Book Review: "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek
Simon Sinek was one of the keynote speakers at my recent conference in Las Vegas. I'm sure I've seen his TED talk in the (somewhat distant) past, but it didn't really connect with me much. But this time I'm in a different place, working with coaches, working on getting some vision for my next phase, and this really clicked. I went out and bought the book and read it on vacation.
The full title is "Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" and I think it's targeted towards people who would hire him to come speak at conferences. That's fair. I think the sub-title would more probably be, though, "drill down to why clients would hire you". The point of the book is that you have a WHY you do things, a HOW you do things, and WHAT you produce. People come to buy WHAT you produce and you make it better with HOW you do it. But he says that a good company culture would have an over-arching WHY behind everything. He refers to a "celery test": if your company has a WHY of "improving the health of all our stakeholders", would your co-workers bring oreos or celery sticks for snacks to share? You don't have to put it in the employee manual, it's obvious. Everyone from the top down understands that celery sticks would be the choice the boss would have told you if you'd (had to) ask.
This is very close to a mission statement. I work on that from time to time. Mine is "to relieve and delight the clients whom I serve." Every word is important, including "whom I serve". Good grammar. I know who my clients are and I serve THEM, not random people with questions. I SERVE them, they don't serve me. I help them to go live their fabulous lives. We do stuff backstage so that the client is delighted with what we produce. We relieve them by doing our job well. I think about this stuff sort of a lot. So Simon Sinek's book was more re-enforcing than brand new for me, but there were some nice take-aways.
He talks about how we make decisions: he says the thinking part of the brain will say "I think this is right." Then we make gut decisions, and say "The decisions feels right." Good leaders should trust their gut, but it's not SCALEABLE. Putting the emotion-based WHY into words helps to combine "think it's right" and "feel it's right" into "know it's right."
Later he talks about how those who know WHY need those who know HOW. He's easing into the world of Rocket Fuel here, and I'm not prepared to go there in this review (or in my life, yet) but I leave this note here so I can recall that I may want to go read chapter 8 someday.
The full title is "Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" and I think it's targeted towards people who would hire him to come speak at conferences. That's fair. I think the sub-title would more probably be, though, "drill down to why clients would hire you". The point of the book is that you have a WHY you do things, a HOW you do things, and WHAT you produce. People come to buy WHAT you produce and you make it better with HOW you do it. But he says that a good company culture would have an over-arching WHY behind everything. He refers to a "celery test": if your company has a WHY of "improving the health of all our stakeholders", would your co-workers bring oreos or celery sticks for snacks to share? You don't have to put it in the employee manual, it's obvious. Everyone from the top down understands that celery sticks would be the choice the boss would have told you if you'd (had to) ask.
This is very close to a mission statement. I work on that from time to time. Mine is "to relieve and delight the clients whom I serve." Every word is important, including "whom I serve". Good grammar. I know who my clients are and I serve THEM, not random people with questions. I SERVE them, they don't serve me. I help them to go live their fabulous lives. We do stuff backstage so that the client is delighted with what we produce. We relieve them by doing our job well. I think about this stuff sort of a lot. So Simon Sinek's book was more re-enforcing than brand new for me, but there were some nice take-aways.
He talks about how we make decisions: he says the thinking part of the brain will say "I think this is right." Then we make gut decisions, and say "The decisions feels right." Good leaders should trust their gut, but it's not SCALEABLE. Putting the emotion-based WHY into words helps to combine "think it's right" and "feel it's right" into "know it's right."
Later he talks about how those who know WHY need those who know HOW. He's easing into the world of Rocket Fuel here, and I'm not prepared to go there in this review (or in my life, yet) but I leave this note here so I can recall that I may want to go read chapter 8 someday.