PART 4
HOW TO
RALLY THOSE
WHO BELIEVE
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START WITH WHY, BUT KNOW HOW
Energy Excites. Charisma Inspires.
RAH!!!! With a roar, Steve Ballmer, the man who replaced Bill Gates
as CEO of Microsoft, bursts onto the stage of the company's annual
global summit meeting. Ballmer loves Microsoft—he says so in no
uncertain words. He also knows how to pump up a crowd. His
energy is almost folkloric. He pumps his fists and runs from one end
of the stage to the other, he screams and he sweats. He is remarkable
to watch and the crowd loves it. As Ballmer proves, without a
doubt, energy can motivate a crowd. But can it inspire a population?
What happens the next day or the next week when Ballmer's energy
is not there to motivate his employees? Is energy enough to keep a
company of about 80,000 people focused?
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In contrast, Bill Gates is shy and awkward, a social misfit. He
does not fit the stereotype of the leader of a multibillion-dollar
corporation. He is not the most energetic public speaker. When Bill
Gates speaks, however, people listen with bated breath. They hang
on his every word. When Gates speaks, he doesn't rally a room, he
inspires it. Those who hear him take what he says and carry his
words with them for weeks, months or years. Gates doesn't have
energy, but Bill Gates inspires.
Energy motivates but charisma inspires. Energy is easy to see,
easy to measure and easy to copy Charisma is hard to define, nearly
impossible to measure and too elusive to copy. All great leaders
have charisma because all great leaders have clarity of WHY; and an
undying belief in a purpose or cause bigger than themselves. It's not
Bill Gates's passion for computers that inspires us, it's his undying
optimism that even the most complicated problems can being
solved. He believes we can find ways to remove obstacles to ensure
that everyone can live and work to their greatest potential. It is his
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optimism to which we are drawn.
Living through the computer revolution, he saw the computer as
a perfect technology to help us all become more productive and
achieve our greatest potential. That belief inspired his vision of a, PC
on every desk to come to life. Ironic considering Microsoft never
even made PCs. It wasn't just WHAT computers did that; Gates saw
the impact for the new technology, it was WHY we needed them.
Today, the work he does with the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation has nothing to do with software, but it is another way he
has found to bring his WHY to life. He is looking for ways to solve
problems. He still has an undying belief. And he still: believes that if
we can help people, this time those with less privilege, remove some
seemingly simple obstacles, then they too will have an opportunity
to be more productive and lift themselves up to achieve their great
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potential. For Gates, all that has changed is WHAT he is doing to
bring his cause to life.
Charisma has nothing to do with energy; it comes from a clarity
of WHY. It comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than
oneself. Energy, in contrast, comes from a good night's sleep or lots
of caffeine. Energy can excite. But only charisma can inspire.
Charisma commands loyalty. Energy does not.
Energy can always be injected into an organization to motivate
people to do things. Bonuses, promotions, other carrots and even a
few sticks can get people to work harder, for sure, but the gains are,
like all manipulations, short-term. Over time, such tactics cost more
money and increase stress for employee and employer alike, and
eventually will become the main reason people show up for work
every day. That's not loyalty. That's the employee version of repeat
business. Loyalty among employees is when they turn down more
money or benefits to continue working at the same company.
Loyalty to a company trumps pay and benefits. And unless you're
an astronaut, it's not the work we do that inspires us either. It's the
cause we come to work for. We don't want to come to work to build
a wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.
The Chosen Path
Raised in Ohio, sixty miles from Dayton, Neil Armstrong grew up
on a healthy diet of stories about the Wright brothers. From a very
early age he dreamed of flying. He'd make model airplanes, read
magazines about flying and stare at the heavens through a telescope
mounted on the roof of his house. He even got his pilot's license
before he got his driver's license. With a childhood passion that
became reality, Armstrong was destined to become an astronaut.
For the rest of us, however, our careers paths are more like Jeff
Sumpter's.
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While Sumpter was in high school, his mother arranged for him
to get a summer internship at the bank where she worked. Four
years after he finished high school he called the bank to see if he
could do some part-time work, and they eventually offered him a
full-time job. Whamo, Jeff's got a career as a banker. In fact, after
fifteen years in the industry he and a colleague by the name of Trey
Maust went on to start their own bank, Lewis & Clark Bank in
Portland, Oregon.
Sumpter is very good at what he does—he's been one of the top-
performing loan officers throughout his career. He's well liked and
well respected among his colleagues and clients. But even Jeff will
admit that he doesn't have much of a passion for banking, per se.
Though he's not living out his childhood dream, he is passionate for
something. It's not WHAT he does that gets him out of bed every
morning. It's WHY he does it.
Our career paths are largely incidental. I never planned to be
doing what I'm doing now. As a kid I wanted to be an aeronautical
engineer, but in college I set my sights on becoming a criminal pros-
ecutor. While I was in law school, however, I became disillusioned
with the idea of being a lawyer. It just didn't feel right. I was at law
school in England, where the law is one of the last truly "English"
professions; not wearing a pinstriped suit to an interview could hurt
my chances of getting a job. This was not my cup of tea.
I happened to be dating a young woman who was studying
marketing at Syracuse University. She could see what inspired me
and what frustrated me about the law and suggested I try my hand
in the field. And whamo, I'd gotten myself a new career in market-
ing. But that's just one of the things I've done—it's not my passion
and it's not how I define my life. My cause—to inspire people to do
the things that inspire them—is WHY I get out of bed every day. The
excitement is trying to find new ways, different WHATs to bring my
cause to life, of which this book is one.
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Regardless of WHAT we do in our lives, our WHY—our driving
purpose, cause or belief—never changes. If our Golden Circle is in
balance, WHAT we do is simply the tangible way we find to breathe
life into that cause. Developing software was merely one of the
things Bill Gates did to bring his cause to life. An airline gave Herb
Kelleher the perfect outlet to spread his belief in freedom. Putting a
man on the moon was one goal John F. Kennedy used to rally people
to bring to life his belief that service to the nation—and not being
serviced by the nation—would lead America to advance and
prosper. Apple gave Steve Jobs a way to challenge the status quo
and do something big in the world. All the things these charismatic
leaders did were the tangible ways they found to bring their WHYs
to life. But none of them could have imagined WHAT they would be
doing when they were young.
When a WHY is clear, those who share that belief will be drawn to it
and maybe want to take part in bringing it to life. If that belief is
amplified it can have the power to rally even more believers to raise
their hands and declare, "I want to help." With a group of believers
all rallying around a common purpose, cause or belief, amazing
things can happen. But it takes more than inspiration to do become
great. Inspiration only starts the process; you need something more
to drive a movement.
Amplify the Source of Inspiration
The Golden Circle is not just a communication tool; it also
provides some insight into how great organizations are organized.
As we start to add dimension to the concept of The Golden Circle, it
is no longer helpful to look at it as a purely two-dimensional model.
If it is to provide any real value in how to build a great organization
in our very three-dimensional world, The Golden Circle needs to be
three-dimensional. The good news is, it is. It is, in fact, a top-down
view of a cone. Turn it on its side and you can see its full value.
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The cone represents a company or an organization—an
inherently hierarchical and organized system. Sitting at the top of
the system, representing the WHY, is a leader; in the case of a
company, that's usually the CEO (or at least we hope it is). The next
level down, the HOW level, typically includes the senior executives
who are inspired by the leader's vision and know HOW to bring it
to life. Don't forget that a WHY is just a belief, HOWs are the actions
we take to realize that belief and WHATs are the results of those ac-
tions. No matter how charismatic or inspiring the leader is, if there
are not people in the organization inspired to bring that vision to
reality, to build an infrastructure with systems and processes, then
at best, inefficiency reigns, and at worst, failure results.
In this rendering the HOW level represents a person or a small
group responsible for building the infrastructure that can make a
WHY tangible. That may happen in marketing, operations, finance,
human resources and all the other C-suite departments. Beneath
that, at the WHAT level, is where the rubber meets the road. It is at
this level that the majority of the employees sit and where all the
tangible stuff actually happens.
I Have a Dream (and He's Got the Plan)
Dr. King said he had a dream, and he inspired people to make
his dream their own. What Ralph Abernathy lent the movement
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was something else: he knew what it would take to realize that
dream, and he showed people HOW to do it. He gave the dream
structure. Dr. King spoke about the philosophical implications of
the movement, while Abernathy, Dr. King's onetime mentor, long-
time friend and financial secretary and treasurer of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, would help people understand
the specific steps they needed to take. "Now," Abernathy would tell
the audience following a rousing address by Dr. King, "let me tell
you what that means for tomorrow morning."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the leader, but he didn't change
America alone. Though Dr. King inspired the movement, to actually
move people requires organizing. As is the case with almost all
great leaders, there were others around Dr. King who knew better
HOW to do that. For every great leader, for every WHY-type, there
is an inspired HOW-type or group of HOW-types who take the
intangible cause and build the infrastructure that can give it life.
That infrastructure is what actually makes any measurable change
or success possible.
The leader sits at the top of the cone—at the start, the point of
WHY—while the HOW-types sit below and are responsible for ac-
tually making things happen. The leader imagines the destination
and the HOW-types find the route to get there. A destination
without a route leads to meandering and inefficiency, something a
great many WHY-types will experience without the help of others to
ground them. A route without a destination, however, may be
efficient, but to what end? It's all fine and good to know how to
drive, but it's more fulfilling when you have a place to go. For Dr.
King, Ralph Abernathy was one of those he inspired and who knew
HOW to make the cause actionable and tangible. "Dr. King's job was
to interpret the ideology and theology of non-violence," said
Abernathy. "My job was more simple and down-to-earth. I would
tell [people], 'Don't ride those buses."'
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In every case of a great charismatic leader who ever achieved
anything of significance, there was always a person or small group
lurking in the shadows who knew HOW to take the vision and
make it a reality. Dr. King had a dream. But no matter how inspiring
a dream may be, a dream that cannot come to life stays a dream. Dr.
King dreamed of many of the same things as countless other African
Americans who grew up in the pre-civil rights South. He spoke of
many of the same themes. He felt the same outrage perpetrated by
an unjust system. But it was King's unflappable optimism and his
words that inspired a population.
Dr. King didn't change America by himself. He wasn't a legisla-
tor, for example, but legislation was created to give all people in the
United States equal rights regardless of skin color. It wasn't Dr. King
who changed America; it was the movement of millions of others
whom he inspired that changed the course of history. But how do
you organize millions of people? Forget millions, how do you
organize hundreds or tens of people? The vision and charisma of the
leader are enough to attract the innovators and the early adopters.
Trusting their guts and their intuition, these people will make the
greatest sacrifices to help see the vision become a reality. With each
success, with every tangible demonstration that the vision can in
fact become reality, the more practical-minded majority starts to
take interest. What was previously just a dream soon becomes a
provable and tangible reality. And when that happens, a tipping
point can be reached and then things really get moving.
Those Who Know WHY Need Those Who Know HOW
The pessimists are usually right, to paraphrase Thomas Friedman,
author of
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