Start With Why

part of their brain, they almost invariably end up "overthinking." 
These rational decisions tend to take longer to make, says Restak, 
and can often be of lower quality. In contrast, decisions made with 
the limbic brain
,
gut decisions, tend to be faster, higher-quality 
de
cisions. This is one of
the primary reasons why teachers tell stu-
dents to go with
 
their first instinct when taking a multiple-choice 
test, to
trust their gut. The more time spent thinking about the 
answer, the
bigger the risk that it may be the wrong one. Our 
limbic brains are smart and often know the right thing to do. It is 
our inability to verbalize the reasons that may cause us to doubt 
ourselves or trust the empirical evidence when our gut tells us not 
to.
Consider the experience of buying a flat-screen TV at your local 
electronics store. You stand in the aisle listening to an expert explain 
to you the difference between LCD and plasma. The sales rep gives 
you all the rational differences and benefits, yet you are still none 
the wiser as to which one is best for you. After an hour, you still 
have no clue. Your mind is on overload because you're over- 
thinking the decision. You eventually make a choice and walk out of 

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START WITH WHY 
64 
the store, still not 100 percent convinced you chose the right one. 
Then you go to your friend's house and see that he bought the 
"other one." He goes on and on about how much he loves his TV. 
Suddenly you're jealous, even though you still don't know that his 
is any better than yours. You wonder, "Did I buy the wrong one?"
Companies that fail to communicate a sense of WHY force us to 
make decisions with only empirical evidence. This is why those de-
cisions take more time, feel difficult or leave us uncertain. Under 
these conditions manipulative strategies that exploit our desires, 
fears, doubts or fantasies work very well. We're forced to make 
these less-than-inspiring decisions for one simple reason—
companies don't offer us anything else besides the facts and figures, 
features and benefits upon which to base our decisions. Companies 
don't tell us WHY.
People don't buy WHAT you do; they buy WHY you do it. A 
failure to communicate WHY creates nothing but stress or doubt. In 
contrast, many people who are drawn to buy Macintosh computers 
or Harley-Davidson motorcycles, for example, don't need to talk to 
anyone about which brand to choose. They feel the utmost 
confidence in their decision and the only question they ask is which 
Mac or which Harley. At that level, the rational features and bene-
fits, facts and figures absolutely matter, but not to drive the decision 
to give money or loyalty to the company or brand. That decision is 
already made. The tangible features are simply to help direct the 
choice of product that best fits our needs. In these cases, the deci-
sions happened in the perfect inside-out order. Those decisions 
started with WHY—the emotional component of the decision— and 
then the rational components allowed the buyer to verbalize or 
rationalize the reasons for their decision.
This is what we mean when we talk about winning hearts and 
minds. The heart represents the limbic, feeling part of the brain, and 
the mind is the rational, language center. Most companies are quite 

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THIS IS NOT OPINION, THIS IS BIOLOGY 
65 
adept at winning minds; all that requires is a comparison of all the 
features and benefits. Winning hearts, however, takes more work. 
Given the evidence of the natural order of decision-making, I can't 
help but wonder if the order of the expression "hearts and minds" is 
a coincidence. Why does no one set out to win "minds and hearts"?
The ability to win hearts before minds is not easy. It's a delicate 
balance of art and science—another coincidental grammatical 
construction. Why is it that things are not a balance of science and 
art, but always art before science? Perhaps it is a subtle clue our 
language-impaired limbic brain is sending us to help us see that the 
art of leading is about following your heart. Perhaps our brains are 
trying to tell us that WHY must come first.
Absent a WHY, a decision is harder to make. And when in doubt 
we look to science, to data, to guide decisions. Companies will tell 
you that the reason they start with WHAT they do or HOW they do 
it is because that's what their customers asked for. Quality. Service. 
Price. Features. That's what the data reported. But for the fact that 
the part of the brain that controls decision-making is different from 
the part of the brain that is able to report back that decision, it 
would be a perfectly valid conclusion to give people what they ask 
for. Unfortunately, there is more evidence that sales don't sig-
nificantly increase and bonds of loyalty are not formed simply when 
companies say or do everything their customers want. Henry Ford 
summed it up best. "If I had asked people what they wanted," he 
said, "they would have said a faster horse."
This is the genius of great leadership. Great leaders and great 
organizations are good at seeing what most of us can't see. They are 
good at giving us things we would never think of asking for. When 
the computer revolution was afoot, computer users couldn't ask for 
a graphical user interface. But that's what Apple gave us. In the face 
of expanding competition in the airline industry, most air travelers 
would never have thought to ask for less instead of more. But that's 

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START WITH WHY 
66 
what Southwest did. And in the face of hard times and 
overwhelming odds, few would have asked their country, what can 
I do for you over what can you do for me? The very cause upon 
which John F. Kennedy introduced his presidency. Great leaders are 
those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art 
before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones 
who start with WHY.
We make decisions all day long, and many of them are emotion-
ally driven. Rarely do we sift through all the available information 
to ensure we know every fact. And we don't need to. It is all about 
degrees of certainty. "I can make a decision with 30 percent of the 
information," said former secretary of state Colin Powell. "Anything 
more than 80 percent is too much." There is always a level at which 
we trust ourselves or those around us to guide us, and don't always 
feel
we need all the facts and figures. And sometimes we just may 
not trust ourselves to make a certain decision yet. This may explain 
why 
we feel
(there's that word again) so uncomfortable when others 
twist our arm to make a decision that doesn't sit well in our gut. We 
trust our gut to help us decide whom to vote for or which shampoo 
to buy. Because our biology complicates our ability to verbalize the 
real reasons why we make the decisions we do, we rationalize based 
on more tangible factors, like the design or the service or the brand. 
This is the basis for the false assumption that price or features mat- 
ter more than they do. Those things matter, they provide us the 
tangible things we can point to to rationalize our decision-making, 
but they don't set the course and they don't inspire behavior.
It's What You Can't See That Matters
"Gets your whites whiter and your brights brighter," said the TV 
commercial for the newest laundry detergent. This was the value 
proposition for so many years in the laundry detergent business. A 
perfectly legitimate claim. That's what the market research revealed 

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THIS IS NOT OPINION, THIS IS BIOLOGY 
67 
customers wanted. The data was true, but the truth of what people 
wanted was different.
The makers of laundry detergent asked consumers WHAT they 
wanted from detergent, and consumers said whiter whites and 
brighter brights. Not such a remarkable finding, if you think about 
it, that people doing laundry wanted their detergent to help get their 
clothes not just clean, but very clean. So brands attempted to dif-
ferentiate HOW they got your whites whiter and brights brighter by 
trying to convince consumers that one additive was more effective 
than another. Protein, said one brand. Color enhancers, said another. 
No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean. That 
little nugget wasn't revealed until many years later when a group of 
anthropologists hired by one of the packaged-goods companies 
revealed that all those additives weren't in fact driving behavior. 
They observed that when people took their washing out of the 
dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white it was or 
compared it to newer items to see how bright it was. The first thing 
people did when they pulled their laundry out of the dryer was to 
smell it. This was an amazing discovery.