Start With Why

part of the higher cause. The second stonemason does not see him-
self as any more or less important than the guy making the stained 
glass windows or even the architect. They are all working together 
to build the cathedral. It is this bond that creates camaraderie. And 

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THE EMERGENCE OF TRUST 
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that camaraderie and trust is what brings success. People working 
together for a common cause.
Companies with a strong sense of WHY are able to inspire their 
employees. Those employees are more productive and innovative, 
and the feeling they bring to work attracts other people eager to 
work there as well. It's not such a stretch to see why the companies 
that we love to do business with are also the best employers. When 
people inside the company know WHY they come to work, people 
outside the company are vastly more likely to understand WHY the 
company is special. In these organizations, from the management on 
down, no one sees themselves as any more or any less than anyone 
else. They all need each other.
When Motivated by WHY, Success Just Happens
It was a turn-of-the-century version of the dot-com boom. The 
promise of a revolutionary new technology was changing the way 
people imagined the future. And there was a race to see who could 
do it first. It was the end of the nineteenth century and the new 
technology was the airplane. One of the best-known men in the field 
was Samuel Pierpont Langley. Like many other inventors of his day, 
he was attempting to build the world's first heavier-than- air flying 
machine. The goal was to be the first to achieve machine- powered, 
controlled, manned flight. The good news was Langley had all the 
right ingredients for the enormous task; he had, what most would 
define as, the recipe for success.
Langley had achieved some renown within the academic com-
munity as an astronomer, which earned him high-ranking and 
prestigious positions. He was secretary of the Smithsonian Institu-
tion. He had been an assistant in the Harvard College Observatory 
and professor of mathematics at the United States Naval Academy. 
Langley was very well connected. His friends included some of the 
most powerful men in government and business, including Andrew 

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START WITH WHY 
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Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. He was also extremely well 
funded. The War Department, the precursor the Department of 
Defense, had given him $50,000 for the project, a lot of money in 
those days. Money was no object.
Langley assembled some of the best and brightest minds of the 
day. His dream team included test pilot Charles Manly, a brilliant 
Cornell-trained mechanical engineer, and Stephan Balzer, the de-
veloper of the first car in New York. Langley and his team used the 
finest materials. The market conditions were perfect and his PR was 
great. The
New York Times
followed him around everywhere. 
Everyone knew Langley and was rooting for his success.
But there was a problem.
Langley had a bold goal, but he didn't have a clear sense of 
WHY. His purpose for wanting to build the plane was defined in 
terms of WHAT he was doing and WHAT he could get. He had had 
a passion for aeronautics since a very young age, but he did not 
have a cause to champion. More than anything else, Langley 
wanted to be first. He wanted to be rich and he wanted to be 
famous. That was his driving motivation.
Although already well regarded in his own field, he craved the 
kind of fame of a Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, the 
kind that comes only with inventing something big. Langley saw 
the airplane as his ticket to fame and fortune. He was smart and 
motivated. He had what we still assume is the recipe for success: 
plenty of cash, the best people and ideal market conditions. But few 
of us have ever heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur 
Wright were also building a flying machine. Unlike Langley, the 
Wright brothers did not have the recipe for success. Worse, they 
seemed to have the recipe for failure. There was no funding for their 
venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. The 
Wright brothers funded their dream with the proceeds from their 

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THE EMERGENCE OF TRUST 
107 
bicycle shop. Not a single person working on the team, including 
Orville and Wilbur, had a college education; some did not even fin-
ish high school. What the Wright brothers were doing wasn't any 
different from Langley or all the others trying to build a flying ma-
chine. But the Wright brothers did have something very special. 
They had a dream. They knew WHY it was important to build this 
thing. They believed that if they could figure out this flying ma-
chine, it would change the world. They imagined the benefits to 
everyone else if they were successful.
"Wilbur and Orville were true scientists, deeply and genuinely 
concerned about the physical problem they were trying to solve— 
the problem of balance and flight," said James Tobin, the Wright 
brothers' biographer. Langley, on the other hand, was consumed 
with acquiring the level of prestige of his associates like Alexander
Graham Bell, fame that he knew would come only with a major sci-
entific breakthrough. Langley, Tobin said, "did not have the 
Wrights' passion for flight, but rather was looking for achievement."
Orville and Wilbur preached what they believed and inspired 
others in the community to join them in their cause. The proof of 
their commitment was self-evident. With failure after failure, most 
would have given up, but not the Wright brothers' team. The team 
was so inspired that no matter how many setbacks they suffered 
they would show up for more. Every time the Wright brothers went 
out to make a test flight, so the stories go, they would take five sets 
of parts with them, because they knew that's how many times they 
were likely to fail before deciding to come home for the day.
Then it happened. On December 17, 1903, on a field in Kitty 
Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers took to the sky. A fifty- 
nine-second flight at an altitude of 120 feet at the speed of a jog was 
all it took to usher in a new technology that would change the 
world.

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START WITH WHY 
108 
Remarkable as the achievement was, it went relatively 
unnoticed. The