Start With Why

 is
successful," we say, using the verb
 to be
to suggest 
this state of
being.
While we can easily lay down a path to reach a 
goal, laying down a path to reach that intangible feeling of success is 
more elusive. In my vernacular, achievement comes when you 

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START WITH WHY 
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pursue and attain WHAT you want. Success comes when you are 
clear in pursuit of WHY you want it. The former is motivated by 
tangible factors while the latter by something deeper in the brain, 
where we lack the capacity to put those feelings into words.
Success comes when we wake up every day in that never-ending 
pursuit of WHY we do WHAT we do. Our achievements, WHAT 
we do, serve as the milestones to indicate we are on the right path. It 
is not an either/or—we need both. A wise man once said, "Money 
can't buy happiness, but it pays for the yacht to pull alongside it." 
There is great truth in this statement. The yacht represents 
achievement; it is easily seen and, with the right plan, completely 
attainable. The thing we pull alongside represents that hard-to- 
define feeling of success. Obviously, this is much harder to see and 
attain. They are distinct concepts, and sometimes they go together 
and sometimes they don't. More importantly, some people, while in 
pursuit of success, simply mistake WHAT they achieve as the final 
destination. This is the reason they never feel satisfied no matter 
how big their yacht is, no matter how much they achieve. The false 
assumption we often make is that if we simply achieve more, the 
feeling of success will follow. But it rarely does.
In the course of building a business or a career, we become more 
confident in WHAT we do. We become greater experts in HOW to 
do it. With each achievement, the tangible measurements of success 
and the feeling of progress increase. Life is good. However, for most 
of us, somewhere in the journey we forget WHY we set out on the 
journey in the first place. Somewhere in the course of all those 
achievements an inevitable split happens. This is true for 
individuals and organizations alike. What the Endicott entrepre-
neurs experienced as individuals was the same transition that Wal- 
Mart and other big companies either have gone through or are 
going through. Because Wal-Mart operates at such an immense 

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WHEN WHY GOES FUZZY 
203 
scale, the impact of their fuzzy WHY is felt on a greater scale. Em-
ployees, customers and the community will feel it also.
Those with an ability to never lose sight of WHY, no matter how 
little or how much they achieve, can inspire us. Those with the 
ability to never lose sight of WHY and also achieve the milestones 
that keep everyone focused in the right direction are the great lead-
ers. For great leaders, The Golden Circle is in balance. They are in 
pursuit of WHY, they hold themselves accountable to HOW they do 
it and WHAT they do serves as the tangible proof of what they 
believe. But most of us, unfortunately, reach a place where WHAT 
we are doing and WHY we are
 doing it
eventually fall out of balance. 
We get to a point when WHY and WHAT are not aligned. It is the 
separation of the tangible and the intangible that marks the split. 

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204 

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205 
12 
SPLIT HAPPENS
Wal-Mart started small. So did Microsoft. So did Apple. So did 
General Electric and Ford and almost every other company that 
made it big. They didn't start by acquisition or spin-off, or achieve 
mass scale overnight. Nearly every company or organization starts 
the same way: with an idea. No matter whether an organization 
grows to become a multibillion-dollar corporation like Wal-Mart or 
fails in the first few years, most of them started with a single person 
or small group of people who had an idea. Even the United States of 
America started the same way.
At the beginning, ideas are fueled by passion—that very com-
pelling emotion that causes us to do quite irrational things. That 
passion drives many people to make sacrifices so that a cause bigger 
than themselves can be brought to life. Some drop out of school or 
quit a perfectly good job with a good salary and benefits to try to go 
it alone. Some work extraordinarily long hours without a second 
thought, sometimes sacrificing the stability of their relationships or 
even their personal health. This passion is so intoxicating and 
exciting that it can affect others as well. Inspired by the founder's 
vision, many early employees demonstrate classic early- adopter 
behavior. Relying on their gut, these first employees also quit their 

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START WITH WHY 
206 
perfectly good jobs and accept lower salaries to join an organization 
with a 90 percent statistical chance of failing. But the statistics don't 
matter; passion and optimism reign and energy is high. Like all 
early adopters, the behavior of those who join early says more about 
them than it does about the company's prospects.
The reason so many small businesses fail, however, is because 
passion alone can't cut it. For passion to survive, it needs structure. 
A WHY without the HOWs, passion without structure, has a very 
high probability of failure. Remember the dot-com boom? Lots of 
passion, but not so much structure. The Titans at Endicott House, 
however, did not face this problem. They knew how to build the 
systems and processes to see their companies grow. They are among 
the statistical 10 percent of small businesses that didn't fail in their 
first three years. In fact, many of them went on to do quite well. 
Their challenge was different. Passion may need structure to sur-
vive, but for structure to grow, it needs passion.
This is what I witnessed at the Gathering of Titans: I saw a room 
full of people with passion enough to start businesses, and with 
knowledge enough to build the systems and structures to survive 
and even do very well. But having spent so many years focused on 
converting a vision into a viable business, many started to fixate on 
WHAT the organization did or HOW to do it. Poring over financial 
or some other easily measured result, and fixating on HOW they 
were to achieve those tangible results, they stopped focusing on 
WHY they started the business in the first place. This is also what 
has happened at Wal-Mart. A company obsessed with serving the 
community became obsessed with achieving its goals.
Like Wal-Mart, the Endicott entrepreneurs used to think, act and 
communicate from the inside out of The Golden Circle—
5 
from 
WHY to WHAT. But as they grew more successful, the process 
reversed. WHAT now comes first and all their systems and pro-
cesses are in pursuit of those tangible results. The reason the change 

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SPLIT HAPPENS 
207 
happened is simple—they suffered a split and their WHY went 
fuzzy.
The single greatest challenge any organization will face is . . . 
success. When the company is small, the founder will rely on his gut 
to make all the major decisions. From marketing to product, from 
strategy to tactics, hiring and firing, the decisions the founder makes 
will, if he trusts his gut, feel right. But as the organization grows, as 
it becomes more successful, it becomes physically impossible for one 
person to make every major decision. Not only must others be 
trusted and relied upon to make big decisions, but those people will 
also start making hiring choices. And slowly but surely, as the 
megaphone grows, the clarity of WHY starts to dilute.
Whereas gut was the filter for early decisions, rational cases and 
empirical data often serve as the sole basis for later decisions. For all 
organizations that go through the split, they are no longer inspired 
by a cause greater than themselves. They simply come to work, 
manage systems and work to reach certain preset goals. There is no 
longer a cathedral to build. The passion is gone and inspiration is at 
a minimum. At that point, for most who show up every day what 
they do is just a job. If this is how the people on the inside feel, 
imagine how those on the outside feel. It is no wonder that 

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START WITH WHY 
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manipulations start to dominate not only how the company sells its 
wares, but even how they retain employees. Bonuses, promotions 
and other enticements, even instilling fear in people, become the 
only way to hold on to talent. That's hardly inspiring.
This diagram depicts the life of an organization. The top line 
represents the growth of WHAT the organization does. For a 
company, that measurement is usually money—profits, revenues, 
EBITA, share price or growth in market share. But the metric can be 
anything, depending on what the organization does. If the 
organization rescues lost puppies, then the metric would be the 
number of puppies successfully rescued. It is inherently simple to 
measure the growth of WHAT an organization does. WHATs, after 
all, are tangible and easy to count.
The second line represents the WHY, the clarity of the founding; 
purpose, cause or belief. The goal is to ensure that as the 
measurement of WHAT grows, the clarity of the WHY stays closely 
aligned. Put another way, as the volume of the megaphone 
increases, the message traveling through it must stay clear.
The volume of the megaphone comes solely from growth