Start With Why

PART 4 
HOW TO 
RALLY THOSE 
WHO BELIEVE 

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147 
 
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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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START WITH WHY 
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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
5 
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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STATUS BUT WHY, BUT KNOW HOW 
149 
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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START WITH WHY 
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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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STATUS BUT WHY, BUT KNOW HOW 
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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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START WITH WHY 
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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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STATUS BUT WHY, BUT KNOW HOW 
153 
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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START WITH WHY 
154 
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