Start With Why

 @aol.com
has changed so dramatically is additional proof 
that the company's cause has long since departed. Absent a clear 
WHY, size and momentum are all AOL has to keep them going. The 
company is not inspiring anymore, not to those who work there and 
not to those on the outside. We don't talk about them like we used 
to and we certainly don't feel the same way about them either. We 
don't compare them to Google or Facebook or any of the other 
industry-changing companies of today. Like a massive freight train 
with brakes applied, it will still take miles for this train to come to a 
complete stop. It's simple physics. At best AOL's size will help them 
putter along, but without a more compelling purpose, cause or 
belief, the company is simply a collection of stuff. It will probably 
end up being chopped up and sold off for scrap (technology or 
customers), which is a sad reality considering how inspiring AOL 
used to be.
It is not a coincidence that successful entrepreneurs long for the 
early days. It is no accident that big companies talk about a "return 
to basics." What they are alluding to is a time before the split. And 
they would be right. They do indeed need to return to a time when 
WHAT they did was in perfect parallel to WHY they did it. If they 
continue down the path of focusing on their growth of WHAT at the 
expense of WHY—more volume and less clarity—their ability to 
thrive and inspire for years to come is dubious at best. Companies 
like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Starbucks, the Gap, Dell and so many 
others that used to be special have all gone through a split. If they 
cannot recapture their WHY and reinspire those inside and outside 
their organization, every one of them will end up looking more like 
AOL than the companies they were.

---

START WITH WHY 
212 
What Gets Measured, Gets Done
In the fall of her freshman year in college, Christina Harbridge set 
out to find a part-time job. Intrigued by the prospect of working in 
the antiques business, she answered a newspaper ad in Sacramento 
to do office work for a "collector." Harbridge soon found out, how-
ever, that the job was filing papers for a collections agent, and even 
then she wasn't entirely sure what that meant.
The collections office consisted of a huge room with dozens of 
phone stations, each staffed by a debt collector making call after call 
to a long list of businesses and individuals who owed money. The 
setup of the room meant there was no privacy—everyone could 
hear everyone else's calls. Harbridge was immediately taken by the 
harshness of the tone that all the collectors used with those from 
whom they aimed to collect unpaid debts. "They would hound 
them, and practically threaten them," she said. "They would do 
anything it took to get information from them."
Harbridge recognized that the owner of the company and 
collectors were all kind, gracious people. They helped each other 
out, listened to each other's problems and even joined together 
sponsor a homeless family during the holidays. But when they wait 
on the phone to collect a debt, these same people turned passive-
aggressive, rude and often mean. It's not because they were bad 
people, it's because they were incentivized to be that way.
Their officious behavior made perfect sense. "What gets 
measured gets done," as well-known sales coach Jack Daly says. 
And ii| the world of debt collecting, the callers were given bonuses 
b on how much money they collected. This has resulted in any 
industry that threatens, badgers, hounds and provokes. It did take 
long until Harbridge found herself adopting the same attitude 
whenever she talked with debtors. "I began treating people on the 
phone the way everybody else in the office treated them," she sail

---

SPLIT HAPPENS 
213 
Feeling like WHAT she was doing was completely out of balance 
with her WHY, Harbridge decided there had to be another way to 
go in my head that I was going to start an agency that collected by 
being nice," she said. People in the collections business though 
Harbridge naive, if not crazy. And maybe she was.
In 1993, Harbridge moved to San Francisco and started her own 
collections firm, Bridgeport Financial, steeped in the belief that 
agents would have more success treating people with respect that 
badgering them. Harbridge built her company on her WHY—that 
everyone has a story and everyone deserves to be listened to Her 
approach was to have her agents try to establish rapport with the 
debtor on the other end of the phone in the course of a three minute 
conversation. The goal was to learn everything they could about the 
person's circumstances: Did they have the means to pa] the debt? 
Would they honor a payment plan? Was the reason for the failure to 
pay reflective of a short-term situation? "We would get people to tell 
us the truth," she said. "Sure, we had a legal department, but we 
tried to avoid using it." Harbridge knew, however, that no matter 
her intentions, if she measured the results the same was as others, 
the same awful behavior would result. So she came with an entirely 
new way to incentivize her people. She found a way to measure 
WHY.
At Bridgeport Financial, bonuses were not given for the amount 
of money that was collected; they were given based on how many 
"thank you" cards her agents sent out. This is harder than it sounds. 
Sending out a card thanking someone for the time they spent talking 
on the phone requires a few things. First, Harbridge had to hire 
people who believed what she believed. She had to hire good fits. If 
her employees didn't believe that everyone deserves to be listened 
to, it wouldn't work. Only good-fit hires would be capable of creat-
ing an environment on the telephone that would actually warrant 
sending a thank-you card, even though the purpose of the call was 

---

START WITH WHY 
214 
to ask for money. Harbridge measured WHY her company existed, 
not WHAT they did, and the result was a culture in which compas-
sion was valued above all.
But what about the other results? What about her financial re-
sults, the ones most businesses pursue first? Bridgeport Financial 
collected 300 percent more than the industry average. What's more, 
most of the people and companies who were initially being pursued 
ended up doing more business with the original company that sent 
the collections agency after them in the first place. This is almost 
unprecedented in the collections industry.
Harbridge's business succeeded not just because she knew WHY 
she was doing what she was doing, but because she found a way to 
measure the WHY. The company's growth was loud and her cause 
was clear. She started with WHY and the rest followed.
Most organizations today use very clear metrics to track the 
progress and growth of WHAT they do—usually it's money. Un-
fortunately, we have very poor measurements to ensure that a WHY 
stays clear. Dwayne Honore has for the past ten years run his own 
commercial construction company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a 
trade he learned from his father. A leader with a deep sense of pur-
pose, he devised some years ago a brilliant system to ensure that his 
values are reinforced in his company's culture. He figured out how 
to measure something most people can only pay lip service to: 
work-life balance. Honore believes that people should not spend all 
their time at work, but rather they should work to spend more of 
their time with their families.
Every employee at Honors Construction is required to clock in 
the morning and clock out in the evening. But there's a catch They 
must clock in between 8:00-8:30 a.m. and out by 5:00-5:3|j