Start with why

The Right Order
After you have clarity of WHY, are disciplined and accountable to your own
values and guiding principles, and are consistent in all you say and do, the final
step is to keep it all in the right order. Just like that little Apple marketing
example I used earlier, simply changing the order of the information, starting
with WHY, changed the impact of the message. The WHATs are important—
they provide the tangible proof of the WHY—but WHY must come first. The
WHY provides the context for everything else. As you will see over and over in
all the cases and examples in this book, whether in leadership, decision-making
or communication, starting with WHY has a profound and long-lasting impact
on the result. Starting with WHY is what inspires people to act.

---

If You Don’t Know WHY, You Can’t Know HOW
Rollin King, a San Antonio businessman, hatched the idea to take what Pacific
Southwest was doing in California and bring it to Texas—to start an airline that
flew short-haul flights between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. He had
recently gone through a long and messy divorce and turned to the one man he
trusted to help him get his idea off the ground. His Wild Turkey–drinking, chain-
smoking divorce lawyer, Herb Kelleher.
In nearly every way, King and Kelleher were opposites. King, a numbers guy,
was notoriously gruff and awkward, while Kelleher was gregarious and likable.
At first Kelleher called King’s idea a dumb one, but by the end of the evening
King had successfully inspired him with his vision and Kelleher agreed to
consider coming on board. It would take four years, however, before Southwest
Airlines would make its first flight from Dallas’s Love Field to Houston.
Southwest did not invent the concept of a low-cost airline. Pacific Southwest
Airlines pioneered the industry—Southwest even copied their name. Southwest
had no first mover’s advantage—Braniff International Airways, Texas
International Airlines and Continental Airlines were already serving the Texas
market, and none was eager to give up any ground. But Southwest was not built
to be an airline. It was built to champion a cause. They just happened to use an
airline to do it.
In the early 1970s, only 15 percent of the traveling population traveled by air.
At that rate, the market was small enough to scare off most would-be
competitors to the big airlines. But Southwest wasn’t interested in competing
against everyone else for 15 percent of the traveling population. Southwest cared
about the other 85 percent. Back then, if you asked Southwest whom their
competition was, they would have told you, “We compete against the car and the
bus.” But what they meant was, “We’re the champion for the common man.”
That was WHY they started the airline. That was their cause, their purpose, their
reason for existing. HOW they went about building their company was not a
strategy developed by a high-priced management consultancy. It wasn’t a
collection of best practices that they saw other companies doing. Their guiding
principles and values stemmed directly from their WHY and were more common
sense than anything else.
In the 1970s, air travel was expensive, and if Southwest was going to be the
champion for the common man, they had to be cheap. It was an imperative. And

---

in a day and age when air travel was elitist—back then people wore ties on
planes—as the champion for the common man, Southwest had to be fun. It was
an imperative. In a time when air travel was complicated, with different prices
depending on when you booked, Southwest had to be simple. If they were to be
accessible to the other 85 percent, then simplicity was an imperative. At the
time, Southwest had two price categories: nights/weekends and daytime. That
was it.
Cheap, fun and simple. That’s HOW they did it. That’s how they were to
champion the cause of the common man. The result of their actions was made
tangible in the things they said and did—their product, the people they hired,
their culture and their marketing. “You are now free to move about the country,”
they said in their advertising. That’s much more than a tagline. That’s a cause.
And it’s a cause looking for followers. Those who could relate to Southwest,
those who saw themselves as average Joes, now had an alternative to the big
airlines. And those who believed what Southwest believed became fiercely loyal
to the company. They felt Southwest was a company that spoke directly to them
and directly for them. More importantly, they felt that flying Southwest said
something about who they were as people. The loyalty that developed with their
customers had nothing to do with price. Price was simply one of the ways the
airline brought their cause to life.
Howard Putnam, one of the former presidents of Southwest, likes to tell a
story of a senior executive of a large company who approached him after an
event. The executive said he always flew one of the big airlines when he traveled
on business. He had to, it was a company mandate. And although he had
accumulated many frequent flier miles on the other airline and money was no
object, when he flew for himself or with his family, he always flew Southwest.
“He loves Southwest,” Putnam says with a grin when he tells the story. Just
because Southwest is cheap doesn’t mean it only appeals to those with less
money. Cheap is just one of the things Southwest does that helps us understand
what they believe.
What Southwest has achieved is the stuff of business folklore. As a result of
WHY they do what they do, and because they are highly disciplined in HOW
they do it, they are the most profitable airline in history. There has never been a
year that they didn’t turn a profit, including after September 11 and during the
oil crises of the 1970s and early 2000s. Everything Southwest says and does is
authentic. Everything about them reflects the original cause King and Kelleher
set out to champion decades earlier. It has never veered.
Fast-forward about thirty years. United Airlines and Delta Airlines looked at
the success of Southwest and decided they needed a low-cost product to compete

---

and share in Southwest’s success. “We got to get us one of those,” they thought.
In April 2003, Delta launched their low-cost alternative, Song. Less than a year
later United launched Ted. In both cases, they copied HOW Southwest did it.
They made Ted and Song cheap, fun and simple. And for anyone who ever flew
Ted or Song, they were cheap, they were fun and they were simple. But both
failed.
United and Delta were both old hands in the airline business and were every
bit qualified to add whatever products they wanted to adapt to market conditions
or seize opportunities. The problem was not with WHAT they did, the problem
was, no one knew WHY Song or Ted existed. They may have even been better
than Southwest. But it didn’t matter. Sure, people flew them, but there are
always reasons people do business with you that have nothing to do with you.
That people can be motivated to use your product is not the issue; the problem
was that too few were loyal to the brands. Without a sense of WHY, Song and
Ted were just another couple of airlines. Without a clear sense of WHY, all that
people had to judge them on was price or convenience. They were commodities
that had to rely on manipulations to build their businesses, an expensive
proposition. United abandoned its entry into the low-cost airline business just
four years after it began, and Delta’s Song also took its last flight only four years
after it launched.
It is a false assumption that differentiation happens in HOW and WHAT you
do. Simply offering a high-quality product with more features or better service
or a better price does not create difference. Doing so guarantees no success.
Differentiation happens in WHY and HOW you do it. Southwest isn’t the best
airline in the world. Nor are they always the cheapest. They have fewer routes
than many of their competition and don’t even fly outside the continental United
States. WHAT they do is not always significantly better. But WHY they do it is
crystal clear and everything they do proves it. There are many ways to motivate
people to do things, but loyalty comes from the ability to inspire people. Only
when the WHY is clear and when people believe what you believe can a true
loyal relationship develop.

---