Start with why

Good Successions Keep the WHY Alive
There were three words missing from Bill Gates’s goodbye speech when he
officially left Microsoft in June 2008. They are three words he probably doesn’t
even realize need to be there.
“I’ll be back.”
Though Gates abdicated his role as CEO of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer in
2000 to lend more time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he
still maintained a role and a presence at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond,
Washington. His plan was always to completely leave the company in the care of
others, but like a lot of founders, Gates forgot to do one thing that would allow
his plan to work. This one oversight could have a devastating impact on
Microsoft and may even require him to come back someday to right the ship he
built.
Bill Gates is special. Not just because of his brain or his management style.
Though important, those two things alone are not the formula for building a $60
billion corporation from scratch. Like all visionary leaders, Bill Gates is special
because he embodies what he believes. He is the personification of Microsoft’s
WHY. And for that reason, he serves as a physical beacon, a reminder of WHY
everyone comes to work.
When Gates founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, he did so to advance
a higher cause: if you give people the right tools, and make them more
productive, then everyone, no matter their lot in life, will have an opportunity to
achieve their real potential. “A PC in every home and on every desk,” he
envisioned; remarkable from a company that didn’t even make PCs. He saw the
PC as the great equalizer. Microsoft’s most successful software, Windows,
allowed anyone to have access to powerful technology. Tools like Word, Excel
and PowerPoint gave everyone the power to realize the promise of the new
technology—to become more efficient and productive. Small businesses, for
example, could look and act like big businesses. Microsoft’s software helped
Gates advance his cause to empower the “everyman.”
Make no mistake, Microsoft has done more to change the world than Apple.
Though we are drawn to Apple’s well-deserved reputation for innovation and
challenging the business models of more than one industry, it is Microsoft that
was responsible for the advancement of the personal computer. Gates put a PC
on every desk and in doing so he changed the world. As the physical

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embodiment of the company’s WHY, the “everyman” who fulfilled an amazing
potential, what happens now that he’s gone?
Gates himself has always held that he receives a “disproportionate” amount of
attention for his role at Microsoft, much of it, of course, due to his exceptional
wealth. Like all inspired leaders, he recognizes that his role is to lead the cause,
but it is others who will be physically responsible for bringing that cause to life.
Martin Luther King Jr. could not have changed America walking across a bridge
in Selma, Alabama, with five prominent civil rights leaders. It took the
thousands of people marching behind them to spur change. Gates recognizes the
need for people to produce real change, but he neglected to remember that any
effective movement, social or business, needs a leader to march in the front,
preaching the vision and reminding people WHY they showed up in the first
place. Though King needed to cross the bridge from Selma on his march to
Montgomery, it was what it meant to cross the bridge that mattered. Likewise in
business, though profit and shareholder value are valid and essential
destinations, they do not inspire people to come to work.
Although Microsoft went through the split years ago, changing from a
company that intended to change the world into a company that makes software,
having Gates hanging around helped Microsoft maintain at least a loose sense of
WHY they existed. With Gates gone, Microsoft does not have sufficient systems
to measure and preach their WHY anymore. This is an issue that will have an
exponential impact as time passes.
Such a departure as Gates’s is not without precedent among companies with
equally visionary leaders. Steve Jobs, the physical embodiment of the rabble-
rousing revolutionary, a man who also personifies his company’s WHY, left
Apple in 1985 after a legendary power struggle with Apple’s president, John
Sculley, and the Apple board of directors. The impact on Apple was profound.
Originally hired by Jobs in 1983, Sculley was a perfectly capable executive
with a proven track record. He know WHAT to do and HOW to do things. He
was considered one of the most talented marketing executives around, having
risen quickly through the ranks of PepsiCo. At Pepsi, he created the wildly
successful Pepsi Challenge taste test advertising campaign, leading Pepsi to
overtake Coca-Cola for the first time. But the problem was, Sculley was a bad fit
at Apple. He ran the company as a business and was not there to lead the cause.
It is worth considering how such a bad fit as Sculley even got the job at Apple
in the first place. Simple—he was manipulated. Sculley did not approach Jobs
and ask to be a part of Apple’s cause. The way the real story unfolded made the
fallout almost predictable. Jobs knew he needed help. He knew he needed a
HOW guy to help him scale his vision. He approached Sculley, a man with a

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solid résumé, and said, “Do you want to sell sugar water your whole life or do
you want to change the world?” Playing off Sculley’s ego, aspirations and fears,
Jobs completed a perfectly executed manipulation. And with it, Jobs was ousted
from his own company a few years later.
Apple thrived on Steve Jobs’s fumes for a few years as businesses started
buying up Macintoshes and software developers continued to create new
software. But it wouldn’t be long until the company would begin to falter. Apple
just wasn’t what it used to be. It had gone through the split and ignored it. The
WHY was getting fuzzier and fuzzier with each passing year. The inspiration
was gone. Literally.
With a capable executive like Sculley running the business, there was no one
to lead the cause. New products would be “less revolutionary and more
evolutionary,” reported 
FORTUNE
magazine at the time, “some people might
even call them dull.” Weary of Apple’s “right brain” ways, Sculley reorganized
the company repeatedly, each time trying to get back what Apple clearly had
lost. He brought in a new executive staff to help. But all they were doing was
trying to manage HOW the company worked when it was the WHY that needed
attention. Needless to say, morale was dismal. It wasn’t until Jobs returned in
1997 that everyone inside and outside the company was reminded WHY Apple
existed. With clarity back, the company quickly reestablished its power for
innovation, for thinking different and, once again, for redefining industries. With
Jobs at the helm again, the culture for challenging the status quo, for
empowering the individual, returned. Every decision was filtered through the
WHY, and it worked. Like most inspiring leaders, Jobs trusted his gut over
outside advice. He was regularly criticized for not making mass-market
decisions, such as letting people clone the Mac. He couldn’t; those actions
violated what he believed. They failed the Celery Test.
When the person who personifies the WHY departs without clearly
articulating WHY the company was founded in the first place, they leave no
clear cause for their successor to lead. The new CEO will come aboard to run the
company and will focus attention on the growth of WHAT with little attention to
WHY. Worse, they may try to implement their own vision without considering
the cause that originally inspired most people to show up in the first place. In
these cases, the leader can work against the culture of the company instead of
leading or building upon it. The result is diminished morale, mass exodus, poor
performance and a slow and steady transition to a culture of mistrust and every-
man-for-himself.
It happened at Dell. Michael Dell, too, had a cause when he started his
company. From the start, he focused on efficiency as a way of getting more

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computing power into more hands. Unfortunately, it was a cause that he too
forgot, and then didn’t communicate well enough before he stepped down as
CEO of Dell Corp. in July 2004. After the company started to weaken—
customer service, for one, plummeted—he came back in less than three years.
Michael Dell recognized that without him present to keep energy focused on
the reason Dell Corp. was founded, the company became more obsessed with
WHAT at the expense of WHY. “The company was too focused on the short
term, and the balance of priorities was way too leaning toward things that deliver
short-term results—that was the major root cause,” Dell told the