Type: Business
Personal favorite score: 5/10
Personal opinion: It goes round and round the main circle of Why – How – What. Yet, I rather admire the author for his enthusiasm and energy in every word.
Personal learning point: People buy products for the company’s WHY, which should be similar to theirs + WHY people can inspire others and the first few ones are those that can help them to progress to HOW + WHY should be consistent throughout what a company does and among the top managers.
Personal leading situation: I used to watch the TED Talk video from this author about this same topic, which I think was efficient summary for the book. Yet, recently, my bosses read this book and, with its influence on them, they changed the organization’s philosophy. Therefore, I bought and read it to check it out in details.
Summary: Some interesting points that I marked on the book:
- “Manipulations Lead to Transactions, Not Loyalty”, thus it is perfectly valid strategy for any behavior that is only required once or on rare occasions.
- “Apple doesn’t simply reverse the order of information, their messages starts with WHY, a purpose, cause or belief that has nothing to do with WHAT they do.”
- “For the Golden Circle to work, each of the pieces must be in balance and in the right order.” Clarity of WHY (to inspire), Discipline of HOW (values and principles should be in VERBS), and Consistency of WHAT (example: Celery test with healthy shopping list, or Toyota has to create a completely new brand for Lexus so it isn’t conflict to their current branding images)
- The emergency of Trust: “Only when individuals can trust the culture or organization will they take personal risks in order to advance that culture or organization as a whole… The strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging…”
- “Loyalty is when people are willing to suffer some inconvenience or pay a premium to do business with you… The goal of business is to find people who believe what you believe… If you have the discipline to focus on the early adopters, the majority will come along eventually.”
- “The best CEO are WHY-types – people who wake up every day to lead a cause … the best CFO and COO are high performing HOW-types – those… are inspired by the leader’s vision and know how to build the structure… behind the scenes…”
- Measure WHY, ensure a WHY stays clear and the rest followed. For example, Harbridge started her collection firm with the goal to treat people with respect, and to measure the firm’s success, she gave bonuses based on the amount of “Thank you” cards the agents sent out!
- “Finding WHY is a process of discovery, not invention… The WHY does not come from looking ahead…[or] market research… It comes from looking in the completely opposite direction… you.”
Ngoc Le 