Review of "Start With Why" by Simon Sinek

I know a lot of people love this book, so I had high hopes. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. (Sorry. Don’t flame me if you’re one of the people who love it!)

The book’s theme

Sinek’s theme — which he repeats about a million times in the book as well as in his famous TED talk — is that “People don’t buy WHAT you sell, they buy WHY you sell it”. The alternative, Sinek says, is to persuade people to buy from you by, for example, competing on price. (Although having a good product or service is necessary.)

“There is a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Great business is when people do business with you multiple times. Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business with you. Loyal customers often don’t even bother research the competition or entertain other options. Loyalty is not easily won. Repeat business, however, is. All it takes is more manipulations.” p. 28-9

To take his favourite example, Apple’s WHY is supposedly something like “We challenge the status quo”. So people who buy Apple products buy that WHY. That is, they buy Apple because they share this value with Apple. Apple buyers see themselves as rebels or at least independent thinkers who aren’t afraid to act counter to the mainstream. 

OK, sounds plausible. The 1984 ad was pretty amazing, right? But is it true that this WHY is why people buy Apple products?

I know the reason I use a Mac computer. When I was an undergraduate at Glasgow University, I volunteered to help out with a student magazine. The student magazine happened to have Macs available to use. (Those boxy beige ones. Who else remembers those?)

I’d never seen the 1984 ad.

Later, because I was already used to using Macs, I continued using them. That’s it. Nothing to do with being a counter-mainstream rebel, unfortunately. Of course, I might be a statistical outlier. But so might those who buy Apple products because of Apple’s purported WHY. We can’t know without evidence. We’d need some actual data to back up the claim that people buy Apple’s WHY — not just Sinek’s repetition of the claim.

As Sinek says, we’re not very good at articulating — or even knowing — why we’re motivated to do what we do. If you ask a Mac user why they use a Mac, they’re not likely to refer to Apple’s WHY, or mention the 1984 ad. But Sinek claims they are nevertheless motivated by those things. But how does he know that? He provides no empirical support whatsoever.

My main gripe: There’s no evidence

That’s what most annoys me about this book — there’s no evidence. There’s the repeated claim and lots of stories that supposedly illustrate it, but no actual evidence. (Oh and there’s a bit of brain fluff chucked in too. Pro tip: If you don’t have any actual evidence for your claims, it doesn’t help support your case to throw in some vaguely related neuro-whatsit stuff. Admittedly, though, it must impress people.)

“We all know someone who is a die-hard Mac lover. Ask them WHY they love their Mac. They won’t tell you, “Well, I see myself as someone who likes to challenge the status quo, and it’s important to me to surround myself with the people, the products and brands that prove to the outside world who I believe I am.” Biologically, that’s what happened. But that decision was made in the part of the brain that controls behaviour but not language. So they will provide a rationalization: “It’s the user interface. It’s the simplicity. It’s the design. It’s the high quality. They’re the best computers. I’m a creative person.” In reality, their purchase decision and their loyalty are deeply personal. They don’t really care about Apple; it’s all about them.” p. 63

Sinek presents plenty of stories of companies like Apple, Southwest, Virgin, and Harley Davidson that at least appear to fit the pattern of having customers who buy their WHY.

But what about the stories of those companies that had a strong WHY and also good knowledge of HOW to implement it, but nevertheless they failed? What about the stories of incredibly successful businesses that don’t have a strong WHY (and are not in the commodity business) but are nevertheless incredibly successful? Does Coca-Cola have a strong WHY? Or McDonald’s? These are companies that don’t compete only on price. Some people love Coke, and they’re loyal to Coke and never buy Pepsi, even if Pepsi is cheaper.

Sinek admits that companies can be successful without a strong WHY and people can be loyal to them. So how can he also claim that people buy a company’s WHY?

Oh, maybe it’s just that some people are sometimes motivated to buy a WHY (i.e. they buy because they’re drawn to a brand’s values) and some people sometimes just buy a damn computer or a Coke. Or they’re partly motivated by a company’s values and they’re partly motivated by a good product? 

That doesn’t sound quite as sexy, does it?

Maybe your WHY doesn’t have to be where you start

Sinek wants you to think about your WHY, the reason why you do what you do. In some cases, perhaps a WHY drives a founder from the beginning, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. It’s something that can develop over time.

For example, one of my current clients is in the construction business. I think they started off just constructing buildings and then managing them. That was what they did and that’s how they made their money. Their WHY has developed over time — they genuinely want to create a better local community. This means that when a business opportunity comes up that doesn’t have anything to do with constructing a building, it nevertheless might work for them (if they have the necessary know-HOW) because it ‘fits’ with their WHY.

I expect it’ll serve them well, decades from now, when the CEO has retired. And this is one of Sinek’s points. If a company has strong WHY, it’ll help everyone at the company — present and future — know what to do when faced with a decision.

I also suspect — but don’t know without looking into the evidence — that having a strong WHY will help you and I run our businesses. Both because it’ll help us stay motivated when times get rough, and it’ll help in crafting our marketing messages.

Trusting your gut

Unfortunately, Sinek seems to equate having a strong WHY with trusting your gut. (My goodness, how I hate that expression. ‘Gut’ is such an ugly word, don’t you think?)

Sinek says:

“Ask the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders what their secret is and invariably they all say the same thing: “I trust my gut.” The times things went wrong, they will tell you, “I listen to what others were telling me, even though it didn’t feel right. I should have trusted my gut.” It’s a good strategy, except it’s not scalable. The gut decision can only be made by a single person…

That’s when the power of WHY can be fully realized. The ability to put a WHY into words provides the emotional context for decisions. It offers greater confidence than “I think it’s right.” It’s more scalable than “I feel it’s right.” When you know your WHY, the highest level of confidence you can offer is, “I know it’s right.”

Shall we just ignore the bazillionty examples of founders who ‘trusted their gut’ and fell on their face?

Take home messages

From the book, I think there are two main points to consider:

  1. Think about the bigger picture and what really motivates you to do the work you do. Yes, you want to earn money, but why earn it by doing this thing rather than that other thing? What, apart from money, do you want to accomplish with your business?

  2. If you write a book that makes a bold claim, you have to support it with actual evidence, not mere repetition. And, no it doesn’t count as evidence to add in a bit of vague brain stuff that fits your story.

And, finally…

Sinek says that most successful entrepreneurs are not WHY-types. Towards the end of the book, it’s almost like he scales back his claim about the necessity of a strong WHY for a company’s success. He’s raised the bar — it’s necessary only for billion-dollar revenue companies. But, again, he provides no evidence even for this more modest claim.

“Although so many of them fancy themselves as visionaries, in reality most successful entrepreneurs are HOW-types. Ask an entrepreneur what they love about being an entrepreneur and most will tell you they love to build things. That they talk about building is a sure clue that they know HOW to get things done… To reach the billion-dollar status, to alter the course of an industry, requires a very special and rare partnership between one who knows WHY and those who know HOW.” p. 141-2

Does this mean that Sinek thinks that all the companies on this list — These 10 Companies Have Passed the Billion-Dollar Revenue Mark — have a WHY-type founder and/or CEO? And all the other billion-dollar companies do too?

Without evidence, why should we believe that?

They might just have done an excellent job of executing a good idea that people happened to like. Heretical thought, I know.