The Problem Solved
Simon Sinek got one thing right, organizations with a clear sense of why they exist are more capable of creating meaning for the people they serve. Sinek’s Start With Why gave business leaders a compelling way to think about purpose. But it left a much harder question unanswered: Once you have your ‘Why,’ what do you actually do with it?
A purpose statement, mission statement, a tagline, a campaign, or a founder standing on a stage explaining what the company believes in does not create a meaningful relationship with consumers.
These things only become valuable when belief becomes behavior, when it permeates the organization and is repeatedly made tangible through the customer experience.
That is where Start With Why stops. And, where our work begins.
The Problem
As companies grow, they add people, departments, processes, channels, technologies, reporting, and layers of specialization. The organization becomes more capable while simultaneously becoming less in touch with the character that made people care about it in the first place.
Marketing, product development, customer service, merchandising, sales, operations, leadership, and finance all optimize to their own agendas. None of those agendas is necessarily wrong. The problem is that they are independently derived. The challenge with this is that somewhere down the line is the consumer’s end experience. There isn’t an invisible hand pulling all of the varied agendas together to collectively manage the relationship being created with the customer.
That’s the missing link.
The character of an organization (the ‘Why’) has no economic consequence merely because it exists. It creates value when customers experience that character, discover alignment with it, and repeatedly find that alignment confirmed through what the organization does.
The crux is that it is these experiences that influence the relationship.
When those experiences confirm alignment, customers progress toward greater commitment. When they don’t, they stall or drift away entirely. It is this accumulated condition of those relationships that ultimately determines something far more consequential than whether customers “like the brand” or not. It determines the quality of the customer asset within the business. This is what modern management has yet to learn how to manage.
The problem was never simply how to articulate a company's purpose. The problem was understanding how organizational character (The Why) becomes customer behavior, and how customer behavior becomes economic value.
The Solution
Easier said than done. To create economic value, one’s ‘Why’ has to become behavior.
Once an organization's Why—its worldview—is defined, the task at hand is to translate that belief into principles that govern how the organization behaves. Those principles shape decisions. Decisions that shape products, service, policies, brand expressions, communication, and culture. Through these things, customers directly experience what the organization believes: how that belief shows up, the change it seeks to create, and ultimately how it improves their lives.
Purpose is no longer something the company says. It becomes something the company does.
That was the missing piece.
The objective was never simply to help an organization articulate its Why. It was to build an organization capable of behaving in accordance with it. Because ultimately, people don’t form relationships with what organizations say they believe. They form relationships with what organizations repeatedly prove themselves to be.