“The Google idea was the idea for organizing the world’s information. Mine was just an idea for making money.”
Will Oremus, Google’s Big Break: It was a great search engine but a money-losing business—until it borrowed an idea from its biggest rival (from Slate.com)She’s just been busy working, doing it, making those words “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” into something every leader in every country now knows is a linchpin of American policy. It’s just so much more than a rhetorical triumph. We’re talking about what happened in the real world, the institutional change that was a result of that stand she took.
Meryl Streep, in her introduction of Hillary Clinton, at the 2012 Women of the World Conference (read, and watch, the full introduction here)Only the Wright brothers started with why.
Simon Sinek, Start with Why
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This is one of the oldest lessons. It has been around a very, very long time. But it is genuinely central – critical – to organizing your world, and your company or organization.
Start with your why. And then act upon that why. Every decision, every act, every process, every hire, every investment of 10 minutes or $10.00 has to be in service to your why.
Lose sight of your why, and you lose it all.
I begin my e-book, 12 Vital Signs of Organizational Health, with this. And every time I turn around, I find another reminder of this truth.
I have a few websites I check pretty much every morning, and the first two quotes above were from my morning reading this morning.
Slate’s piece about how Google finally made money was a fascinating journey from the “why” to profit. But the “why” was first, and profit was the “after” result. Profit was not the goal – the why was the goal… to “organize the world’s information.”
And Hillary Clinton! See if you can forget politics for a minute. Just think about this simple question – do women have a difficult time being treated with fairness and justice throughout the world? And then read Meryl Streep’s full introduction of Hilary Clinton. It is breathtaking, moving, convicting. And it shows that Hillary Clinton has spent a life-time acting on her why.
In my speech classes, I always project a portion of Hillary Clinton’s 1995 UN Speech in Beijing, describing it as a perfect example of the use of parallel structure in a speech. But – confession time – I also do it to let Hilary Clinton’s voice speak to my students about the issue of justice for women. Here’s the excerpt I project:
These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. But the voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loudly and clearly:
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed — and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.
It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.
It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.
(Read the full speech at the great American Rhetoric site, AmericanRhetoric.com.)
Google; Hillary Clinton; and Steve Jobs. The “why” always drove Steve Jobs. After reading the Walter Isaacson biography, this was my first takeaway:
Care about the product, not about the money. The money must – must! — be the by-product, not the focus.
These are just three such examples of the power of the “why.” If you are a leader of any kind, in any company or organization, this should be your overarching question. “What is our why?’’ You ask it over and over again, constantly, incessantly – until you know your answer fully and completely. It is simply the most important question to answer.
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“Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Steve Jobs, to John Sculley, luring John Sculley away from Pepsi. It sealed the deal!
First Friday Book Synopsis 