Simon Sinek

“Great leaders and great organizations are good at seeing what most of us can’t see. They are good at giving us things that we would never think of asking for. [Note: Henry Ford once summed it up best. ‘If I had asked people what they wanted,’ he said, ‘they would have said a faster horse.’]…Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the world who they are and what they believe. Remember, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. If a company [or a leader] does not have a clear sense of WHY then it is impossible for the outside world to perceive anything more than the WHAT the company does [and the leader asks them to do].

“In business, like a bad date, many companies work so hard to prove their value without saying WHY they exist in the first place. You’ll have to do more than show your résumé before someone finds you appealing.”

The same is true of leaders.

I highly recommend Simon Sinek’s Start with WHY: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, published by Portfolio/Penguin Group (2009).