What’s your ‘WHY?’

The hardest question for any business is “Why?”, just why are we doing what we do for 5 days a week? What is our purpose in life? In business? In the world? (ok, the last might be a stretch).

The critically acclaimed business strategist, Simon Sinek has carved out a career from his famous ‘Why?’ TED talk that has now been viewed 23,499,193 times:

https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

It is the biggest question of them all for a business and one that should far outstrip any capitalist financial goals. Money will always take care of itself if you have a good idea and purpose to what you do in life & business. It’s often the hardest question that any business faces and one that we encounter in our daily lives when partnering with businesses. Sometimes the ‘why’ changes as the business evolves, frequently when a business comes to us and tries to re-focus its ‘why’, it realises that it has moved so far away from the original ambitions that it has lost touch with the reason it was created in the first place.

 Why don’t people tackle the ‘why’ in their business? Most probably because they can’t see the woods for the trees, as they are deeply entrenched in the woods. The day-to-day has a habit of doing that to you, all the efforts go on the immediate tactical needs of the business in order to survive. It’s easy to do and leaves the big scary elephant in the corner of the room.

We’ve found that the businesses that do prosper, are the ones that go back to their ‘why?’ and then use it to strategically drive their businesses forward with a purpose and a target to achieve. Google didn’t start with “let’s make as much money as we can”, they started with a mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible & useful. Hell yeah, let’s sign up to that (and I’m a Brit)! Steve Jobs had a mission to “remove the barrier of having to learn” technology, which he beautifully summed up with: “We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use.” 

Our “WHY?" as a business is to bring people & brands closer together through simple effective ideas that work.