Book Review: Start With Why

I’d start with calling this book a demagogue’s playbook, but “playbook” implies an instructional cohesion this soggy mishmash of poorly researched cargo-culting, emotional pablum, and chewing-with-mouth-open annoying capitalized interrogative pronouns completely lacks. The book is a prime example of all that is wrong with this genre: not every good idea or good TED talk should be a book. And yet this one, as the book flap tells me, has sold over a million copies, so what do I know about the publishing industry?

The core idea here that Sinek, a converted ad-man and now self-actualizer, is peddling is that businesses and leaders are more successful if they, you guessed it, start with why they are doing anything. Good business arises from clearly communicated vision statements, as it were. Sine’s core metaphor is a few circles within circles for a hierarchical ranking of WHY, HOW, and WHAT. Your approach to asking these interrogative pronouns, says Sinek, need to be “balanced” or you won’t be able to compel blind, emotional loyalty from your customers and followers to your brand. Sinek claims to borrow his golden circle from nature’s golden ratio, ¹, but Sinek’s formulation might as well be named for the Golden Hind or a golden potato for all it shares with that mathematical constant.

In Sinek’s world, there is good marketing and bad marketing, and all business success radiates outward from where you fall. In Sinek’s world, business leaders are their company’s business strategy. His argument certainly holds water if we are talking about those singular, once-in-a-generation geniuses that are innovation unto themselves. Sinek seems to be arguing that everyone just needs to be more like Steve Jobs, and you can start with being clear why you do anything. Sinek dedicates much of the textual real estate here as a fan’s notes on Apple and Jobs, a slavish and ingratiatingly shallow analysis of why the company was so successful in building a brand.

Sinek’s analysis trends towards shallow generally. TiVo fails because, in Sinek’s mind, they didn’t have vision, which is to say nothing about breaking in hardware to the oligopoly of cable companies, where inertia and anti-competition reign supreme². But hey, people wait six months to get Harley-Davidsons, so why didn’t TiVO work? Another example: Orville and Wilbur Wright pioneered the first plane because they really wanted to fly and thus were persistent. Another: Martin Luther King Jr. was pretty charismatic and was good at building a movement that transcended himself.

These sorts of superficial examples thread what is generally a poorly organized book. It doesn’t feel like Sinek is building to anything; an argument isn’t being structured, examples don’t appear to be layered. Sinek has two pitches here, which is to talk about Apple and sprinkle some WHYs and WHATs and HOWs³ to justify his thesis, or to extend his central “Golden Circle” metaphor in some confusing direction, e.g., the circle isn’t just a circle, it’s a megaphone! Surprisingly, the book gains a little momentum towards the end, where Sinek gets personal to his why. It allows the book to transcend the business book as marketing papers for a consultancy firm type of insistence, to humanize it. Unfortunately, it comes after 200 or so pages, or, the same 10 pages 20 times.

Sinek’s book ultimately posits a hierarchical leadership, with a Mussolini-type in the center gravitationally pulling sun-like, appealing to raw emotion. The phenomenology of success then is a conflation of the marketing of a product and the cult of personality of a brand’s leader, and Sinek employs thinly researched straw-men to justify this world-view. The central truism, that why you do what you do matters as much or more than what you do, is padded by hundreds of mind-numblingly useless pages riddled with post-facto arguments and survivor bias. Sinek builds a one-in-a-million ubermensch of a leader and claims that that target is what we should aspire to, rather than to say bolstering business arguments with why is generally a good way to go about selling, either externally or internally. Being a once-in-a-lifetime visionary who can change an industry is nice, but sometimes you are just selling used cars, and the car is just a car.

Footnotes