When companies or organizations do not have a clear sense of why their customers are their customers, they tend to rely on a disproportionate number of manipulations to get what they need. And for good reason. Manipulations work.

WHY-types are the visionaries, the ones with the overactive imaginations. They tend to be optimists who believe that all the things they imagine can actually be accomplished. HOW-types live more in the here and now. They are the realists and have a clearer sense of all things practical. WHY-types are focused on the things most people can’t see,

All Apple’s advertising and communications, their products, partnerships, their packaging, their store design, they are all WHATs to Apple’s WHY, proof that they actively challenge status quo thinking to empower the individual. Ever notice that their advertising never shows groups enjoying their products? Always individuals. Their Think Different

By the time Sam Walton died, he had taken Wal-Mart from a single store in Bentonville, Arkansas, and turned it into a retail colossus with $44 billion in annual sales with 40 million people shopping in the stores per week. But it takes more than a competitive nature, a strong work ethic and a sense of optimism to build a company big enough to equal

all dictate to Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, LG and others what the phones will do. Then Apple showed up. They announced that they would tell the service provider what the phone would do, not the other way around. AT&T was the only one that agreed, thus earning the company the exclusive deal to offer the new technology. That’s the kind of shift that

To pass the School Bus Test, for an organization to continue to inspire and lead beyond the lifetime of its founder, the founder’s WHY must be extracted and integrated into the culture of the company. What’s more, a strong succession plan should aim to find a leader inspired by the founding cause and ready to lead it into the next generation.

The manipulative nature of promotions is so well established in retail that the industry even named one of the principles. They call it breakage. Breakage measures the percentage of customers who fail to take advantage of a promotion and end up paying full price for a product instead. This typically happens when buyers don’t bother performing the

Those who are able to inspire give people a sense of purpose or belonging

Once you know WHY you do what you do, the question is HOW will you do it? HOWs are your values or principles that guide HOW to bring your cause to life. HOW we do things manifests in the systems and processes within an organization and the culture. Understanding HOW you do things and, more importantly, having the discipline to hold the organization