Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action

So I just finished watching the Ted talk with Simon Sinek, and the subject was how great leaders inspire action. Throughout the video he brought up the subject of selling, not so much of how to sell but in essence of what the message was and how most companies sold their products. In the video one of the companies he talk about was Apple and in talking about them he used the golden circle reference of selling.

            The golden circle is basically three circles within each other with the word why starting in the center, followed by how in its own circle and what in the outer circle. Using this method he began to pitch a product sold by Apple using just the how and what, detailing what the product was and how it was better. After the pitch, he concluded why no one wanted to purchase it if it was pitched that way. So instead he started with the why, saying that it would make your life better, that they believe in what they are doing and why it would make people's lives better simply because they believed in what they were doing, followed by the same pitch used in reference to the how and what.

            Throughout this video I could relate to his message to the stories he shared about the Wright Brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, how they didn’t use the how or what by why they were great and so many people believed in them.

            Especially the story about the Wright Brothers and how their “flying” machine came to be and the gentleman who was competing with them. The gentleman who was competing with them was doing it for all the wrong reasons, being he was doing it for money and not the science of it. He had congress backing him and even had the New York Times following him every step of the way but yet the Wright Brothers completed the task first. When this happened, the gentleman who was working so tersely to be the first simply quit because he wasn't the first.

            With these events and each story the leaders inspired the people they work with not for glory or being the first, but quite simply they were doing it because the believed in what they were doing and why they were doing it.