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Inspiring and Motivating Individuals, 1.09 (V) 01.06 - How Starting with WHY is Essential

1.09 (V) 01.06 - How Starting with WHY is Essential

I was really drawn to the message of Simon Sinek in his book Start With Why. And the message that resonated with me from that book is that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And I had to stop, and think about why is it that we do things the way we do them? What do we believe? What is our fundamental belief? And quite frankly, the deeper I got into that, for me, what I realized was, we can sum up Menlo in a single word, and that word is joy. The business value of joy. And what we want to do more than anything else is delight the people we serve. We're a software design and development firm, we do contract work for others. What we want to do is create software that goes out into the world and people love that software when they touch it. Now having that fundamental purpose behind what we do to create joy in the world with the work of our hearts, our hands, and our minds. Now we can begin articulating that purpose first to our team. As a visionary leader of the company I need to communicate what is our purpose, our mission is to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. We take that mission very seriously. We can say that kind of thing tongue and cheek and people will chuckle about it but everybody knows they've been tortured by technology at some point in their life, and we didn't want to create that kind of pain in the world. What we wanted to do was create just the opposite. And so by communicating that first and foremost to the team, my heart and vision to this team is to what our purpose is, why are we here, and the fact that the goal, the purpose of is externally focused. They were talking about who are we serving in the world and what do we want to do for them, can really energize a team. I fundamentally believe people are wired to work on something that's bigger than themselves, and we get a chance to do that. The work we do is hard. We can't possibly be happy every minute of everyday with what we're doing. But with that long arch of joy as our goal, we can keep a team energized around a fundamental purpose of what we're trying to do as a company.


1.09 (V) 01.06 - How Starting with WHY is Essential

I was really drawn to the message of Simon Sinek in his book Start With Why. And the message that resonated with me from that book is that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And I had to stop, and think about why is it that we do things the way we do them? What do we believe? What is our fundamental belief? And quite frankly, the deeper I got into that, for me, what I realized was, we can sum up Menlo in a single word, and that word is joy. The business value of joy. And what we want to do more than anything else is delight the people we serve. We're a software design and development firm, we do contract work for others. What we want to do is create software that goes out into the world and people love that software when they touch it. Now having that fundamental purpose behind what we do to create joy in the world with the work of our hearts, our hands, and our minds. Now we can begin articulating that purpose first to our team. As a visionary leader of the company I need to communicate what is our purpose, our mission is to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. We take that mission very seriously. We can say that kind of thing tongue and cheek and people will chuckle about it but everybody knows they've been tortured by technology at some point in their life, and we didn't want to create that kind of pain in the world. What we wanted to do was create just the opposite. And so by communicating that first and foremost to the team, my heart and vision to this team is to what our purpose is, why are we here, and the fact that the goal, the purpose of is externally focused. They were talking about who are we serving in the world and what do we want to do for them, can really energize a team. I fundamentally believe people are wired to work on something that's bigger than themselves, and we get a chance to do that. The work we do is hard. We can't possibly be happy every minute of everyday with what we're doing. But with that long arch of joy as our goal, we can keep a team energized around a fundamental purpose of what we're trying to do as a company.