Start with Why — A Book Review. Today’s book, Start With Why, by Simon…
By: Rory Lynch
Tags: Software Development, Product, Agile, Leadership

Today’s book, Start With Why, by Simon Sinek, is something of a disappointment. It poses itself as a leadership a book, a book on how to inspire people to take action in your name (and/or the name of your cause.) What I actually found was a book which rehashed some basic marketing tactics and the concept of a vision, with some weak anecdotal evidence. Regardless of if you’ve read Start With Why, you’ve probably seen Simon Sinek before, even if you don’t recognise the name. He’s debatably most famous for his Ted Talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action, which currently has 52 million views on Ted.com. I find Sinek a compelling and charismatic speaker, I must have listened to 3 or 4 of his talks now, which certainly helped my decision to pick this up.

It also helped that it’s highly talked about in product circles, and has a 4.08 stars on Goodreads off a whooping 127,000 ratings, which given how savage Goodreads reviewers are, is a strong recommendation.

I won’t talk about the publisher again today, as it’s a Penguin Random House publication, which probably means a quarter of the books you’ve ever read or heard of were published by them.

The book in question. Note the annoying red foil on the cover. Very distracting.

I’ve said many times, and probably will say many more time, the true measure of the value of a (non-fiction book) is if it changes your behaviours or mental models of the world. Unfortunately, Start With Why failed to do either of these things. I found it thin (intellectually) and poorly argued, supported by some anecdotal evidence (and re-telling the same half-dozen stories in every chapter.) There’s no solid evidence, no counter arguments, and no examination of the initial hypothesis. It is, in a word, not-terrible. I did come away with a mild feeling of inspiration (whoo) and there were one or two ideas which were gems buried in 250-odd pages of murk. Overall, I’m giving this book 2 stars, for generally bad, but some redeeming features. This could have been a blog post. If you want the ideas in this book, just watch the Ted Talk instead.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The above quote does not appear in the book, but honestly sums up the entire idea in two sentences.

I’ll start with what I liked about this book. There was a nice explanation of the the neo-cortex and limbic systems of the brain which is both fascinating, and helps to describe the why we can rationally explain some of the ideas we have, but not others (especially feelings/“gut feeling.”) I really love when authors take the time to propose or explain anatomical and physiological mechanisms for psychology. Everything we do and think is underpinned in physiology, so succinct and precise mechanisms lend credibility to the ideas presented. Unfortunately, that’s where the level of evidence (beyond some choice anecdotes) stops for this one.

The other idea I really liked, which was new to me, was the distinction between novelty and innovation. I think I could probably have conceptualised the idea before, but it’s presented really nicely. In this case, Sinek describes innovation as being the disruption of industries or user behaviours, and being a relatively rare occurrence. Novelty is just what it says — newness. Adding more buttons to an existing app isn’t innovation, it’s just novelty, and users to whom that appeals are going to be easily swayed by whatever the next novelty is.

Finally, Sinek appears to have a wry sense of humour. I laughed out loud, spraying coffee across my notebook, at the following line, buried drily in an unassuming paragraph.

If you have to write “honesty” on your wall to remind you to do it, you probably have bigger problems.

What I disliked about this book was mostly what was absent, rather than what was there but wasn’t good. What was missing was evidence or counter-examples, or arguments against the hypothesis. It makes the argument flimsy. It’s easy to cherry pick six examples of how starting with why, or any other arbitrary thing leads to success, but how does it lead to more success than another method? Sinek himself cites that 90% of businesses in the United States fail within three years (I don’t have a source on that, but bear with me), but how does that number change when you start with why? Where are the data, or the examples where a now-successful business started with why, but pivoted to something else because it wasn’t working? Taking time to explore some counter-examples, alternatives, and even present some research would help pad the otherwise thin and flimsy book into something more worthwhile.

I was sadly disappointed by this one. I don’t regret reading the book, I still got one or two useful ideas out of it, but all the same material could be either distilled into a good blog post, or expanded into a good book with more work. Instead, it exists in a frustrating middle ground; not short enough to be a blog, but not strong enough to stand properly by itself either.

Have you read Start With Why? What did you think, was I too harsh?