Inspirational Leadership

In this story, I try to explain leadership role in creating and managing long lasting value in a commercial context

In this story, I explain the leadership role in creating and managing long lasting value in a commercial context

In this TED talk, Simon Sinek explains the simple yet powerful idea of the “Golden Circle”. The notion of why you do what you do and how you do it can help many organisations, and individuals, gain clarity in their day to day work as well as help shape their purpose in society. It represents a practical yet almost spiritual way of handling ideas and ideals.

From a commercial point of view, I look at this similar to the way he explains the example of Apple. The reason why Apple’s share price has outperformed other tech giants so tremendously can be seen through the prism of the golden cirlce. This doesn’t mean that Google and Amazon don’t have a “why” or “how”, (Google’s why is to “organise the world’s information and it has done an outstanding job at that) but it shows that Apple’s golden circle is so well defined and integrated that it works as a highly aligned value engine for itself and the wider community.

Let’s look at the leadership role that Apple has played in the technology market as well as how it manages itself internally. In many ways, Apple is a world of contradictions. Its brand image portrays it as a new age company at the forefront of the digital age. It has created tremendous value by disrupting many old business models such as digital distribution of music (iTunes) and software (AppStore). However, it is primarily a computer company which drives majority of its profits from consumption of its hardware rather than services (89% vs. 11% according to statista). Its internal culture is extremely secretive yet its products and services have been very successful in building a community of collaborators and loyal consumers. Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms explain this very neatly in the context of old vs. new power.

So if you want to create long lasting value, a combined model of motivation and power explained above could be a useful tool to put things into perspective and really help your commercial venture: