Below Water Level

For a business or product to succeed, nothing else matters more than winning hearts and minds of customers, employees, investors, followers and champions. The only way to do so is to articulate the business or product’s reason-for-existence.

Something happens to the human mind when it hears the why, the origin story and why something should be relevant to the world. Whether it is sales, a product proposal or internal alignment building, the following three questions are the only ones that matter.

There are three excellent books that delve into the issue of finding and articulating purpose, designing a message and delivering it:

1. Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies By Ranjay Gulati
   
2. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action By Simon Sinek
   
3. Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck By Chip and Dan Heath