Transcript excerpt of Simon Sinek explaining the role of money in visionary organizations: money is the fuel that enables a company to pursue its vision but should not be the primary reason for starting a company. Sinek illustrates this using examples including Apple (inference of 'why' from public artifacts) and Disney (strategic divestment to preserve organizational ethos under Bob Iger), arguing organizations should use their 'why' as a filter before chasing profit.
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Money's fine. But let's recognize the role that money plays inside a visionary organization, right? Which is it's the fuel that makes the car go. So if the car is the company and the vision is the destination that you're trying to get to, money makes the car go. If you don't have money, the car doesn't go. No vision is accomplished. So money is an essential component, but it's not the reason to own a car. You don't own a car just so you can buy gas.
For the same reason you don't start a company just so you can make money. That's inconsistent. We buy a car to go places. We started the business to advance something, to move towards something, to change the way the world functions. And the money will get us there. And somewhere along the way, we take our eyes off the road and start looking obsessively at the gas tank, you know, And I think some of it's gotten a little confused for a lot of companies. And you can tell a lot about what a company believes by looking at their products. I'll give you a little inside baseball. So when I was writing Start with why, I had all these theories about Apple, and I'd never really visited or met anybody at Apple. They were just theories. And I thought, before I publish a book, I should probably check.
So we sent a note to Apple requesting an interview with Steve Jobs. And I didn't know this at the time, but my publisher had published an unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs. And so because I was associated with that publisher, I was told to know. I was told, not only can I not interview Jobs, I can't interview anybody, and I may never visit campus. Oh, and by the way, all your ideas are wrong.
So I had no inside access. The only thing that I had was the way that Apple talked about itself. So I looked at its packaging, I looked at its products, I looked at its store experience, I looked at its advertising, I looked at its pr, I read its legal type on a box.
I just looked at everything that was public, and you can see a very clear pattern of who they are, who they were, and what they stood for. And so I could easily assess what the why was. Because what they did proved it. What they did was so consistent. Some of the what's made money, some of the what's didn't make money, but it didn't matter. The through line was there. And so I was able to accurately say, this is what Apple stands for. Stood for. The why is a filter. So Disney, for example.
Went off the rails when at the later half of Michael Eisner's tenure because he became obsessed with world domination. When Bob Iger and Tom Staggs took over, they sat down with the portfolio and they divested things that didn't make sense. So they got rid of the production company that made Pulp Fiction. They got rid of the music company that had bands in it called World War 3 that was named as one of the bands that did death metal. Not very Disney. And they were profitable, but they didn't prove the Disney ethos, so they just divested them. Disney has never and will never go into casinos. Like, think about that. A Star wars and Marvel casino on the Vegas strip. Best casino ever.
It'll never happen because it doesn't fit the ethos. You'd scratch your head and say, that doesn't make sense. And so they're very disciplined about doing things. They don't just chase profit first they say, should we be in this business now? How are we going to make a profit doing it? But there's a filter first. And I think what happens for a lot of companies, they chase the money before they run the filter. So using your. Why is that filter.
