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Who Not How - A Book About Achieving Bigger Goals Through Teamwork and Delegation

Who Not How Book Review

Book Description:

The world's foremost entrepreneurial coach shows you how to make a mindset shift that opens the door to explosive growth and limitless possibility--in your business and your life.

Have you ever had a new idea or a goal that excites you... but not enough time to execute it? What about a goal you really want to accomplish...but can't because instead of taking action, you procrastinate? Do you feel like the only way things are going to get done is if you do them? But what if it wasn't that way? What if you had a team of people around you that helped you accomplish your goals (while you helped them accomplish theirs)?

When we want something done, we've been trained to ask ourselves: "How can I do this?" Well, there is a better question to ask. One that unlocks a whole new world of ease and accomplishment. Expert coach Dan Sullivan knows the question we should ask instead: "Who can do this for me?"

This may seem simple. And it is. But don't let the lack of complexity fool you. By mastering this question, you will quickly learn how billionaires and successful entrepreneurs like Dan build incredible businesses and personal freedom.

This book will teach you how to make this essential paradigm shift so you can:

  • Build a successful business effectively while not killing yourself
  • Immediately free up 1,000+ hours of work that you shouldn't be doing anyway
  • Bypass the typical scarcity and decline of aging and other societal norms
  • Increase your vision in all areas of life and build teams of WHOs to support you in that vision
  • Never be limited in your goals and ambitions again
  • Expand your abundance of wealth, innovation, relationships, and joy
  • Build a life where everything you do is your choice--how you spend your time, how much money you make, the quality of your relationships, and the type of work you do

Making this shift involves retraining your brain to stop limiting your potential based on what you solely can do and instead focus on the nearly infinite and endless connections between yourself and other people as well as the limitless transformation possible through those connections.

My Top Takeaways: 

  • Very few people, if anyone, has ever accomplished anything great on their own. Even in individual sporting events the best performers have coaches, friends, or others who pushed them, taught them, and even covered for them in other areas of their life that they weren't as strong.
  • Ask Who can help you instead of How can you make something happen. We tend to look at big goals and ask How... How can I write this book? How can I get fit enough to run this race? How can I build a sales team to get my product to the world? Instead, we should ask Who. Who can help me with this book, this race, building this sales team? Or maybe even, Who can help cover what I'm doing now so that I can accomplish this new goal? Who is a much more powerful question than How.
  • Time and effort invested in the right relationships pay a bigger dividend than any other investment we could make. Transformational Relationships are what builds companies, improve communities, and achieve goals. Strong networks are significantly more valuable in the long run than how our bank account looks, and can very quickly make our bank accounts much more attractive.
    • When meeting someone new ask, "What's in it for them?" so that you can start the relationship by creating value.
    • Learn what the other person cares about and be a generous giver.
  • You can not continue engaging with people who don't align with your vision if you want to accomplish your goals. Saying no to people who don't align with your vision will bring greater confidence for you and your team.
  • The right Who at the right time can expand our vision and help us move in ways we hadn't even considered. Find and invest in good mentors.
  • Using the Impact Filter when approaching a Who for help will streamline and simplify the process. Have the following questions answered (in writing):
    • What is the project?
    • Purpose: What do you want to accomplish?
    • Importance: What's the biggest difference this will make?
    • Ideal Outcome: What does the completed project look like?
    • Best Result: Best possible result if you take action?
    • Worst Result: Worst possible result if you don't take action?
    • Success Criteria: What has to be true when this project is finished? What does success look and feel like?
Who Not How Impact Filter
https://resources.strategiccoach.com/goal-setting-and-success-habits/the-impact-filter

  • Make an effort to find Whos for personal and professional aspects of our lives. It will free up time, bring a greater sense of purpose and clarity, and help us achieve far more impact.
  • You can't have money freedom until you achieve time freedom. We need to find the right Who to help free time so that our minds can operate at a higher level. It's easy to say we can't afford the help, but with the ideas and innovations we're missing due to distraction and overscheduling, can we afford not to find the Who?
  • Eliminating decision fatigue should be one of our primary goals if we are going to be a higher performer with increased freedom and income.
  • We need to commit to specific results and get our team on board using Transformational Leadership, even if it is uncomfortable for them in the beginning. Transformational Leaders embody four characteristics:
    1. Individualized Consideration - Attend to each team member's needs, mentor and coach them, listen to their concerns, and challenge them to help them grow. Respect and celebrate their contribution to the team.
    2. Intellectual Stimulation - Challenge people's assumptions, take risks, a solicit ideas from each member of the team. Take learning seriously and allow team members to ask questions and make decisions.
    3. Inspirational Motivation - Articulate the vision and make it appealing and inspiring to the team. Challenge them to increase personal standards and communicate optimism about goals. 
    4. Idealized Influence - Act as a role model for high ethical behavior, instill a sense of pride, and gain respect and trust. People want to be with you and work towards the vision if they believe you have high moral authority.
  • If you have enough money to solve a problem, you don't have a problem. Are you constantly stressed about finding enough time to mow your lawn, put up Christmas lights, or fold your laundry? If you can afford to have someone else take care of those chores then do it. The stress and time relief will pay much bigger dividends in your overall wellbeing and performance. Don't get pulled into a scarcity mindset and cost avoidance pattern.
  • Create a culture of collaboration. It will expand visions, bring greater innovation, improve projects, make it more likely that people will ask for help when needed, and bring greater purpose to the team.

'The 52 Book' Review Rating:

Final Thoughts:

Who Not How was the Business Minds Book Club assigned reading for February and it did not disappoint. I had been looking forward to reading it in the hopes that I would understand effective delegation better, but it brought so much more clarity around networks, relationships, and teams than I had anticipated.

It's only been a week since I finished the book and I'm already seeing benefits from the insights it shared. I've always been the type of person who likes to run a project on my own because I know "it'll get done right." This made me take a harder look at my calendar and realize how often I'm stripping my team of opportunities to grow, missing insights and ideas throughout the day due to an overpacked schedule, and sometimes doing things that others on my team could have done better.

Like nearly any book, Who Not How has quite a few concepts that you can find repeated in similar books, but Dan Sullivan did a wonderful job of simplifying those concepts through stories and examples in a way that I haven't seen before. It left me reevaluating decisions I've made and figuring out better ways of moving forward with an expanded network of Whos and less energy spent trying to figure out the How.

Do you love learning and want to hear about future books?

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Have you read Who Not How, and if so, what are your thoughts?

Also, I am always on the prowl for my next great book. What life-changing books have you read recently? I'm excited to see your comments below.


You can reach out to David Inman at: david@kennected.io 
You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at: 
Location: Indianapolis, IN, USA

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