A very inspiring TED Talk about how great leaders inspire action. It explains, among others, why people wait in queue for hours or days to get their hands on the new iPhone 🙂

[…] I call it the golden circle.

Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren’t. Let me define the terms really quickly.
Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent.
Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP.
But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by “why” I don’t mean “to make a profit.” That’s a result. It’s always a result. By “why,” I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief?
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html

Later edit: interesting to observe how this different TED Talk leads, somehow, to the same idea. Dan Pink speaks about the The puzzle of motivation. It explains, among others, why the Wikipedia business model worked and Microsoft’s Encarta didn’t.

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows.
One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.
Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity.
Three: The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive — the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html