Who Not How (Dan Sullivan)


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#delegation #teamwork #leadership #entrepreneurship #collaboration #goalachievement #scaling #WhoNotHow


These are takeaways from this book.


Firstly, Shifting from How Thinking to Who Thinking, A central theme is the difference between how thinking and who thinking. How thinking treats every goal as a personal engineering problem, pushing you to learn, troubleshoot, and execute each step yourself. The book suggests this approach often creates delays, stress, and a ceiling on growth because your time and skill set are finite. Who thinking reframes the same challenge as a relationship and capability question: who already has the expertise, capacity, or resources to help produce the result. This shift is not about avoiding work but about choosing the right kind of work, focusing on vision, decision making, and direction rather than doing everything. The book connects this mindset to larger results because it enables specialization and parallel progress, where multiple people move different parts of a project forward at once. It also highlights psychological resistance, including the desire for control, fear of dependence, and identity tied to being the problem solver. By replacing the need to be the hero with the desire to be the leader, the framework encourages readers to make collaboration a default strategy for achieving ambitious goals.


Secondly, Clarifying Goals and Defining the Result You Want, Before you can find the right who, you need clarity about what you are trying to accomplish. The book emphasizes defining outcomes in a way that is specific enough to guide delegation and collaboration. Vague goals lead to mismatched expectations and ineffective help, while clearly described results let others contribute their expertise with confidence. This topic involves articulating what success looks like, the constraints that matter, the timeline, and the quality standards you will accept. It also invites readers to distinguish between activities and results: activity is what you do, results are what you get. When you define the result, you make room for others to propose better methods than the ones you would have chosen. That openness can create breakthrough solutions because specialists often see options that generalists miss. The book also encourages identifying your unique strengths and highest value contributions, then shaping goals so your role aligns with those strengths. The practical payoff is better prioritization, fewer false starts, and a clearer basis for deciding which tasks should stay with you and which should move to collaborators, team members, or external partners.


Thirdly, Finding and Selecting the Right Who, The framework becomes real when you start identifying people who can make your goals achievable. The book discusses looking beyond the immediate circle of colleagues and considering a broad range of who options: team members, contractors, strategic partners, mentors, service providers, or peer connections. The point is not merely to hire help, but to match capabilities and motivations to the result. Effective selection includes evaluating competence, reliability, communication style, and alignment with your standards. It also means understanding what you can offer in return, whether that is compensation, opportunity, recognition, or a shared mission. Another emphasis is that the right who often already exists in your environment, but you must notice the potential and be willing to ask. This requires overcoming hesitation about reaching out and shifting from transactional thinking to relationship building. The book also highlights that a who relationship can be temporary or long term depending on the goal, and that assembling a network of trusted specialists creates compounding benefits over time. When you repeatedly collaborate with high performers, execution speeds up, quality improves, and your confidence in taking on bigger objectives grows.


Fourthly, Delegation as Collaboration, Not Abdication, Delegation is presented as a collaborative process with clear responsibility boundaries rather than a simple handoff. The book encourages leaders to delegate outcomes, not just tasks, so the who has room to apply judgment and expertise. That requires communicating the result, relevant context, and decision rights, while avoiding micromanagement that undermines ownership. A strong delegation process also includes defining how progress will be tracked, what milestones matter, and how feedback will be handled. The book points out common failure modes: delegating without clarity, delegating to the wrong person, or keeping hidden control by constantly revising directions. It positions trust as a practical tool, not a vague ideal. Trust allows teams to move faster, but it is supported by clear expectations, consistent communication, and accountability. Another element is learning to let go of being the best person to do something and instead becoming the person who builds the system where the best work gets done. When delegation is done well, you protect your attention for strategy and growth, while team members gain meaningful responsibility that increases engagement and capability across the organization.


Lastly, Compounding Growth Through Teamwork and Networks, Beyond completing a single project, the book frames who not how as a long term growth strategy. Each new relationship with a capable who expands what you can attempt next, creating a compounding effect: better execution leads to bigger goals, which attract better collaborators, which further increases momentum. This topic includes the idea that teamwork accelerates results because it enables parallelism and specialization. Instead of sequential progress that depends on your personal capacity, multiple contributors can move workstreams forward simultaneously. The book also implies that collaboration improves decision making by bringing different perspectives to the table, reducing blind spots and increasing creativity. Over time, a curated network of trusted who partners becomes an asset in itself, making you more resilient to change and better able to seize opportunities quickly. The emphasis is practical: identify recurring needs, build repeatable relationships, and invest in systems that make collaboration smoother. When you treat teamwork as a deliberate operating model rather than an occasional tactic, you gain time, reduce stress, and create a path to scale that does not depend on working longer hours or becoming an expert in everything.