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GodTrib 10-05-062 |
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Tribes We
Need You to Lead Us Seth
Godin Portfolio,
2008, 147 pp. ISBN 978-1-59184-233-0 |
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Seth Godin is the author of ten international
bestsellers, including Permission
Marketing and Purple Cow. A tribe is any group of connected people
and an idea. With barriers eliminated
by the internet, those with a passion have the opportunity to lead their
fellow employees, customers, investors, readers, etc. Individuals have far more power than ever
before in history. Rather than
chapters, the book is divided into segments of ideas, principles, and
suggestions. A tribe needs only a shared idea and a way to
communicate. Plus a leader. Tribes are about belief in an idea and a
community. Humans need to belong and
many can’t resist the thrill of a new idea.
There is an explosion of new tools to help people connect around an
idea. So it’s easier to create a
movement. A leader doesn’t market to his audience or manage
it or push it. He leads it. Everyone is now a leader. People work a lot and it is much more satisfying
to work on things they believe in.
Consumers are deciding to spend time and money on things they believe
in. Heretics are the new leaders. They challenge the status quo and make new
rules. “Leadership…is about creating change that you believe in.” (14) “New rule: If you want to grow, you need to find
customers who are willing to join you or believe in you or donate to you or
support you. And guess what? The only customers willing to do that are
looking for something new. The growth
comes from change and light and noise.” (18) Messages go from leader to tribe, sideways within
the tribe, and back to the leader.
People are in it together.
People wanted to hear the Grateful Dead “together.” “The movement happens when people talk to
one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when
peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing.”
(22) “So a leader can help increase the effectiveness
of the tribe and its members by
The ideas that spread are remarkable ones. “An individual artist needs only a thousand true
fans in her tribe. It’s enough…because
a thousand fans will bring you enough attention and support to make a great
living, to reach more people, to do great work.” “…the real win is turning a
casual fan into a true one.” (33) Organizations that destroy the status quo
win. The status quo could be the time
that ‘everyone knows’ it takes you to ship an order. Changing it gives you the opportunity to be
remarkable. Twitter doesn’t cause an event; it merely enables
it to occur because of the respect and permission a tribe allows a
leader. Organizations of the future will be filled with
smart, fast, flexible people on a mission.
And that requires leadership.
(41) Boring ideas don’t spread. And ideas that spread, win. Great leaders focus not on their own glory but on
the tribe. A leader may first tighten the tribe by
increasing communication among them.
This is more important than growing the tribe. A tribe that communicates quickly with emotion
thrives. You do not need a majority to win, only to
motivate people who choose to follow you.
“Through your actions as a leader, you attract a tribe that wants to
follow you. That tribe has a worldview
that matches the message you’re sending.” (65) “Ultimately, people are most easily led where
they wanted to go all along. While
that may seem as if it limits your originality or influence, it’s true. Fox News didn’t persuade millions of people
to become conservatives; they just assembled the tribe and led them where
they were already headed.” (66) “Great leaders don’t water down their message in
order to make the tribe a bit bigger.
Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst
of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.” (67) “Welcome to the age of leverage. Bottom-up is a really bad way to think
about it because there is no bottom.” (75) Easiest: react.
Next easiest: respond. Hardest:
initiate. Sometimes it makes more
sense to follow. If so, get out of the
way and follow. At first, the new thing will rarely be as good as
the old thing. If the new thing has to
be better from the beginning, you’ll never begin. Soon enough, the new thing will be better
than the old. But if you wait until then,
it will be too late. The music
industry refused to understand this. Industries
don’t die by surprise. It’s not as if
you didn’t know it was coming. (95) The key elements in creating a micromovement:
Principles:
“Tribes are the most effective media channels
ever, but they’re not for sale or for rent.
Tribes don’t do what you want; they do what they want.” (107) The transactional costs of tribes are falling
fast while the costs of formal organizations keep increasing. Initiative is an astonishingly successful tool
because it’s rare. (112) “I despair for most of the top fifty nonprofits
in the United States. These are the
big guys, and they’re stuck. …the top
charities rarely change.” (115) “The big win is in turning donors into patrons
and activists and participants. The
biggest donors are the ones who not only give, but also do the work. The ones who make the soup or feed the
hungry or hang the art.” (116) “The Internet allows some organizations to
embrace long-distance involvement. It
lets charities flip the funnel, not through some simple hand waving but by
reorganizing around the idea of engagement online. This is the new leverage. It means opening yourself up to volunteers
and encouraging them to network, to connect with one another, and yes, even
to mutiny. It means giving every one
of your professionals a blog and the freedom to use it. It means mixing it up with volunteers so
they have something truly at stake.
This is understandably scary for many nonprofits, but I’m not so sure
you have a choice.” (116) “Growth doesn’t come from persuading the most
loyal members of other tribes to join you.
They will be the last to come around.
Instead, you’ll find more fertile ground among seekers, among people
who desire the feeling they get when they’re part of a vibrant, growing
tribe, but who are still looking for that feeling.” (119) There is a huge penalty for being too late. Real leadership rarely comes from the CEO or
senior VP. “Instead, it happens out of
the corner of your eye, in a place you weren’t watching.” (122) “Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate
leadership. Leadership comes when your
hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a
way to get there. People won’t follow
you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.” (122) “Caring is the key emotion at the center of the
Tribe. Tribe members care what happens,
to their goals and to one another.”
“If no one cares, then you have no tribe.” (125, 26) “People what to be sure you heard what they
said—they’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said.” (128) “Tribes grow when people recruit other people. That’s how ideas spread as well. The tribe doesn’t do it for you, of
course. They do it for each other. Leadership is the art of giving people a
platform for spreading ideas that work.” (129) “Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is
the ability to stick with the dream for a long time.” (132) “(Jerry) Sternin went to Vietnam to try to help
starving children. Rather than
importing tactics that he knew would work, or outside techniques that he was
sure could make a difference, he sought out the few families who weren’t
starving, the few moms who weren’t just getting by but were thriving. And then he made it easy for these mothers
to share their insights with the rest of the group. This seems obvious, but it’s
heretical. The idea that an aid worker
would go to a village in trouble and not try to stamp out nonstandard
behavior is crazy. ‘The traditional
model for social and organization change doesn’t work, he told Fast Company. ‘It never has. You can’t bring permanent solutions in from
outside.’” (133) |
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