TRIBES: We Need YOU to Lead us
Seth Godin, Publisher Portfolio Penguin Group 2008
Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.
The marketplace now rewards (and embraces) the heretics. It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them, and for the first time, it’s also profitable, powerful, and productive to do just that.
This shift might be bigger than you think. Suddenly, heretics, troublemakers, and change agents aren’t merely thorns in our side—they are the keys to our success. Tribes give you leverage. And each of us has more leverage than before. I want you to think about the ramifications of the new leverage. I’m hoping you’ll see that the most profitable path is also the most reliable, the easiest, and the most fun. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to give you a push on the path to becoming a heretic yourself.
With tribes flourishing everywhere, there’s a vast shortage of leaders. We need you.
My thesis:
- For the first time ever, everyone in an organization—not just the boss—is expected to lead.
- The very structure of today’s workplace means that it’s easier than ever to change things and that individuals have more leverage than ever before.
- The marketplace is rewarding organizations and individuals who change things and create remarkable products and services.
- It’s engaging, thrilling, profitable, and fun.
- Most of all, there is a tribe of fellow employees or customers or investors or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting for you to connect them to one another and lead them where they want to go.
Leadership isn’t difficult, but you’ve been trained for years to avoid it. I want to help you realize that
you already have all the skills you need to make a huge difference, and I want to sell you on doing it. The best thing is that you don’t need to wait until you’ve got exactly the right job or built the right organization or moved up three rungs on the corporate ladder. You can start right now.
Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done. Burger King franchises hire managers. They know exactly what they need to deliver and they are given resources to do it at low cost. Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible.
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.
My thesaurus says the best synonym for leadership is management. Maybe that word used to fit, but no longer.
- Movements have leaders and movements make things happen.
- Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.
- Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.
Change? Change is frightening, and to many people who would be leaders, it seems more of a threat than a promise. That’s too bad, because the future belongs to our leaders, regardless of where they work or what they do.
There’s a difference between telling people what to do and inciting a movement. 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.
For fifty years, established brands with efficient factories and effective marketing carried the day. Pepsi, the Salvation Army, and the local hardware store were the cornerstones of the marketplace. Suddenly, though, the oldest brands are no longer the fastest-growing ones. Suddenly, the most experienced businesspeople are no longer the most successful ones. And suddenly, the safest jobs are not so safe anymore.
Showing up isn’t sufficient. Friending ten or twenty or a thousand people in Facebook might be good for your ego but it has zero to do with any useful measure of success.
A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.
A curious person embraces the tension between his religion and something new, wrestles with it and through it, and then decides whether to embrace the new idea or reject it.
What we’re seeing is that fundamentalism really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an outlook, regardless what your religion is.
Tribes are increasingly voluntary. No one is forced to work for your firm or attend your services. People have a choice of which music to listen to and which movies to watch.
So great leaders don’t try to please everyone. 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.
Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.
The first thing you need to know is that individuals have far more power than ever before in history. One person can change an industry. One person can declare war. One person can reinvent science or politics or technology.
The second thing you need to know is that the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it’s worth doing. Faith that failure won’t destroy you.
Our culture works hard to prevent change. We have long had systems and organizations and standards designed to dissuade people from challenging the status quo. We enforce our systems and call whoever is crazy enough to challenge them a heretic. And society enforces the standards by burning its heretics at the stake, either literally or figuratively.
But the world has changed a lot. There are heretics everywhere you look. It’s so asymmetrical that burning heretics isn’t particularly effective any longer. As a result, more and more people—goo people, people on a mission, people with ideas that matter—are stepping forward and making a difference.
Faith is the unstated component in the work of a leader and I think faith is underrated.
Paradoxically, religion is vastly overrated.
Faith is critical to all innovation. Without faith, it’s suicidal to be leader, to act like a heretic.
Religion, on the other hand, represents a strict set of rules that our fellow humans have overlaid on top of our faith. Religion supports the status quo and encourages us to fin in, not to stand out.
That’s why human beings invented religion. It’s why we have spiritual religions and cultural religions and corporate religions. Religion gives our faith a little support when it needs it, and it makes it easy for your peers to encourage you to embrace your faith.
Religion at its best is a subtle but consistent reminder that belief is okay, and that faith is the way to get where you’re going.
The reason we need to talk about this, though, is that often religion does just the opposite. Religion at its worst reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of our faith. They had a religion at Woolworth’s department store, and sticking, without variation, to the principles that made the store great prevented them from turning it into a new, better kind of experience. The store is long gone, of course.
The reason it’s so difficult to have a considered conversation about religion is that people feel threatened. Not by the implied criticism of the rituals or irrationality of a particular religious practice, but because it feels like criticism of their faith.
Faith, as we’ve seen, is the cornerstone that keeps our organizations together. Faith is the cornerstone of humanity; we can’t live without it. But religion is very different from faith. Religion is just a set of invented protocols, rules to live by (for now). Heretics challenge a given religion, but do it from a very strong foundation of faith. In order to lead, you must challenge the status quo of the religion you’re living under.
It’s no wonder that religion has been around forever. It reinforces faith, and we can’t succeed without it.
A recent study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that about a third of all Americans have left the religion they grew up with. The study mistakenly uses the word faith, but in fact, few of these people have lost faith. What they’ve done instead is change the system they use for reinforcing that faith.
When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow.
If faith is the foundation of a belief system, then religion is the façade and the landscaping. It’s easy to get caught up in the foibles of a corporate culture and the systems that have been built over time, but they have nothing at all to do with the faith that built the system in the first place.
Change is made by people, by leaders who are proud to be called heretics because their faith is never in question.
The easiest thing is to react.
The second easiest thing is to respond.
But the hardest thing is to initiate.
Reacting, as Zig Ziglar has said, is what your body does when you take the wrong kind of medicine. Reacting is what politicians do all the time. Reacting is intuitive and instinctive and usually dangerous. Managers react.
Responding is a much better alternative. You respond to external stimuli with thoughtful action. Organizations respond to competitive threats. Individuals respond to colleagues or to opportunities. Response is always better than reaction.
But both pale in comparison to initiative. Initiating is really and truly difficult, and that’s what leaders do. They see something others are ignoring and they jump on it. They cause the events that others have to react to. They make change.
In the old model, things happened to you at work. Factories opened, people were hired. Bosses have instructions. You got transferred there were layoffs. You got promoted. Factories closed.
Leaders, on the other hand, don’t have things happen to them. They do things.
In the middle of the mortgage crisis, I spent some time with a few thousand Realtors at their annual convention. What I discovered might surprise you. The group was completely split.
Some of the Realtors saw what the media, Bear Stearns, the banks, and the public were doing to them and to their hard-won careers. They were angry (even bitter) about the end of a long run of increasing housing prices, and they were scared about their futures. These Realtors didn’t know how they were going to cope with what had happened. They wanted to manage their careers, but change was making it impossible.
The other Realtors were palpably excited. They were eager to get to work. They saw the change in the outside world as an opportunity, a chance for them to dramatically increase their business. They knew that the current problems wouldn’t last forever, and they understood that the problems would wipe out the opportunity seekers, leaving the professionals standing. Some 10 or 20 percent of the Realtors were going to quit, and the leaders, the ones who were going to stay, realized that this change was a very good thing. The same way soldiers realize that it’s war that makes generals, these brokers were ready and motivated to use change as a chance to really wreak some havoc on the status quo.
Top management now wants leaders. …who will create change before change happens to them.
But the rank and file hesitates.
We’re afraid of failure, of criticism, of making a mistake, and of getting caught. We worry that we’ll lose our jobs if we stop managing and start leading.
The status quo is persistent and resistant. It exists because everyone wants it to. Everyone believes that what they’ve got is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change.
Taking a look at the music business is a useful education for any heretic. It demonstrates how exceedingly intelligent people in a fairly new industry willfully ignored the world around them and hid. Those lessons apply to just abut every industry you can imagine.
The first rule the music business failed to understand is that, at least at first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin.
Soon enough, the new thing will be better than the old thing. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic abut the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing that it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.
…past performance is no guarantee of future success.
It’s four a.m. and I can’t sleep. So I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Jamaica, checking my e-mail.
It took me a long time to figure out why I was so happy to be checking my e-mail in the middle of the night. It had to do with passion. Other than sleeping, there was nothing I’d rather have been doing in that moment—because I’m lucky enough to have a job where I get to make change happen. Even though I don’t have many people working for me, I’m in the business of leading people, taking them somewhere we want to go.
…maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
The congregation shows up every week and does the same ritual it did last week, goes through the same motions and nothing changes. In fact, nothing changes precisely because of the ritual.
Some tribes are engaged in change. Many are not. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a church or a corporation, the symptoms are the same. The religion gets in the way of the faith. Static gets in the way of motion. Rules get in the way of principle.
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.
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. My mom was a volunteer for years at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and there’s no doubt at all that we gave more money to the museum than we would have if they’d sent us a flyer once a month.
The largest enemy of change and leadership isn’t a “no.” It’s a “not yet.” “Not yet” gives the status quo a chance to regroup and put off the inevitable for just a little while longer.
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.
The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.
In the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy.
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.
The Elements of Leadership
Leaders challenge the status quo.
Leaders create a culture around their goal and involve others in that culture.
Leaders have an extraordinary amount of curiosity about the world they’re trying to change.
Leaders use charisma (in a variety of forms) to attract and motivate followers.
Leaders communicate their vision of the future.
Leaders commit to a vision and make decisions based on that commitment.
Leaders connect their followers to one another.
I think most people have it upside down. Being charismatic doesn’t make you a leader. Being a leader makes you charismatic.
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.
If it’s about your mission, about spreading the faith, about seeing something happen, not only do you not care about credit, you actually want other people to take credit. There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.
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A Missouri ministry known for leading 24-hour prayer and worship is marking its 10th anniversary this week by committing to match its prayer efforts with acts of service and outreach.
