The Song of Significance

by Seth Godin

Once their basic needs are met, workers are very clear about what they want from work. It’s not more stock options or a fancier office. It’s much more fundamental: agency and dignity.

What companies need has shifted, and suddenly. Instead of cheap labor to do the semiautomated tasks that machines can’t do (yet), organizations now seek two apparently scarce resources: creativity and humanity.

The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. BEN ZANDER, BOSTON PHILHARMONIC 28. Stakes and Trust When we consider the four kinds of work, we can lay them out in a two-by-two grid with stakes and trust as the two axes. High-stakes, low-trust work is the work assigned by the industrialist. This is meeting spec. Test and measure. Surveillance. Traditional management lives in this quadrant. This is how you successfully run a fast-food franchise. Every customer is important, and every output needs to be identical. Low-stakes, low-trust work is similar, except it’s easily outsourced. This isn’t work your organization needs to take seriously or personally. When Amazon needed to label ten thousand images, they built the Mechanical Turk, a program that allows anyone in the world to make a few pennies doing piecework. Now work like this is done by AI and machine learning. Assign the same work to one hundred bots and, sooner or later, it’ll get done. The next quadrant is for work that is low stakes but high trust. This is the work of culture creation, of community, of people we care about showing up each day to contribute a bit to the whole. The work is consistent, but it’s human, not industrial. The shifts caused by pandemic disruptions, outsourcing, work from home, and AI have disrupted this quadrant. And the final quadrant, the most important one, is the work with high stakes and high trust. This is s...

We’ve reached a point where we’re shifting from How do I get my employees to do what I want? to How do I create the conditions where the team can make the impact it desires? This is Hannah Arendt’s “inter-est.” The desire of humans to have a seat at the table, a place where they can intersect, create, and produce meaning. This is N. F. S. Grundtvig’s “living word.” Our desire to connect and to speak and be heard, not to simply be told what to do by some authority at a distance.

Even though they’re more difficult to measure, that doesn’t mean we can’t improve them, can’t practice them, or can’t change the way we do our work. Of course we can. Let’s stop calling them soft. They’re interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. The skills of charisma and diligence and contribution. But these modifiers, while accurate, somehow edge them away from the vocational skills, the skills that we actually hire for, the skills we measure a graduate degree on. So let’s uncomfortably call them real skills instead.

115. Meetings Are a Problem and a Symptom By this point in our rant, many managers are saying, “We’re doing pretty well at building a significant organization, under the circumstances.” But you’re not under the circumstances. You are the circumstances. It’s pretty easy to invoke managerial exceptionalism. That something about your organization, your product, your competitors, or your corporate structure requires you to run in an industrial way. That you’re doing your best to remember the human, but there are simply too many external forces at work. Which is why we need to consider your meetings.

Today must be considered unwastable, and the urgency of now presents us with the opportunity for better. Significance is the generous incremental process of possibility. The smallest useful change produced for the smallest viable audience. Again and again, with humanity.

Keep leading: it matters. Significance isn’t what we get …. It’s what we do for others.