The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams

by Seth Godin

When you dance on the edge of infinity, there’s always enough . . . because you aren’t taking opportunity from anyone else, you’re creating it.

Each of us can show up in our own way, but the choice is the same: to lead, to create work that matters, and to find the magic that happens when we are lucky enough to cocreate with people who care.

We can create the best job someone ever had, the best experience any customer can imagine—and build organizations that are regenerative, resilient, and powerful.

The top four items (people could choose more than one answer) overwhelmingly came out ahead: I surprised myself with what I could accomplish I could work independently The team built something important People treated me with respect

What if we created the best job someone ever had? What if we built an organization people would genuinely miss if it were gone? How much better would our work be if we could simply talk about the work without hesitation? What if the work we did made things better?

If you’re not drowning, you’re a lifeguard.

When people feel disrespected, unseen, or unsafe, they can shut down, phoning in the work and doing as little as possible, hoping to simply hold on to their job—at least until a better one comes along.

Until our existential needs are met, it’s difficult to produce the emotional labor needed for progress and possibility.

Give up your dreams and your soul, we promise each other, and you can buy some things that will give you status and satisfaction. Or at least let you forget what you gave up. While that promise may have worked well half a century ago, it rings hollow today. There is an alternative. It’s a different sort of increase, a better sort of safety. It’s work that matters. It’s creating a difference, being part of something, and doing work we’re proud of. This is the song of significance. This is what motivates people to do the work that can’t be automated, mechanized, or outsourced. And this is the song that humans yearn to sing together.

Agency gives us control over our time, and it encourages us to choose what our contribution looks like. Because it demands responsibility and some authority, agency is antithetical to controlled industrial piecework. Dignity flows from agency, allowing us to be treated as humans, not cogs. To be respected for our work and treated with as much kindness as the situation allows.

As each machine was developed, displaced workers were encouraged to increase their education and move up to jobs that the machines hadn’t taken over yet. As of 2023, those machine-done jobs include robots working in hotels, algorithms doing stock trades, and machine learning systems sketching illustrations and reading X-rays. 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. Both skills involve dealing with other humans, creating strategies, and finding insights in a fast-moving world.

Industrial capitalism (industrialism) seeks to use power to create profits. Market capitalism seeks to solve problems to make a profit.

Market capitalism, meanwhile, continues to create most of the jobs and value worldwide. This is the never-ending work of finding problems and solving them. Market capitalists have no power over customers (or even, in most cases, their employees). Instead, they work to bring effort and insight to a rapidly changing marketplace in service of their customers.

Together, we can make something better. Something worth our time, our effort, and our imagination.

The work of significance embraces the very things that industrialism seeks to stamp out. Significance is inconvenient. We’ve built powerful tools. Tools for communication, production, and amplification. Tools that allow humans to leverage their insights and care to produce value for others. And now those tools are there for us to use to make things better. If we choose to.

We need to decide what work is for. Whether we want to spend our days creating scarcity and harm, or if we want to commit to the regenerative work of building the best job any worker has ever had, and the best organization any customer has ever encountered.

No grades, no check marks, no badges. I’m not in charge of you, and I’m not manipulating you. I’m simply establishing the conditions for you to get to where you said you wanted to go. You tell me where you’re going and what you need. You make promises about your commitment and skills development. I’ll show up to illuminate, question, answer, spar with, and challenge you. I’ll work tirelessly to make sure you’re part of a team of people who are ready to care as much as you do. We can get real. Or let’s not play.

Real value is no longer created by traditional measures of productivity. It’s created by personal interactions, innovation, creative solutions, resilience, and the power of speed.

The opportunity for all of us lies in the emotional labor invested by enrolled and committed employees who seek to make a difference—that is the competitive advantage that extraordinary organizations produce.

16. Significant Organizations Create an Impact They earn more money. Attract better employees. Change more lives. Raise more donations. Offer better work environments. And the only thing you need to create that impact is to give up merely doing your job and start leading instead. More isn’t the point. Better is.

17. Toward Better There’s no need to be a victim of a system that has outlived its usefulness. Instead, right here and right now, you have a chance to lead. To create the conditions for change. To enroll people in a journey that creates connections, dignity, and possibility. Leadership is a skill and an art, and it can be learned. We can lead together.

But teams doing significant work can create a culture where clarity, professionalism, and enrollment open the door to possibility. Forward motion is the way to significance. Significance requires trust, and trust comes from consistently keeping our promises.

Creating the conditions for significance isn’t easy. If it were, we would all be doing it already.

By helping his clients ask “how” and “what” in their conversations, he helps teams find a way forward. These two words help us discover what other people are seeking and how we can accompany them in getting to where they seek to go. “How do you feel about this client?” or “What led you to want to do it this way?” are great places to begin. Connection comes from the mutual understanding that these conversations can uncover.

The alternative is to bring actual wonder to the conversation, to be with a person in their story and narrative. Wonder is the open-ended version of curiosity, without seeking an explanation to solve the problem. Process and principles don’t require a specific plan. We can’t plan a basketball game in advance. If we focus on culture and process, however, we can enable the players to achieve their goals regardless of how the game unfolds.

Engineers, surgeons, and race car drivers do easily measured work. They are able to focus on executing along proven paths. The rest of us, though, need to engage in useful discussions about what might be.

The midcentury consumer revolution was easy: make it cheap and convenient and you’ll do fine. When the internet was in its infancy, smart observers understood that useful decisions could be easily arrived at if we asked the question “What does the internet want?” Not the people who are using the internet, but the network itself. What does it thrive on? If you offered more person-to-person connection, more bandwidth, or more selection—the things that the internet itself was good at—you were likely to succeed regardless of anything else you did. The network effect was a symptom of understanding how this new technology was revolutionizing whatever it touched. Kevin Kelly helped us understand that asking what technology wants is a useful North Star, a compass for riding with the current instead of fighting it.

The earth is your customer, and many people will be aligned with you as you serve it.

And the lesson of this manifesto is simple: An organization of any size can effectively move forward by asking, “What do humans need?” What will create significance for those who interact with us?

We’re not here to fill self-storage units or simply gain market share. Instead, we’re asking what our people need. What is the change we seek to make? Does it matter to the people we work with?

What each revolution has in common is that it is inconvenient. It was inconvenient for an industrialist to embrace the internet in 1998, for a nonprofit to shift gears and become sustainable, and for a successful corporation to embrace significance. It’s rare that it happens quickly or easily, which is precisely why these changes are revolutionary. The revolutions begin at the edges but ultimately end up changing whatever they interact with.

Customers respond well to a generic, predictable, and convenient service. We like Big Macs and Prime shipping. Fast service and low prices come at a cost, though.

“Ultimately, for the business, these tools are about really helping their employees thrive,” Nadella said. “The only way a business is successful and productive is if employees feel that sense of empowerment, that sense of energy and connection for the company’s mission and are doing meaningful work.”

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

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.

The planet does not need more successful people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. David Orr

People respond to score-based systems, especially systems with rewards and even prizes. Fast-forward a century, though, and we can see the results of de La Salle’s innovation. A friend’s kid came home from first grade and proudly showed his mom the cheap plastic trinkets he had earned that day. “I stood quietly on the dot and so I got some tickets. And if I stand on the dot quietly tomorrow, I can get some more prizes!” First grade. Stand quietly and get a toy. That’s one way to indoctrinate kids in both obedience and consumption. This is precisely what industrialism seeks.

Gamification is simply a codification and amplification of the motivations that we each respond to once we are enrolled in a game. Training for the industrial regime of control and short-term productivity. As Adrian Hon points out in You’ve Been Played, it’s all gamification now. The real argument to be had is the difference between good and bad gamification, between useful and manipulative, between magical and banal.

Sooner or later, all motivation is self-motivation. Either the points become part of who we are or we cease responding to them. And when we cease responding, the external forces seeking more power will simply amp up the points.

Plato argued that the State should be sure to indoctrinate children early, and never let them develop imagination. “Being different, they’ll demand a different kind of life, and that will then make them want new institutions.” How many followers do you have online? How much can you fit in? Here’s today’s dot, go stand on it.

As soon as an industrial system can monitor your day, it will. Relentlessly.

The people you hire to follow instructions are rarely the people who will help you build something of innovation and substance.

But when we start squeezing people, sometimes they speak up or walk away. The world has changed. Employees have more information about alternatives, respect, and wages. You can’t torture them in private as easily as you can push a machine to its breaking point. That information also highlights opportunities for individuals who are able to contribute more human insight and possibility somewhere else. Remote work makes this even easier, since the number of places to contribute without leaving home is close to infinite. And finally, as a result of scale and information exchange, nearly all the benefits of maximizing inputs from nonhumans have been exhausted. It’s easy to find parity with your competitors when you’re all outsourcing to the same producers. The result is a real shift in how we need the people we work with to act: like humans, not like obedient machines.

35. Kinko and Sleepy There’s an alternative to the top-down regime of compliance. When Paul Orfalea was building Kinko’s (which he sold to FedEx for more than two billion dollars), he said that his best technique for growing the business was simple: he would walk into one of their stores and ask someone there to tell him about an innovation they’d implemented that was working (and then he’d tell all the other stores about it). If you didn’t have an innovation to share, Paul let you know you needed to do better. When Harry Acker was building Sleepy’s (which his son sold to Mattress Firm for nearly a billion dollars), his best technique for growing the business was to call every store every day and ask, “What’s wrong?” and then fix the problem. The store manager who told me this story made it clear that if you didn’t have a problem to share, you were in trouble. Two sides of the same coin. It’s possible your team knows what’s up.

This Time, with Meaning Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. kathrin jansen

Management runs a race to the bottom; leadership offers a chance to run for the top.

The manager seeks compliance. A manager makes a profit delivering industrial progress and productivity, which is done by doing what we did yesterday a little faster and a little cheaper. The leader seeks to create the conditions for people to make a change happen. Leaders don’t need authority, but they must coordinate the trust, focus, and connection of people who are enrolled in a journey to do work that matters. It’s tempting to want the easiest and best outputs of both. To promise people dignity and connection and excitement, and then use discipline to get them to do what you want. But that’s not working as well as it once did.

It’s time to change this. We can create value, cause change, and make a difference by leading with humans instead of treating them as cogs in a soulless machine.

In 1909, a gusher in Texas ushered in a century of cheap oil, fuel that could be burned to create power and wealth. In 1911, Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, a manifesto that envisioned humans as machines, compliant devices that could be made ever more efficient. And in 1911, Taylor met Henry Ford as he was building the Model T plant in Highland Park, Michigan. Human resources was born. Cheap oil plus leveraged machines plus obedient humans created enormous profit and we got hooked.