This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

We often get stuck in a customer loop, dancing ever faster for the customers we have instead of spending time and resources replacing these folks with the customers we’d like to have instead.

The customers you pay attention to—and those you fire—change the way you spend your days (if you’re not firing customers, you’re surrendering your future to whoever walks in the door).

When we match where we seek validation to the work we hope to do and the rewards we hope to receive, our strategy is in alignment.

The need for a unanimous standing ovation is a trap. There’s a way out: The people who need you, the someone who will benefit—if you hesitate to ship the work because it might not be perfect for everyone, you’re actually stealing from the someones who need you.

Tim Wu made it crystal clear that once we have enough to survive, we go looking for convenience. People will trade almost anything once they’re offered an option that enhances laziness or seems to multiply free time. And this helps us see that what most people in most systems want is reassurance. Freedom from fear. Knowing that they’re going to be okay, and that tomorrow will be okay too.

Like penguins, humans in a cultural system are herd animals. When in doubt, look for the fear. It’s probably the cause of whatever surprising behavior you’re encountering.

“This is happening—are you coming?” is more powerful than, “Let me explain all the facts about what is possible.”

most of the people we encounter are skeptics. They’re looking for an easy way to keep things the same. They’re uncomfortable with the tension that change brings, and will conceal that fear with objections that seem like thoughtful feedback.

If a change is gaining traction with the nucleus that can move it forward, a difficult but essential part of our leadership is to ignore everyone else.

The hard work isn’t to appeal to everyone. The hard work is to get out the vote, to get the folks who want the change you want to show up, persistently and generously, over and over.

Anthony Iannarino teaches that that the job of a sales team isn’t to persuade people to buy from us. It’s to find the people who WANT to try something new, and to politely and eagerly send everyone else on their way.

The job of the marketer is to make something so remarkable that this tiny group of adopters can’t stop telling their peers. They’re the ones that get the word out, not you.

Your idea might be rejected because it’s not better. But it’s probably going to be rejected because it’s new.

Ideas that spread, win. And traction is underrated.

It’s possible to have an uncompromising desire but be willing to compromise. It’s possible to trade the failure of now for the success of traction and the magic of inevitable progress.

If you seek to make systems change and you haven’t built the scaffolding for others to join you, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed.

Marketers build scaffolding. We create the conditions for people who want to go where we’re going to join us. We use tension and status and affiliation to help people get from where they are to where they seek to go.

A brand isn’t a logo. It’s an invitation and a promise, an expectation about who someone can become, and what the journey will be like.

The original personal computers needed to be assembled and programmed with switches. They now fit in your pocket, understand speech, and reward laziness.

When we pursue quality, we then have two jobs: • Agree on the spec for the customer we seek to serve. • Make sure the product or service meets the spec. An early adopter, someone eager for the newest model and latest style, doesn’t care so much about every seam matching up or whether or not the testing is complete. They actually prefer a different spec—the spec of soon and new and now—even if it’s rough compared to what it will be.

Useful early criticism is grounded in an understanding of time. “This tree is too small” isn’t helpful, because the gardener already knows the tree is going to grow.

Use short-term games to build long-term soft assets like trust or habits.

Every strategy includes a game. We need to choose and understand the game we’re playing.

All resilient strategies are based on expanding our circles of us and of now.

Cooperation is the most often overlooked option. Alliances, networks and rewiring information flow create new opportunities because value is added, not simply captured. There are actually very few zero-sum games, we simply need to use our imagination.

When Alexander Graham Bell offered the telephone patents to Western Union, they turned him down, because they had a perfect strategy—running a consistent telegraph business was their mission. They’d still be doing it today if the change agent hadn’t arrived and rewritten the rules of the game. Years later, when AT&T failed to capitalize on all the innovations in telecom, from fax machines to the nascent internet, they repeated the very same mistake that Western Union made—the mistake that enabled them to exist in the first place.

The only way to effectively scale magic is to create a strategy where the scale is the magic.

Projects where the scale is the magic have a network effect. The more people who use them, the better they get.

The work of change-making is to help people decide that changing their actions is exactly what they want to do. Not because it’s important to us, but because it’s important to them.

We create value when we establish the conditions for status and affiliation to be delivered to those that seek it.

There are three steps: • Tell a story, a true story, one that holds up. And tell it only to your smallest viable audience, the tiny group that is actually listening to you, that cares and that is among the early adopters. Create tension and urgency. • Give this group a reason to share the story with others. Something that will increase their status, their affiliation with others, or increase the utility of supporting your product, service or cause. Give them the scaffolding to do this. • Help them, through use or narrative, alter the story to make it theirs.

Generous doesn’t mean free: Generous work requires emotional labor.

At a certain point, a person’s story about money is far more important than money itself: Successful strategies seek to find customers who are eager to pay money to solve their problems. If you want to find a lousy customer, find someone who has a scarcity mindset, or is more comfortable with their problem than they are in spending to make it go away.

Money is a story, and price is a way of telling that story.

You can be right or you can make progress. It helps if you’re right, but progress actually comes from helping other people feel as though they’re right. It’s easier to help someone get to where they’re going than it is to persuade them to go somewhere else.

How did Dorothy persuade the Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the Wizard? Did she make a case about how much she missed home? The lesson here is worth remembering. She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her.

We can show up with a story that resonates, and we can create the conditions for people to make different choices. But we cannot easily persuade someone that they are wrong.

Negative feedback loops might be better understood as dampers.

We avoid putting a hand on a hot stove. That’s largely because the pain feedback comes almost instantly. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people smoke cigarettes. The response from their lungs can take decades, and the delay in feedback means that people may, in short-term apparent self-interest, voluntarily do something that harms them.

A first step, then, is to seek to shorten the delay, to look for early signals that usually lead to later ones. More likely, though, we’ll need to have a strategy that helps us navigate when the feedback from the system is slow or confusing.

Here are some of the precepts of strategic impact. • Think ahead and reason back:

• The empathy of a mutual win:

• Trust and expectation: Follow through on commitments and threats to maintain credibility and influence others’ behavior.

• Make the consequences intended:

• Leverage information asymmetry:

• Create and shape the rules of the game:

• Manage expectations: Experiences are largely relative. If it’s better than expected, it’s better. • Foster cooperation through repetition: Encourage cooperation by engaging in repeated interactions and building a reputation for reciprocity.

• All forward motion involves risk and reward:

• Build scaffolding: Demanding that masses of people leap is rarely as effective as creating the conditions for them to simply walk on board. • Require effort and expense from the early adopters: When working with the pioneers, require effort and offer status.

• What gets measured: Create simple and useful metrics for status and stick with them. • Create stickiness: Invest in systems that build stickiness for the believers and don’t be distracted by the skeptics that push you to be a commodity. • Persistence: People become what they do, so reward them for consistently showing up to do the new thing. • Moving forward: Create one-way ratchets where sticking with the new approach is easier than giving up and moving backward. • Reinvest: