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A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.
Many people are starting to realize that they work a lot and that working on stuff they believe in (and making things happen) is much more satisfying than just getting a paycheck and waiting to get fired (or die).
Most of all, we’re stuck acting like managers or employees, instead of like the leaders we could become. We’re embracing a factory instead of a tribe.
Fear of change is built into most organisms, because change is the first sign of risk.
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.
Marketing changed everything. Marketing created leverage. Marketing certainly changed the status quo. Most of all, marketing freed and energized the tribe. If the tribe doesn’t like the king, they’re now free to leave.
Marketing is the act of telling stories about the things we make—stories that sell and stories that spread.
Stability Is an Illusion Marketing changed the idea of stability. It’s human nature—we still assume the world is stable, still assume that Google will be number one in five years, that we’ll type on keyboards and fly on airplanes, that China will keep growing, and that the polar ice cap won’t really be melted in six years. And we’re wrong.
Microfinance as a tool to fight poverty and the effort to recognize and stem global warming have both become movements. But as Yasmina Zaidman, at the Acumen Fund, told me, both problems (and their solutions!) were recognized more than thirty years ago. We weren’t lacking the answer—Muhammad Yunus had it all along. So why did it take thirty years for the idea to gain steam? The answer, as you’ve probably guessed, is that there’s a difference between telling people what to do and inciting a movement.
So a leader can help increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members by • transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change; • providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications; and • leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members.
Tribes, though, aren’t about stuff. They’re about connection.
Life’s too short to fight the forces of change. Life’s too short to hate what you do all day. Life’s way too short to make mediocre stuff. And almost everything that’s standard is now viewed as mediocre.
Too many organizations care about numbers, not fans. They care about hits or turnstile clicks or media mentions. What they’re missing is the depth of commitment and interconnection that true fans deliver.
Now, when we envision our dream jobs, we’re imagining someone who reaps huge rewards as a result of her insight. Or someone who has control over what he does all day, creating products or services that he’s actually proud of. It certainly involves having authority over your time and your effort and having input into what you do.
So stop for a second and think about this. The only shortcut in this book, the only technique or how-to or inside info is this: the levers are here. The proof is here. The power is here. The only thing holding you back is your own fear. Not easy to admit, but essential to understand.
Dr. Laurence Peter is famous for proposing that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” In other words, when you do a great job, you get promoted. And that process repeats itself until finally you end up in a job you can’t handle.
Sometimes the criticism doesn’t even have to be that obvious. The fear of hearing “I’m surprised you launched this without doing more research” is enough to get many people to do a lot more research, to study something to death, and then kill it.
Participating Isn’t Leading
Curious is the key word. It has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with education, and certainly nothing to do with organized religion. It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting.
Leaders are curious because they can’t wait to find out what the group is going to do next. The changes in the tribe are what are interesting, and curiosity drives them.
Ultimately, people are most easily led where they wanted to go all along.
All other things being equal, the smaller class will always do better. The
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.
Nobody is going to see your PowerPoint presentation and hand you a check.
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.
The lesson isn’t that you need to risk your fingers (not to mention your life) on a rock. The lesson is that one person with a persistent vision can make change happen, whether climbing rocks or delivering services.
Top management now wants leaders. It wants heretics who will create change before change happens to them.
If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin.
The second rule they missed is that past performance is no guarantee of future success.
I define sheepwalking as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them brain-dead jobs and enough fear to keep them in line.
Steve Jobs was wrong about the Apple III, wrong about the NeXT computer, wrong about the Newton. Insanely wrong. You know the rest. The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.
The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.
He quotes Ronald Coase, the Nobel laureate in economics: There are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something with a firm. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs.
The largest enemy of change and leadership isn’t a “no.” It’s a “not yet.” “Not yet” is the safest, easiest way to forestall change.
There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.
My friend Jacqueline tells the story of how Unicef spent a fortune creating posters to promote the idea of child vaccination to the mothers of Rwanda. “The posters were gorgeous—photographs with women and children with simple messages written in Kinyarwandan (the local language), about the importance of vaccinating every child. They were perfect, except for the fact with a female illiteracy rate exceeding 70 percent, words written in perfect Kinyarwandan made little difference.”
People want to be sure you heard what they said—they’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said.
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 your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.
All the Sternins did was find the mom with the healthy kids. And then they helped the others in the village notice what she was doing. They gave that mom a spotlight, encouraging her to keep it up and, more important, encouraging others to follow her lead. It’s simple, but it works. It might be the most important practical idea in this entire book.
There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.
People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change.
If we define quality as regularly meeting the measured specifications for an item, then quality matters a lot for something like a pacemaker. It doesn’t matter at all for a $3,000 haute couture dress.
The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec
Once you choose to lead, you’ll be under huge pressure to reconsider your choice, to compromise, to dumb it down, or to give up. Of course you will. That’s the world’s job: to get you to be quiet and follow. The status quo is the status quo for a reason.
