Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

by Seth Godin

This isn’t about working your way up to the top by following the rules and then starting down the path of changing your world. Instead, these innovations are examples of leadership, about one heretic, someone with a vision who understood the leverage available, who went ahead and changed things.

Odds are that growth and success are now inextricably linked to breaking the old rules and setting your organization’s new rules loose in an industry too afraid to change.

The lesson is that one person with a persistent vision can make change happen, whether climbing rocks or delivering services.

The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on.

Faith goes back a long way. Faith leads to hope, and it overcomes fear. Faith gave our ancestors the resilience they needed to deal with the mysteries of the (pre-science) world. Faith is the dividing line between humans and most other species. We have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, faith that Newton’s laws will continue to govern the way a ball travels, and faith that our time in med school will pay off twenty years from now because society is still going to need doctors.

Faith is critical to all innovation. Without faith, it’s suicidal to be a leader, to act like a heretic.

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.

These religions exist for one reason—to reinforce our faith.

When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow.

Leadership almost always involves thinking and acting like the underdog. That’s because leaders work to change things, and the people who are winning rarely do.

Changing things—pushing the envelope and creating a future that doesn’t exist yet (at the same time you’re criticized by everyone else)—requires bravery.

The Easiest Thing The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate.

It takes guts to acknowledge that perhaps this time, right now, you can’t lead. So get out of the way and take the follow instead.

Over and over, everyone is wrong—unless you believe that innovation can change things, that heretics can break the rules, and that remarkable products and services spread. If you believe that, then you’re not everyone. Then you’re right.

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.

The second rule they missed is that past performance is no guarantee of future success.

The best time to change your business model is while you still have momentum.

What was missing was leadership—an individual (a heretic) ready to describe the future and build the coalitions necessary to get there.

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.

When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff.

Step one is to give the problem a name. Sheepwalking. Done. Step two is for those of you who see yourself in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

“Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?”

You don’t have enough time to be both unhappy and mediocre. It’s not just pointless, it’s painful. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

A thermostat is far more valuable than a thermometer. The thermometer reveals that something is broken. The thermometer is an indicator, our canary in the coal mine. Thermometers tell us when we’re spending too much or gaining market share or not answering the phone quickly enough. Organizations are filled with human thermometers. They can criticize or point out or just whine. The thermostat, on the other hand, manages to change the environment in sync with the outside world. Every organization needs at least one thermostat. These are leaders who can create change in response to the outside world, and do it consistently over time.

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. People show up because they have to, not because they want to. Desire is defeated by fear, and the status quo calcifies, leading to the long slow death of the stalled organization.

Tribes are the most effective media channels ever, but they’re not for sale or for rent. Tribes don’t do what you want; they do what they want. Which is why joining and leading a tribe is such a powerful marketing investment.

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 only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.

The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.

The brilliant venture capitalist Fred Wilson got me thinking about what purpose a traditional firm (corporation, nonprofit, church, whatever) serves. 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. In other words, we start formal organizations when it’s cheaper than leading a tribe instead. Having employees, for example, gives you a tight interaction of communication and output that used to be difficult to accomplish from a less formal tribe. Having soldiers, for example, is seen as more reliable than earning the trust and support of the entire population. The Internet changes this because you can build a bigger, faster, cheaper tribe than you used to be able to. The new economy changes this because the transaction costs are falling fast while the costs of formal organizations (offices, benefits, management) keep increasing.

The organizations that need innovation the most are the ones that do the most to stop it from happening. It’s a bit of a paradox, but once you see it, it’s a tremendous opportunity.

I’m imagining that your colleagues aren’t stupid. But when the world changes, the rules change. And if you insist on playing today’s games by yesterday’s rules, you’re stuck. Stuck with a stupid strategy. Because the world changed.

The Posture of a Leader If you hear my idea but don’t believe it, that’s not your fault; it’s mine. If you see my new product but don’t buy it, that’s my failure, not yours. If you attend my presentation and you’re bored, that’s my fault too. If I fail to persuade you to implement a policy that supports my tribe, that’s due to my lack of passion or skill, not your shortsightedness. If you are a student in my class and you don’t learn what I’m teaching, I’ve let you down. It’s really easy to insist that people read the manual. It’s really easy to blame the user/student/prospect/customer for not trying hard, for being too stupid to get it, or for not caring enough to pay attention. It might even be tempting to blame those in your tribe who aren’t working as hard at following as you are at leading. But none of this is helpful. What’s helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you communicate. You can design your products to be easy to use. You can write so your audience hears you. You can present in a place and in a way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you. Most of all, you get to choose who will understand (and who won’t).

Growth doesn’t come from persuading the most loyal members of other tribes to join you. They will be the last to come around. Instead, you’ll find more fertile ground among seekers, among people who desire the feeling they get when they’re part of a vibrant, growing tribe, but who are still looking for that feeling.

If you’re trying to persuade the tribe at work to switch from one strategy to the other, don’t start with the leader of the opposition. Begin instead with the passionate individuals who haven’t been embraced by other tribes yet. As you add more and more people like these, your option becomes safer and more powerful—then you’ll see the others join you.

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. “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.

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.

Because, of course, it has nothing to do with knowing how the trick is done, and everything to do with the art of doing it. The tactics of leadership are easy. The art is the difficult part.

Leadership is very much an art, one that’s accomplished only by people with authentic generosity and a visceral connection to their tribe. Learning the trick won’t do you any good if you haven’t made a commitment first.

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.

Your tribe communicates. They probably don’t do it the way you would; they don’t do it as efficiently as you might like, but they communicate. The challenge for the leader is to help your tribe sing, whatever form that song takes.

If no one cares, then you have no tribe. If you don’t care—really and deeply care—then you can’t possibly lead.

What most people want in a leader is something that’s very difficult to find: we want someone who listens.

People want to be sure you heard what they said—they’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said.

Listen, really listen. Then decide and move on.

Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths—whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over.

If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it’s unlikely to be worth the journey. Persist.

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 Fred’s book spreads, then he’s off to a great start. If it doesn’t, he needs a new book or a better platform.

It’s a myth that change happens overnight, that right answers succeed in the marketplace right away, or that big ideas happen in a flash. They don’t. It’s always (almost always, anyway) a matter of accretion. Drip, drip, drip. Improvements happen a bit at a time, not as grand-slam home runs that are easy to get.

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another . . . so they follow.

This seems obvious, but it’s heretical. The idea that an aid worker would go to a village in trouble and not try to stamp out nonstandard behavior is crazy. “The traditional model for social and organizational change doesn’t work,” he told Fast Company. “It never has. You can’t bring permanent solutions in from outside.” Leveraging the work of Marian Zeitlin, Sternin and his wife Monique have taken this approach around the world, from developing countries to hospitals in Connecticut. Over and over again, the Sternins have discovered a simple process: find leaders (the heretics who are doing things differently and making change), and then amplify their work, give them a platform, and help them find followers—and things get better. They always get better. I hope that’s not so simple that it gets ignored, because it’s important. It’s such an effective idea that it saves children’s lives every day. 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.