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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.
Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.
Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.
Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done.
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.
Marketing used to be about advertising, and advertising is expensive. Today, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and delivering products and services with stories that spread.
Leaders lead when they take positions, when they connect with their tribes, and when they help the tribe connect to itself.
If you want to grow, you need to find customers who are willing to join you or believe in you or donate to you or support you. And guess what? The only customers willing to do that are looking for something new. The growth comes from change and light and noise.
The movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing. Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them.
leader
jobs for the leader
A true fan, he argues, is a member of the tribe who cares deeply about you and your work.
Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.
Fear of criticism is a powerful deterrent because the criticism doesn’t actually have to occur for the fear to set in.
It’s tempting to make the tribe bigger, to get more members, to spread the word. This pales, however, when juxtaposed with the effects of a tighter tribe.
Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.
It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers. It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail. It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo. It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.
Whom would you hire?
The one path that never works is the most common one: doing nothing at all.
Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.
the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it’s worth doing. Faith that failure won’t destroy you.
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,
Religion, on the other hand, represents a strict set of rules that our fellow humans have overlaid on top of our faith.
Religion at its best is a sort of mantra, a subtle but consistent reminder that belief is okay, and that faith is the way to get where you’re going.
study in contrast
Religion at its worst reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of our faith.
The reason it’s so difficult to have a considered conversation about religion is that people feel threatened.
but because it feels like criticism of their faith.
These religions exist for one reason—to reinforce our faith.
religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.
Ordinary thinking and ordinary effort are almost never enough to generate leadership.
The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate.
Leading when you don’t know where to go, when you don’t have the commitment or the passion, or worst of all, when you can’t overcome your fear—that sort of leading is worse than none at all.
Leaders, on the other hand, don’t have things happen to them. They do things.
Organizations used to be managed, with no place for leaders, no use for heretics.
Top management now wants leaders.
But the rank and file hesitates. We hesitate because we’ve seen what’s happened before.
If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin. Soon enough, the new thing will be better than the old thing.
Training a student to be a sheep is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep?
And then these organizations give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking (“I might get fired!”).
When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses watch and shake their heads,
“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?”
Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
1. Publish a manifesto.
2. Make it easy for your followers to connect with you.
3. Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another.
4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement.
5. Track your progress.
1. Transparency really is your only option.
2. Your movement needs to be bigger than you.
3. Movements that grow, thrive.
