Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

by Seth Godin

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.

You can’t have a tribe without a leader—and you can’t be a leader without a tribe.

Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.

Do you believe in what you do? Every day? It turns out that belief happens to be a brilliant strategy.

“How was your day?” is a question that matters a lot more than it seems. It turns out that the people who like their jobs the most are also the ones who are doing the best work, making the greatest impact, and changing the most.

Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.

Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe

Kings have always worked to maintain stability because that’s the best way to stay king. They’ve traditionally surrounded themselves with a well-fed and well-paid court of supplicants, each of whom has a vested interest in keeping things as they are.

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.

As we saw earlier, it takes only two things to turn a group of people into a tribe: • A shared interest • A way to communicate

That’s it—three steps: motivate, connect, and leverage.

Organizations that destroy the status quo win.

Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.

The only thing holding you back is your own fear. Not easy to admit, but essential to understand.

The one path that never works is the most common one: doing nothing at all.

Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing. Lean in, back off, but don’t do nothing.

you begin to realize that the safest thing you can do feels risky and the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.

Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.

Leaders who set out to give are more productive than leaders who seek to get.

It turns out that this was the easiest way up the wall. Leaning into the problem made the problem go away.

It’s nothing but a few neurons’ worth of faith, just the knowledge that you can do it. But without faith, the leap never works.

Someone who opposes faith is called an atheist and widely reviled. But we don’t have a common word for someone who opposes a particular religion. Heretic will have to do.

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

I think the real question—the one they probably wouldn’t want to answer—was, “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?”

Track your progress. Do it publicly and create pathways for your followers to contribute to that progress.

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.

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.

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.

Managers are the cynical ones. Managers are pessimists because they’ve seen it before and they believe they’ve already done it as well as it can be done. Leaders, on the other hand, have hope. Without it, there is no future to work for.

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

When Graham Weston, executive chairman of Rackspace, wanted to persuade his talented and somewhat skittish staff to move with him to the new headquarters in a depressed area of town, he didn’t lecture them or even try to cajole them. All he did was listen. He met with every one of the employees who was hesitating about the move and let them air their views. That’s what it took to lead them: he listened. Listen, really listen. Then decide and move on.

If it’s about your mission, about spreading the faith, about seeing something happen, not only do you not care about credit, you actually want other people to take credit.

There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.