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.

Tribes need leadership. Sometimes one person leads, sometimes more. People want connection and growth and something new. They want change.

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

This is an opportunity for you—an opportunity to find or assemble a tribe and lead it. The question isn’t, Is it possible for me to do that? Now, the question is, Will I choose to do it?

For the first time ever, everyone in an organization—not just the boss—is expected to lead. • The very structure of today’s workplace means that it’s easier than ever to change things and that individuals have more leverage than ever before. • The marketplace is rewarding organizations and individuals who change things and create remarkable products and services. • It’s engaging, thrilling, profitable, and fun. • Most of all, there is a tribe of fellow employees or customers or investors or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting for you to connect them to one another and lead them where they want to go.

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. Movements have leaders and movements make things happen. Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.

Managers make widgets. Leaders make change. Change? Change is frightening, and to many people who would be leaders, it seems more of a threat than a promise. That’s too bad, because the future belongs to our leaders, regardless of where they work or what they do.

In fact, in a stable world, it’s great to be king. Lots of perks. Not a lot of hassles. 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. The monarchy has had a huge impact on the way we see the world. Kings taught us about power and about influence and about getting things done. A king assembles his own geographically based tribe and uses power to enforce compliance. From royalty we learned how to build corporations. And from royalty we learned how to build nonprofits and other organizations as well. Long live the king. Corporations are traditionally built around the CEO, with all his perks and power. The closer you get to being king/CEO, the more influence and power you have. The goal of the corporation is to enrich the king and to keep him in power. And then, recently, something happened. 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. The changing status quo isn’t such good news for the CEO, just as the changing face of warfare and politics wasn’t good news for the crowned heads of Europe a century ago. Marketing is the act of telling stories about the things we make—stories that sell and stories that sp...

If you want us to follow you, don’t be boring.

“Good enough” stopped being good enough a long time ago. So why not be great?

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.

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.

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

create change before change happens to them.

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.

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.

I think we have an obligation to change the rules, to raise the bar, to play a different game, and to play it better than anyone has any right to believe is possible.

Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Leaders create things that didn’t exist before. They do this by giving the tribe a vision of something that could happen, but hasn’t (yet).

You can’t manage without knowledge. You can’t lead without imagination.

Belief 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.

No one gives you permission or approval or a permit to lead. You can just do it. The only one who can say no is you.

Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo.