Lessons from Tribes by Seth Godin
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.
One of the most powerful of our survival mechanisms is to be a part of a tribe, to contribute to (and take from) a group of like-minded people.
Leadership is not management… management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done.
Marketing is the act of telling stories about the things we make–stories that sell and stories that spread.
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.
It takes only two things to turn a group into a tribe:
- a shared interest
- a way to communicate
The communication can be one of four kinds:
- Leader to tribe
- Tribe to leader
- Tribe member to tribe member
- Tribe member to outsider
*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
Senator Bill Bradley defines a movement as having three elements:
- A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build
- A connection between and among the leader and the tribe
- Something to do–the fewer limits, the better
Too often organizations fail to do anything but the third.
A crowd is a tribe without a leader. A crowd is a tribe without communication.
Instead of always being on the hunt for one more set of eyeballs, true leaders have figured out that the real win is in turning a casual fan into a true one.
Organizations that destroy the status quo win.
Great leaders are able to reflect the light onto their teams. Great leaders don’t want the attention, but they use it. They use it to unite the tribe and to reinforce its sense of purpose.
*The first thing a leader can focus on is the act of tightening the tribe. 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.
A tribe that communicates more quickly, with alacrity, and emotion, is a tribe that thrives.
Ultimately, people are most easily led where they wanted to go all along.
Great leaders don’t water down the message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger.
The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on.
The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate.
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.
The six elements in creating a micro movement consist of five things to do and six principles:
*1. Publish a manifesto.
Give it away and make it easy for the manifesto to spread far and wide. It doesn’t have to be printed or even written. But it’s a mantra and a motto and a way of looking at the world. It unites your tribe members and gives them a structure.
*2. Make it easy for your followers to connect with you.
It could be as simple as visiting you or emailing you or watching you on television. Or it could be as rich and complex as interacting with you on Facebook.
*3. Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another.
There’s that little nod one restaurant regular gives to another recognized regular. Or the shared drink in an airport lounge. Even better is the camaraderie developed by volunteers on a political campaign or insiders involved in a new product launch. Great leaders figure out how to make these interactions happen.
4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement.
Money merely exists to enable it. The moment you try to cash out is the moment you stunt the growth of your movement.
*5. Track your progress.
Do it publicly and create pathways for your followers to contribute to your progress.
Six principles for creating a micro movement:
*1. Transparency really is your only option.
Every failed televangelist has learned this the hard way. The people who follow you aren’t stupid. You might go down in scandal or, more likely, from ennui. People can smell subterfuge from a mile away.
2. Your movement needs to be bigger than you.
An author and his book, for example, don’t constitute a movement. Changing the way people apply to college does.
3. Movements that grow, thrive.
Every day they get better and more powerful. You’ll get there soon enough. Don’t mortgage today just because you’re in a hurry.
*4. Movements are made most clear when compared to the status quo or to movements that work to push the other direction.
Movements do less well when compared to other movements with similar goals. Instead of beating them, join them.
5. Exclude outsiders
Exclusion is an extremely powerful force for loyalty and attention. Who isn’t part of your movement matters almost as much as who is.
*6. Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up.
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The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not so great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
*The secret to leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.
The biggest donors are the ones who not only give, but also do the work.
*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.
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 other join you.
The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.
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.
Leaders challenge the status quo. Leaders create a culture around their goal and involve others in that culture. Leaders have an extraordinary amount of curiosity about the world they’re trying to change. Leaders use charisma (in a variety of forms) to attract and motivate followers. Leaders communicate their vision of the future. Leaders commit to a vision and make decisions based on that commitment. Leaders connect their followers to one another.
The secret, Reagan’s secret, is to listen, to value what you hear, and then to make a decision even if it contradicts the very people you are listening to… 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.
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.
*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.
