Seth Godin is an author and entrepreneur. His latest book, Tribes, argues that "lasting and substantive change can be best effected by a group of people connected to each other, to a leader and to an idea," according to Publisher's Weekly.
In an interview with Wired.com, Godin discussed the role of ego in a successful leader, finding your inner charisma and whether timing is everything, or even anything.
Wired: What exactly is a tribe and why is it so important?
Seth Godin: Big world-changing ideas have had three cycles. The first cycle was that you could change the world by building a factory the way Henry Ford did. If you could put productive people to work and make money producing something that made change, then people like Henry Ford and Andy Grove could cause world-changing things to occur.
The second cycle had to do with advertising and TV and media and promotion. The idea that if you talked about an idea enough and pushed it on people enough, it could change the world.
The third idea, the one that I think is really available to a large number of people now without a lot of resources, is this idea of finding and connecting like-minded people and leading them to a place they want to go. You can use Barack Obama as an example, but you can also use Blake Mycoskie of Tom's Shoes. The internet means geography isn't so important, so if you can find the 1,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 people out there who want to make a certain kind of change and can connect them and show them a path, they want to follow you. And you can use that tribe, that group of people, to make change that matters.
Wired: What makes one tribe gel over another?
SG: The people who are successful at it, what they have in common is they take action for the tribe and with
the tribe as opposed to doing things to the tribe. There are plenty of people out there who have an agenda they want to achieve, but sometimes they get so caught up in themselves and the agenda that they forget that they have to nurture the tribe if they want the tribe to follow them.
Wired: So for a tribe to succeed the leader needs to get his ego out of the way?
SG: Ego turns out not to be relevant. There are some people who do it completely without ego ... and [then there's] Steve Jobs who has an ego bigger than the Empire State Building and also leads a movement.
The people who are buying Apple stock don't do it for Steve, they do it for themselves. They do it for the way it makes them feel ... like an insurgent, a creative-class member, somebody who is part of something.
Wired: Speaking of Apple, the company managed to build a tribe of people who wanted to identify themselves as being different, but it also created a backlash against the tribe, which was viewed as elitist and snobby. Is there a danger in a tribe becoming too popular?
SG: I think you’re bringing up two interesting points. The first point is you can't have insiders unless you have outsiders. All tribes have outsiders. That's what makes them a tribe. If everyone is a member, it's not a tribe anymore.... So I don't think there's any problem at all for Apple with people saying they're elitist.
The second thing you're talking about is the paradox of building a tribe of outsiders, building a tribe of people who want to be seen as being different or independent, because once you succeed at that, it's no longer true. The magical dance that Apple has done ... for example with the iPod, at the beginning people like me bought an iPod because we wanted to show the rest of the world that we were cool and different and ahead of the curve. Now people buy an iPod because everyone else has one. And so they have gone from being the insurgent product to the default product. And that is an extremely difficult path to navigate, but they managed to do it.
Wired: You mentioned Al Gore. It's interesting that if he'd tried leading the global environmental movement 10 years ago, it wouldn't have succeeded. So it seems the timing has to be right for a tribe to gel.
SG: I think the scientists among us would say it's almost impossible to prove whether that's true or not. We do it after the fact. After the fact we say, oh yeah, that worked because the time was right. In terms of social movements, could Barack Obama or someone like him have been elected eight years ago? ... All I know is that when it works, it's proof that the time was right.
Wired: You've said that a tribe doesn't have to be encouraged to connect, they want to connect with each other. And that you as the person in the center aren't required to do anything.
SG: That part's not true. It requires you to do a great deal.
But what you don't need to do is sell people on the fact that they want to connect. That's human nature. We want to connect with like-minded people. What you have to do that's very difficult is create the platform –- whether it's a cocktail party or a technology -– where people can get over social friction, where people can make connections that would ordinarily feel awkward. So why does TED as a conference work? It works because after traveling all that way and paying all that money, it's expected that you will join the TED tribe. Whereas if the
TED conference didn't exist and you just called people on the list and said why don't 20 of us get together for coffee, that would be a weird phone call to make.... That's part of what it means to make a movement
– do something difficult to overcome the social friction.
Wired: So it's all about sensing a need and filling the need and encouraging the connection.
SG: The need is always there -– the need to connect, to matter. I think the need comes and then the issue comes, not the other way around.... And what leaders do, whether they're leading a small
Christian evangelical community or trying to organize India to overthrow British imperialism ... is they find a particular subset of people who also share a goal ... and bring in the right people to support it. If it hadn't been Al Gore, it could have been William F.
Buckley who had led the fight against global warming and it could have been completely filled with people from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.... It just happened that the leader who stood up and did it had a natural constituency, a constituency that was looking for the cause and the connection and the movement, and he was the man to do it.... My point is that people don't become leaders because they have charisma;
people get charisma because they're leaders.
Wired: There are a lot of leaders who don't have charisma.
SG: Well Al Gore has charisma now. Where did Al find his charisma? The charisma showed up because he was leading. I don't think you can lead correctly with transparency and create a movement if you're not passionate about it. The passion and the leadership go together and once you've done those things you are seen as being charismatic by the people who are following you.... What makes you a leader is not that you own a company with 150 people. What makes you a leader is that you are leading people who want to be led, going somewhere they want to go.
Wired: How do you put your tribe ahead of others in a land of too many choices and too many other things vying for attention?
SG: The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they're the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000
people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in. It's not for you to somehow beam your message to strangers and convert them, because you can't convert strangers anymore. Not one major new consumer brand built in the last five years was built on the back of advertising. Google and Facebook, etc. are built because one person brought another one by the hand, not because someone bought ads on the
Super Bowl.
