Video Transcript: Seth Godin - The Tribes We Lead

So sometimes I get invited to give weird talks. I got invited to speak to the  people who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes to perform at sporting  events. Unfortunately, I couldn't go. But it got me thinking about the fact that  these guys, at least most of them, know what it is that they do for a living. What  they do is they dress up as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting  events. Shortly after that, I got invited to speak at the convention of the people  who make balloon animals. And again, I couldn't go, but it's a fascinating group.  They make balloon animals. There's a big schism between the ones who make  gospel animals and porn animals, but they do a lot of really cool stuff with  balloons. Sometimes they get in trouble, but not often. And the other thing about these guys is they also know what they do for a living. They make balloon  animals. But what do we do for a living? What exactly do the people watching  this do every day? And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change  everything that we try to find a piece of the status quo, something that bothers  us, something that needs to be improved, something that's itching to be  changed, and we change it, and we try to make big, permanent, important  change. But we don't think about it that way, and we haven't spent a lot of time  talking about what that process is like, and I've been studying it for a couple  years, and I want to share a couple stories with you today. First about a guy  named Nathan Winograd. Nathan was the number two person at the San  Francisco SPCA. And what you may not know about the history of the SPCA is it was founded to kill dogs and cats. Cities gave them a charter to get rid of the  stray animals on the street and destroy them. And in a typical year, 4 million  dogs and cats were killed, most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off the street. Nathan and his boss saw this, and they could not tolerate it, so they set  out to make San Francisco a no kill city, create an entire city where every dog  and cat, unless it was ill or dangerous, would be adopted, not killed, and  everyone said it was impossible. Nathan and his boss went to the city council to  get a change in the ordinance, and people from SPCAs and humane shelters  from around the country flew to San Francisco to testify against them to say it  would hurt the movement and it was inhumane. They persisted, and Nathan  went directly to the community. He connected with people who cared about this,  non professionals, people with passion, and within just a couple years, San  Francisco became the first no kill city running no deficit, completely supported  by the community. Nathan left and went to Tompkins County, New York, a place  as different from San Francisco as you can be and still be the United States.  And he did it again. He went from being a glorified dog catcher to completely  transforming the community. And then he went to North Carolina and did it  again. And he went to Reno and he did it again. And when I think about what  Nathan did, and when I think about people here, do I think about ideas, and I  think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea, has a lot behind it.  And I don't know if you've ever been to a Jewish wedding, but what they do is 

they take a light bulb and they smash it. Now, there's a bunch of reasons for that and stories about it, but one reason is because it indicates a change from before to after. It's a moment in time, and I want to argue that we are living through and  are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and  

spread and implemented. We started with the factory idea that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. We  then went to the TV idea that said, if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you  could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. And  now we're in this new model of leadership, where the way we make change is  not by using money or power to lever a system, but by leading. So let me talk  about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. Henry Ford comes up  with a really cool idea. It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents  a day, and pay him $5 a day because he's got an efficient enough factory. Well,  with that sort of advantage, you can churn out a lot of cars. You can make a lot  of change. You can get roads built. You can change the fabric of an entire  country that the essence of what you're doing is you need ever cheaper labor  and ever faster machines. And the problem we've run into is we're running out of both ever cheaper labor and ever faster machines. So we shift gears for a  minute and say, I know television advertising, push, push. Take a good idea and  push it on the world. I have a better mouse trap, and if I can just get enough  money to tell enough people, I'll sell enough. And you can build an entire  industry on that. If necessary, you can put babies in your ads. If necessary, you  can use babies to sell other stuff, and if babies don't work, you can use doctors,  but be careful, because you don't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition when  you're talking about one thing instead of the other. This model requires you to  act like the king, like the person in the front of the room, throwing things to the  peons in the back that you are in charge, and you're going to tell people what to  do next. That you know, the quick little diagram of it is, you're up here, and you  are pushing it out to the world. This method, mass marketing requires average  ideas, because you're going to the masses and plenty of ads. What we've done  as spammers is tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our idea, hypnotize  everyone into donating to our cause, hypnotize everyone into voting for our  candidate. And unfortunately, it doesn't work so well anymore either. But there's  good news around the corner, really good news. I call it the idea of tribes. What  tribes are is a very simple concept that goes back 50,000 years. It's about  leading and connecting people and ideas, and it's something that people have  wanted forever. Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church  tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe, but now, thanks to the  internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things  that are bubbling through our society around the world, tribes are everywhere.  The internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all.  Instead, what it's allowed is silos of interest. So you got the Red Hat ladies over 

here. You got the Red Hat triathletes over there. You got the organized armies  over here. You got the disorganized rebels over here. You got people in white  hats making food, and people in white hats sailing boats. The point is that you  

can find Ukrainian folk dancers and connect with them because you want to be  connected, that people on the fringes can find each other, connect and go  somewhere. Every town that has a volunteer fire department understands this  way of thinking. Now, it turns out this is a legitimate non Photoshop photo.  People I know, who are firemen, told me that this is not uncommon, and that  what firemen do to train sometimes is they take a house that's going to be torn  down, and they burn it down instead, in practice, putting it out. But they always  stop and take a picture. So you know, the pirate tribe is a fascinating one. They  got their own flag. They got the eye patches. You can tell when you're running  into someone in a tribe. And it turns out that it's tribes, not money, not factories,  that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large  numbers of people, not because you forced them to do something against their  will, but because they wanted to connect that what we do for a living now, all of  us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that  assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea, and it becomes  Something far bigger than ourselves. It becomes a movement. So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn't do it by himself, and he didn't do it  by buying a lot of ads. He did it by creating a movement 1000s of people around the country who could give his presentation for him, because he can't be in 100  or 200 or 500 cities in each night. You don't need everyone. What Kevin Kelly  has taught us is you just need, I don't know, 1000 true fans, 1000 people who  care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the  next round. That means that the idea you create, the product you create, the  movement you create, isn't for everyone. It's not a mass thing. That's not what  this is about. What it's about instead is finding the true believers. It's easy to look at what I've said so far and say, Wait a minute, I don't have what it takes to be  that kind of leader. So here are two leaders. Because they don't have a lot in  common. They're about the same age, but that's about it. What they did, though, is each, in their own way, created a different way of navigating your way through technology. So some people would go out and get people to be on one team,  and some people get people to be on the other team. It also informs the  decisions you make when you make products or services. This is one of my  favorite devices, but what a shame that it's not organized to help authors create  movements. What would happen if when you're using your Kindle, you could  see the comments and quotes and notes from all the other people reading the  same book as you in that moment, or from your book group, or from your  friends, or from the circle you want. What would happen if authors or people with ideas could use version two, which comes out on Monday, and use it to organize people who want to talk about something? Now there's a million things I could 

share with you about the mechanics here, but let me just try a couple. The  Beatles did not invent teenagers. They merely decided to lead them. That most  movements, most leadership that we're doing is about finding a group that's  disconnected but already has a yearning, not persuading people to want  something they don't have yet. When Diane Hatz worked on the meat tricks her  video that spread all across the internet about the way farm animals are treated. She didn't invent the idea of being a vegan. She didn't invent the idea of caring  about this issue, but she helped organize people and helped turn it into a  movement. Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected middle and lower class  of Venezuela. He merely led them. Bob Marley did not invent Rastafarians. He  just stepped up and said, Follow me. Derek Sivers invented CD Baby, which  allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man, to have a place to take the mission they already wanted to go to  go to and connect with each other. What all these people have in common is  that they are heretics, that heretics look at the status quo and say, this will not  stand. I can't abide this status quo. I am willing to stand up and be counted and  move things forward. I see what the status quo is. I don't like it that instead of  looking at all the little rules and following each one of them. That instead of  being what I call a sheep Walker, somebody who's half asleep, following  instructions, keeping their head down, fitting in, every once in a while, someone  stands up and says, not me. Someone stands up and says, This, one's  important. We need to organize around it, and not everyone will. But you don't  need everyone. You just need a few people who will look at the rules, realize  they make no sense, and realize how much they want to be connected. So Tony  Hsieh does not run a shoe store. Zappos isn't a shoe store. Zappos is the one,  the only, the best there ever was place for people who are into shoes, to find  each other, to talk about their passion, to connect with people who care more  about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow, it can be something as  prosaic as shoes and something as complicated as overthrowing a government.  It's exactly the same behavior, though. What it requires, as Geraldine Carter has discovered, is to be able to say, I can't do this by myself, but if I can get other  people to join my climate ride, then together, we can get something that we all  want. We're just waiting for someone to lead us. Michelle Kaufman has  pioneered new ways of thinking about environmental architecture. She doesn't  do it by quietly building one house at a time. She does it by telling a story to  people who want to hear it by connecting a tribe of people who are desperate to  be connected to each other by leading a movement and making change and  around and around and around it goes. So three questions I'd offer you. The first one is, Who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you're not upsetting anyone,  you're not changing the status quo. The second question is, Who are you  connecting? Because for a lot of people, that's what they're in it for the  connections that are being made, one to the other. And the third one is, who are 

you leading? Because focusing on that part of it, not the mechanics of what  you're building, but the who and the leading part is where change comes. So  Blake at Tom's shoes had a very simple idea. What would happen if every time  someone bought a pair of these shoes, I gave exactly the same pair to someone who doesn't even own. Own a pair of shoes. This is not the story of how you get  shelf space at Neiman Marcus. It's a story of a product that tells a story. And as  you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes, and someone says, what  are those you get to tell the story on Blake's behalf, on behalf of the people who  got the shoes. And suddenly it's not one pair of shoes or 100 pair of shoes. It's  10s of 1000s of pairs of shoes. My friend Red Maxwell has spent the last 10  years fighting against juvenile diabetes, not fighting the organization that's  fighting it, fighting with them, leading them, connecting them, challenging the  status quo, because it's important to him and the people he surrounds himself  with need the connection. They need the leadership. It makes a difference. You  don't need permission from people to lead them, but in case you do, here it is,  they're waiting. We're waiting for you to show us where to go next. So here's  what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo.  They challenge what's currently there. The second thing is, they build a culture,  a secret language, a seven second handshake, a way of knowing that you're in  or out. They have curiosity, curiosity about the people in the tribe, curiosity about outsiders. They're asking questions. They connect people to one another. Do  you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They  want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when  they're gone. And tribe leaders can do that, and it's fascinating, because all tribe leaders have charisma, but you don't need charisma to become a leader. Being  a leader gives you charisma. And if you look and study the leaders who have  succeeded, that's where charisma comes from, from the leading and finally, they commit, they commit to the cause, they commit to the tribe, they commit to the  people who are there. So I'd like you to do something for me, and I hope you'll  think about it before you reject it out of hand. What I want you to do is, only  takes 24 hours, is create a movement, something that matters. Start do it. We  need it. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.