Book Review: Tribes - We Need You to Lead Us

Reading Seth Godin is a lot like going for an enjoyable mountain hike and finding a handful of small gold nuggets along the way. No heavy effort to dig for miles in order to find the deeper, richer vein of wealth. Just enough interesting shiny bits of useful wisdom scattered along the trail to invite the reader to explore further.

“Tribes” isn’t so much about the composition and character of tribes, per se, but more a call to serve as a leader for tribes yet to be formed. “Human beings can’t help it,” he writes. “[W]e need to belong. One of the most powerful of our survival mechanisms is to be part of a tribe, to contribute to (and take from) a group of like-minded people.” But left to their own devices, tribes dissolve or evolve into something directionless, perhaps unruly. What they need to persist is some form of leadership to set the rules and customs.

Speaking to aspiring or future leaders, Godin presents what he views as the biggest blocker to people stepping up and fulfilling leadership roles.

The only shortcut in this book, the only technique or how-to or inside info is this: the levers are here. The proof is here. The power is here. The only thing holding you back is your own fear….Dr. Laurence Peter is famous for proposing that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” In other words, 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….I’d like to paraphrase the Peter Principle. I think what actually happens is that “in every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.”

And the source of that fear is rooted in misaligned beliefs about criticism and failure.

As with almost everything I read, my eye is searching for ways the information I’m acquiring can be applied to improving team performance. The notion of tribes appeals to me from a social community perspective. I firmly believe there are deep psychological patterns in the human mind that unconsciously gravitate toward the idea of belonging to a tribal structure. And yet, there are limitations to that structure in the 21st Century business world. As Godin notes, “[I]n addition to the messages that go from the marketer or the leader to the tribe, there are the messages that go sideways, from member to member, and back to the leader as well.” What about communication between tribes? How might we avoid the formation of silos and corporate turf battles? These are questions for which I’ll need to continue searching as they are not addressed in “Tribes.”

Written more than ten years ago, there are elements of the book that have not aged well. For example, writing at a time which many today are considering the Golden Age of the Internet, Godin observes “In the nonsquishy tribal world of this decade, Twitter and blogs and online videos and countless other techniques contribute to an entirely new dimension of what it means to be part of a tribe.” And later, while writing about how easy it is for tribes to connect, communicate, and spread messages: “The tribe thrives; it delivers value and it spreads. Internet folks call this viral activity, or a virtuous cycle.” More commonly today the technology noted by Godin – particularly Facebook and Twitter – have resulted in the formation of more mobs than tribes and the cycles in 2021 are more vicious than they are virtuous.

However, I don’t think Godin was casting his gaze into the future through entirely rose colored glasses. He notes that crowds (and their blunt force object version: mobs) and tribes are “[t]wo different things: A crowd is a tribe without a leader. A crowd is a tribe without communication. Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe. Crowds are interesting, and they can create all sorts of worthwhile artifacts and market effects. But tribes are longer lasting and more effective.”

Several of the gold nuggets I picked up pointed to the importance of systemic thinking and analysis:

Leaders don’t care very much for organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them. Leaders must become aware of how the organization works, because this awareness allows them to change it.

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Working in an environment that’s static is no fun. Even worse, working for an organization that is busy fighting off change is horrible.

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When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow.

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The status quo is persistent and resistant.

The last quote is a clear reflection of Shalloway’s Corollary. The status quo is the system pushing back.

I’ll round out this review with a few quotes that apply to a life in general.

Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.

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If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin.

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Life’s too short to fight the forces of change. Life’s too short to hate what you do all day. Life’s way too short to make mediocre stuff.

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Defending mediocrity is exhausting.

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Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

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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.