Name: Tribes
Rating: 4.6 (165 reviews)
Author: Seth Godin

What’s in it for me? Learn how to change the status quo by building and leading a tribe.

World-renowned marketing guru and author Seth Godin reveals in this book why today’s successful brands need to form tribes around their cause to grow and advocate their ideas and products.

He explains why trying to reach everyone with your cause, like most big companies are still trying to do, only leads to mediocrity and a lack of intense feeling for your idea or brand.

These blinks elaborate step-by-step how anyone can form and lead a tribe, and how to use this powerful force to change the status quo and create a new future.

In these blinks, you’ll discover:

why tribes are the future of growth – and can potentially change the world,
how to be a great leader of your very own tribe, and
why today there are too few heretics, and too many sheepwalkers.

Whether you know it or not, you are already part of a tribe.

For millions of years people have been part of tribes. Whether the groups are religious, ethnic or political, it seems we can’t help it: humans need to belong to a collective larger than themselves.

In fact, tribes are everywhere; and whether you know it or not, you also are a member of at least one of them – as an employee of your company, a member of your religious community or a fan of your favorite band.

But what actually is a tribe?

All tribes share three components: a group of people, a common cause and at least one leader who represents and organizes the tribe.

Take Wikipedia, for example. The vast majority of work for the website is performed by a group of about 5,000 contributors and editors. They all work together to realize the common cause of Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder: a vision of freely accessible, communally created information.

However, the most important feature here is the shared cause. A tribe’s shared cause leads its members to internalize the tribe’s values and ideas as their own. These internalized incentives make tribe members into driven believers instead of mere followers.

The cause of a tribe – either a yearning for or a resistance to change – can be anything from environmental justice, a political campaign or a group of Apple enthusiasts who believe in the superiority of their beloved consumer electronics.

Tribes have always been with us, but with today’s technology, the number of tribes is exploding.

This is mainly due to the internet: tribes used to be local, but now, with the reach of the internet – and especially social media – geography is no longer a barrier to tribal growth.

And thanks to social media, a tribe’s influence is no longer directly correlated to its size, but to the cause for which it stands, and how it uses communication technologies.

Why?

Because today, real sustainable growth derives from the people who truly love your cause, advocate your values – and beat the social media drum for you.

Don’t engineer your ideas for the masses: make it exclusive and meaningful for a distinct group of people.

The marketing mantra of the past was to reach as many people as possible with your products. But times have changed – and this blink will show you how.

Many companies are stuck in the past and still focus on developing products for the masses, a strategy which can lead to catastrophic consequences.

Leadership is about stepping into a vacuum and creating motion.

Management is primarily about getting a job done. But leadership is all about change, and this implies going where no one has been before: into a vacuum.

For a tribe to form there has to be a particular change that people want to see made. This need for change has to come from a certain discomfort with the status quo, from a sense that there is something missing in the world. A leader steps right into this discomfort zone – the vacuum – and starts to organize so people will follow him.

Kernaussagen in Tribes

Worum geht es in Tribes?

In this book, author Seth Godin reveals the most powerful unit of social organization: the “tribe,” or a group of people connected to a cause, a leader and each other, who together drive change in society. It shows us how we can harness the power of the internet to form and lead our own tribes. Tribes also advocates the universal need for change and leadership, so we can grow as a company or as a society.