Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Book Review)
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
One writer I’m always interested in reading their new work is Seth Godin, entrepeneur and what I’d term new-paradigm marketer. By that I mean he’s not just touting the Four P’s of the Marketing Mix: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. The world has changed and successful businesses have had to flip a lot of their old school thinking to achieve results. And his latest book, released this week, called Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us carries on from his ideas about Purple Cows, being remarkable, permission marketing and unleashing an idea virus. I wasn’t disappointed, especially as the copy I enjoyed was a promotional free version of Tribes from Audible.com. Which is a savvy move - as a tribe member I’ll read it, pass it on and you can read the tangible marketing benefit in this positive review on my blog. It’s win win.
We’re human and it’s our nature to be in tribes. Tribes need leaders. But we’re all thinking that we’re not quite remarkable enough to be a leader and it’s best to stay safely as a follower. We feel we lack charisma. But, Seth points out, leadership creates charisma not the other way around. We can all be leaders if we’re passionate enough, if we treat our followers with the respect of a tribe. When it comes to your business a tribe will take your message or product out into the world of their own volition and pass it on and remark on it. The book not only explains how tribes function but offers a number of excellent examples of where someone created a tribe around their core beliefs (like the dog catcher who wouldn’t kill dogs simply because it was how we historically deal with lost and abandoned pets). Passionate people with passionate ideas who believe in themselves tend to get followers. This is very much a book about leadership (not about management).
