Leading Tribes: a book review

TNM's resident book reviewer, Martin Haworth, reviews Seth Godin's Tribes...

Leadership could be defined as that quality needed to inspire an organization to the next level. A place where vision and strategy meet, to achieve goals as yet unheard of.

 

Few people have this ability and those who do are highly prized for their capacity to see beyond the horizon and to take followers along in the wake.

Real leadership is more, much more than that at the very highest level.

 

Think of someone for whom you would, without question, walk over the hot coals for. Someone whose inspiration is so strong that you would not hesitate, what they say and do may be so aligned with your values and dreams that there’s the irresistible blend that you cannot turn your eyes from.

Someone whose limited interventions, simply coach (or coax) out of you the next level of your own thinking and possibilities you have inside just bursting to get out.

 

That's the level of leadership Godin describes in Tribes.

 

We all want to belong. We all want to feel a part of something — it’s human; we’re sociable. Even apparently unsociable nerds hunched over their Macs in darkened rooms find tribes.

 

In this book, Godin explores (in small article-like snippets that feel like they were written elsewhere and found a place in the book), just what the difference is between archetypal ‘leaders’ in the world and those who lead a tribe of followers.

 

No longer is it enough to lead an organization with a vision that you might like to take it towards. No, what's needed now are evangelists who are able, with little effort, to attract a tribe of followers such that they become cult-like in their zeal for what the tribe stands for.

And this enables a level of contribution like nowhere else.

 

This is not a leader seeking help who’s thinking of asking for open-source support. It's more.

 

It's the self-enabled contributing that is given so freely that it's a passion. It's why Wikipedia is so powerful, with its contributors giving information just because they want to.

 

The extension of Tribes is that with the skill to switch people on, provide the framework for communication and a capacity for creating discomfort, these special leaders can truly engage followers enough for the tribe’s output to be spectacular. In almost any field, business or otherwise.

Tribes is a rather disjointed collection (as Godin freely admits) of maybe 100 ideas and mini-philosophies that Godin has pulled together in a book. Some of them are related to his larger concept of the tribe, others are quite tenuously linked to it.

 

It's readable and interesting, raising the level of leadership thinking a little higher. Each little article is useful as a moment to ponder, some more than others.

 

As a book, is it missable?

 

Well, yes, you can live without it and if you want your thinking extended, there may be one or two concepts that make it worth the price.

 

For more by and about Martin Haworth, check out his Web site, CoachTrainLearn.com