By Seth Godin

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By Verne Harnish

“…keeping you great”

HEADLINES:

Mojo Triples Membership Subscriptions using just one discipline, but first…

Jim Collins Backlash — I received three emails from readers warning me that there’s some dissatisfaction brewing over Collins’ ideas given the recent failures of Fannie Mae and Circuit City. And one email hinted that a third company is failing and has been doing less than honorable things, though they failed to mention the company. I encourage you to read his latest book (and question him at the Growth Summit) — I just finished How the Mighty Fall last night and he addresses the controversy head-on — following are my highlights from the book (then I’ll give Collins and his book “a rest”).

Need for Change — notes Collins on p.11 “Clearly, the solution to decline lies not in the simple bromide ‘Change of Die’; Bank of America changed a lot and nearly killed itself in the process.” A strong message throughout the book is that complacency was not what caused firms to decline — instead, it was misplaced innovation, acquisitions, activities, and change, in general, that precipitated the decline.

Neglect Primary Flywheel — p. 32 — those familiar with Jim’s flywheel analogy from Good to Great know that it’s important for companies to be clear what they are and/or can be “best at” and then put all energies toward this one focus. Instead, leaders either get bored with their existing focus or get distracted by new adventures which take energy away from their primary flywheel. Jim outlines a 5 step “cycle of arrogant neglect” on p. 32.

Vacuum Peoples’ Brains — p. 39 “Like inquisitive scientists, the best corporate leaders we’ve researched remain students of their work, relentlessly asking questions — why, why, why? — and have an incurable compulsion to vacuum the brains of people they meet.” He differentiates the knowing person who claims to already know everything and why what they do works vs. the learning person. On p. 43 he lists five markers that are the earliest signs you might be in stage 1 of eminent decline, one of which notes the failure of leaders to “maintain a learning curve as steep as when they first began their careers.”

Job vs. Responsibility — p. 57 — this is one of my favorite “how to’s” in the book — notes Collins “One notable distinction between wrong people and right people (in key seats) is that the former see themselves as having ‘jobs,’ while the latter see themselves as having ‘responsibilities. Every person in a key seat should be able to respond to the question “What do you do?” not with a job title, but with a statement of personal responsibility. “I’m the one person ultimately responsible for x and y.” Think columns two and three on our People Accountability worksheet (http://www.gazelles.com/4decisions/people.pdf). In fact, Collins, when he’s hosting executive teams at his research lab often challenges executives to introduce themselves not with titles, but by articulating their responsibilities. As he notes “those who have lost (or not yet built) a culture of discipline find this question to be terribly difficult.”

Key Indicators (Metrics) of Pending Decline — p. 76 — Collins describes some of the quantitative metrics that are early indicators of decline, yet seemed to be ignored by management. Notes Collins “For businesses, our analysis suggests that any deterioration in gross margins, current ratio, or debt-to-equity ratio indicates an impending storm.” I personally find companies not watching gross margins enough — one reason is that it’s in the middle of the P&L. Too many execs look at top line and bottom line to assess health while gross margins might be slipping unnoticed. Three to four percent decline (from 52% to 48% for instance) doesn’t seem like much, but can have a dramatic long-term impact on the business. Collins outlines a couple other non financial indicators as well on p. 76.

Weakest Part of the Book — p. 77 — I’ve always felt that Collins’ “Levels of Leadership” was his weakest and less substantiated idea (based on research) i.e. the Level 5 Leader. Similarly, he created a chart on p. 77 of “Leadership-Team Dynamics On The Way Down Versus On The Way Up.” He says in the beginning of the book that he chose NOT to interview any leaders of the fallen companies because of his concern for hindsight bias. Therefore, I don’t know how he was able to reach such specific conclusions about Leadership-Team Dynamics. I suspect it’s his own observations of team dynamics vs. specific research-based analysis — I intend to ask Collins about this.

Solid Management Disciplines — p. 119 (the main part of the book is only 123 pages long) — concludes Collins “If you’ve fallen into decline, get back to solid management disciplines — now!” I couldn’t agree more. And I love this line also on page 119 “In fact, our research shows that if you’ve been practicing the principles of greatness all the way along, you should get down on your knees and pray for severe turbulence, for that’s when you can pull even further ahead of those who lack your relentless intensity.” Again, I couldn’t agree more. I’m seeing what I consider our best students of business remain learners, disciplined, and gaining market share right now.

Back to Mojo…yesterday I received this note “I attended one of your courses near Dulles with my employer. While there, I immediately recognized the benefits of daily huddles, BHAG, and alignment. I took those ideals back home and applied them to my personal BLOG (www.insanemoney.com – where I discuss stock option investments). I’ve created a community of several hundred option traders and we collectively created a BHAG of “Creating and Supporting 1,000 Option Traders Producing Full Time Income”. Just from these changes we’ve been able to attract three of the top option traders in the country, increased our readership, and tripled our membership subscriptions! Keep up the good work and thank you!”

Beware of Fear — and in one of Mojo’s blog postings he notes “The media drives hype and promotes fear in order to increase consumption. Ultimately it teaches us to fear what we shouldn’t and not fear what we should. So do yourself, your family, and me a favor. Turn off your TV, put down that glossy newspaper, and pick up a short book on statistics. We haven’t allowed the news to be on or in our house since 9-11. Evil, villainy, and fear can’t come into your home unless you invite it. If something is really important someone will tell you. Trust me, your life will be much better for it.” Again, I couldn’t agree more.

Keep on Learning and Remain Disciplined and Focused

EDUCATION:

Final two-day Rockefeller Habits Workshop before summer break

Washington, DC – Jun 9-10, 2009

Growth Series Webcasts

June 23 — Keith Ferrazzi “Who’s Got Your Back: 3 Critical Relationships”

Summits & Conferences

Growth Summit
October 20-21, 2009 Dallas, TX

Great Game of Business with Jack Stack

Gazelles DVD/Online Learning Products — Gazelles.tv

PEOPLE
What’s the Secret to Providing World Class Customer Experience
Topgrading

STRATEGY
High Stakes Negotiations
The Art of Advantage

EXECUTION
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits
Execute Without Drama

Did you miss previous insights? – read here (http://verneharnish.typepad.com/growthguy/archives.html)

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Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions — and the end of reading alone

By STEVEN JOHNSON

Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of “aha” moment in your memory — the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.

The Journal Report

• See the complete Technology report.

I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone’s touch interface.

The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.’s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I’d bought and downloaded Zadie Smith’s novel “On Beauty.” By the time the check arrived, I’d finished the first chapter.

How does Sony’s E-Reader hold up against the Amazon Kindle? Stacey Delo reviews.

Aha.

I knew then that the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?

The Dark Matter

In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are the dark matter of the information universe. While we now possess terabytes of data at our fingertips, we have nonetheless drifted further and further away from mankind’s most valuable archive of knowledge: the tens of millions of books that have been published since Gutenberg’s day.

That’s because the modern infosphere is both organized and navigated through hyperlinked pages of digital text, with the most-linked pages rising to the top of Google Inc.’s all-powerful search-results page. This has led us toward some traditional forms of information, such as newspapers and magazines, as well as toward new forms, such as blogs and Wikipedia. But because books have largely been excluded from Google’s index — distant planets of unlinked analog text — that vast trove of knowledge can’t compete with its hyperlinked rivals.

John Weber

But there is good reason to believe that this strange imbalance will prove to be a momentary blip, and that the blip’s moment may be just about over. Credit goes to two key developments: the breakthrough success of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service, which now offers close to 10 million titles, including many obscure and out-of-print works that Google has scanned. As a result, 2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.

If so, if the future is about to be rewritten, the big question becomes: How?

The World of Ideas

For starters, think about what happened because of the printing press: The ability to duplicate, and make permanent, ideas that were contained in books created a surge in innovation that the world had never seen before. Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate — and innovation to bloom — just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.

Think about it. Before too long, you’ll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you’ve ever read — as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you’ve read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven’t encountered yet.

The Impulse Buy

The magic of that moment in Austin (“I’m in the mood for a novel — oh, here’s a novel right here in my hands!”) also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely because there’s an impulse-buy quality to the devices that’s quite unlike anything the publishing business has ever experienced before.

Geoffrey A. Fowler

SECOND EDITION Soon you’ll be able to create a digital, searchable version of your library. It’s hard to overstate the impact that will have.

On another occasion, I managed to buy and download a book on a New York City subway train, during a brief two-stop stretch on an elevated platform.

Amazon’s early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it’s not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you’re at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and — voilà! — you own it.

My impulsive purchase of “On Beauty” has another element to it, though — one that may not be as welcomed by authors. Specifically: I was in the middle of the other book, and in a matter of seconds, I left it for one of its competitors. The jump was triggered, in this case, by a sudden urge to read fiction, but it could have been triggered by something in the book I was originally reading: a direct quote or reference to another work, or some more indirect suggestion in the text.

In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.

Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article — sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

Amazon Revenue Growth Rate Tops Google

3:49

Ahead of Amazon’s quarterly results, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney says the company’s growth potential is robust and explains why he upgraded his rating on the stock to buy. Stacey Delo reports. (April 20)

The Kindle in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting, and its Web browser is buried in a subfolder for “experimental” projects. But Amazon has already released a version of the Kindle software for reading its e-books on an iPhone, which is much more conducive to all manner of distraction. No doubt future iterations of the Kindle and other e-book readers will make it just as easy to jump online to check your 401(k) performance as it is now to buy a copy of “On Beauty.”

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

You’re Never Alone

Putting books online will also change how we find books — and talk about them.

Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called “Web logs,” cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.

With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”) You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.

Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Web publishers have long recognized that “front doors” matter much less in the Google age, as visitors come directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison’s controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from bookloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google’s results for anyone searching “invention of light bulb.” Each day, Google will deposit a hundred potential book buyers on that page, eager for information about Edison’s breakthrough. Those hundred readers might pale compared with the tens of thousands of prospective buyers an author gets from an NPR appearance, but that Google ranking doesn’t fade away overnight. It becomes a kind of permanent annuity for the author.

Writing for Google

A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens’s day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We’ll have to see.

(One geeky side note here: Before we can get too far in this new world, we need to have a technological standard for organizing digital books. We have the Web today because back in the early 1990s we agreed on a standard, machine-readable way of describing the location of a page: the URL.

But what’s the equivalent for books? For centuries, we’ve had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down in this new digital world. The Kindle doesn’t even have page numbers — it has an entirely new system called “locations” because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. If you want to write a comment about page 32 of “On Beauty,” what do you link to? The Kindle location? The Google Book Search page? This sounds like a question only a librarian would get excited about, but the truth is, until we figure out a standardized way to link to individual pages — so that all the data associated with a specific passage from “On Beauty” point to the same location — books are going to remain orphans in this new world.)

Paying Per Chapter?

The economics of digital books will likely change the conventions of reading and writing as well. Digital distribution makes it a simple matter to offer prospective buyers a “free sample” to entice them to purchase the whole thing. Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The “free sample” component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections, just as Dickens mastered the cliffhanger device almost two centuries before.

It’s not hard to imagine, for instance, how introductions will be transformed in this new world. Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won’t be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.

Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.

This fragmentation sounds unnerving — yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from “Middlemarch,” “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Beloved” will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today.

Yet that modular pricing system will have one interesting, and laudable, side effect: The online marketplace will have established an easy, one-click mechanism for purchasing small quantities of text.

Tellingly, the Kindle already includes blog and newspaper subscriptions that can be purchased in a matter of seconds.

Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that’s precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We’ve seen how that turned out. If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business — a system many people wish had been built into the Web’s original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn’t it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?

—Mr. Johnson is the author of six books, most recently “The Invention of Air,” and the co-founder of the hyperlocal news site outside.in. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page R1

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By Seth Godin

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Atlas Shrugged of Ayn Rand has been the second most influential book (after the Bible) to Entrepreneurs and Business Owners in the USA. I read it some 4 years ago and it has changed my business philosophy since.  Below some information of Ayn Rand and her philosophy.

* Name: Ayn (pronounced “eye-n”) Rand
* Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. Died in 1982.
* Who she is: Mother of Objectivism, a philosophy that claims:
* 1) Reality is an objective absolute. Facts trump man’s feelings, wishes, hopes, and fears.
* 2) Reason is the only way to perceive reality and the sole knowledge source. It is man’s only guide to action and means to survival.
* 3) Every man exists for his own sake. Pursuit of his own rational self-interest and his own happiness is his life’s moral purpose.
* 4) The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism.
* Best known for: Two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged
* Most famous follower: Alan Greenspan

In this engaging 1959 interview, her first on television, Ayn Rand capsulizes her philosophy for CBS’s Mike Wallace. The discussion ranges from the nature of morality to the economic and historical distortions disseminated about the “robber barons.” She also comments on her relationship with Frank O’Connor, provides some autobiographical information and gives her perspective on the future of America.

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Last month I read the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, its one the books I have enjoyed most to read and also one I have learned the most.  One chapter is called “The 10,000 Hour-Rule” where he explains that to really master anything you have to practice it at least 10,000 hours. Today I was surfing youtube.com and see a video that reminded me that, hope you enjoy it.

I strongly recommend you read the book and decide to master anything you are interested in like this athletes master football.

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By Erin Duckhorn

Published by Eyth Blog http://www.e-myth.com/cs/user/print/post/how-to-hire-employees-safely

Much of your business growth depends on finding the right people to staff your expanding organization, but in most companies much more time and money is devoted to choosing and purchasing equipment than to preparing for the hiring process. Something about the price and mass of a turbine engine or a computer terminal makes the results and the risks of your decision-making seem more important. But you will make no more important expenditure than the time and money you spend recruiting the right people. If the growth of your business depends on innovation, and it’s your people who are its source, the hiring of new staff is about the most important “purchase” you can make.

So take the time to first develop a hiring strategy. Which position do you want to hire next? Why that one? Do you have the cash flow to handle the additional load on your finances? What attitudes and skills would be the right matches with your needs for the position? There are a lot of factors to consider in choosing the right players for your “team,” and Nina’s article discusses a few of them.

How to Hire Employees Safely

By Nina L. Kaufman, Esq.

For many business owners, the thought of hiring employees is scarier than the latest Halloween horror flick. And yet — think of the alternative (the boon to your business!). Can your company afford to stay where it is?

Chances are, you recognize it can’t . . . which is why you’re connected to the E-Myth. Hiring employees can create a paradigm shift for your company, if done carefully and with advance planning. Here are a handful of areas that you’ll want to address in your hiring process:

• Job descriptions. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, your job description needs to tread a fine line. You want them narrow enough so that not “just anyone” can apply. For many positions, you need a certain level of talent and expertise. However, they need to be flexible enough so that you don’t pigeon-hole your workforce too tightly. A clear job description can also help you steer clear of various discrimination laws. If a position requires heavy physical work, or absolutely requires an employee’s office presence on the Sabbath (for example, in the wedding planning business), you can avoid claims that you discriminated in hiring under the American with Disabilities Act or other discrimination statutes.

• Interview manners. Interviewing employees is part science and part art – all of which can be learned, but virtually little of which comes naturally. For example, interviewing a noticeably pregnant woman and asking her due date/how many children she hopes to have might arise out of innate curiosity, but is a minefield for a sex discrimination claim. “How old are you?” and “Are you married?’ can also get you into hot water. It helps to have coaching through this process, or hiring a firm to handle it for you. In addition, employers get into trouble when they talk too much. It’s tough. We like to talk about ourselves — it’s human nature. The point of the interview is for the employee to sell you on him/her — not for you to sell the employee on the company.

• Background checks. What do you really know about the candidate sitting in the chair across the table from you? In many situations, only what she tells you. As a business owner, that’s not enough. “Trust, but verify,” as Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying. You want to check all references. Background checks are crucial. For example, you’ll definitely want to do a credit check if you’re a financial services firm; a criminal convictions check if you’re in the security business. Make sure you’re up front with the candidates that these checks are required as a matter of course. Also, all employees need to fill out Form I-9 — required by the Department of Homeland Security. Do not hire undocumented workers.

• Employee handbooks. Small companies may want to provide a “kinder, gentler” culture, with abundant vacation and personal days, but that can really cost you in the long run. Even costlier is being generous with Employee #1, recognizing the costs, and then being less generous with Employee #2. Especially if Employee #1 is a 20-something white male and Employee #2 is a 43-year-old African-American female. With an employee handbook, you have an opportunity to determine the policies and procedures that apply objectively to all employees. When you’re consistent, you can deflect many claims of unfair treatment.

Employees can be a skyrocket — or a torpedo — for your business. Before you step into this thorny area, engage good employment attorneys to help you navigate it safely. They can guide you on the right way to hire that both streamlines the process and ensures you comply with federal and state law.

Want more information on employee behavior guidelines? Visit our website, www.GreatBusinessLawResources.com/employeesbehavingbadly.htm to get your free copy of our special report, Top 10 Reasons Employees Get Fired.

© 2009 Nina L. Kaufman, Esq. Nina L. Kaufman, Esq. is an award-winning attorney, edutainer, and Entrepreneur Magazine online columnist and blogger. Under her Ask The Business LawyerSM umbrella, she reaches thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners with her legal services, professional speaking, information products, and LexAppeal weekly ezine. For more information, visit www.AskTheBusinessLawyer.com.

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Seth Godin is an author and entrepreneur. His latest book, Tribes, argues that “lasting and substantive change can be best effected by a group of people connected to each other, to a leader and to an idea,” according to Publisher’s Weekly.

In an interview with Wired.com, Godin discussed the role of ego in a successful leader, finding your inner charisma and whether timing is everything, or even anything.

Seth Godin: Big world-changing ideas have had three cycles. The first cycle was that you could change the world by building a factory the way Henry Ford did. If you could put productive people to work and make money producing something that made change, then people like Henry Ford and Andy Grove could cause world-changing things to occur.

The second cycle had to do with advertising and TV and media and promotion. The idea that if you talked about an idea enough and pushed it on people enough, it could change the world.

The third idea, the one that I think is really available to a large number of people now without a lot of resources, is this idea of finding and connecting like-minded people and leading them to a place they want to go. You can use Barack Obama as an example, but you can also use Blake Mycoskie of Tom’s Shoes. The internet means geography isn’t so important, so if you can find the 1,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 people out there who want to make a certain kind of change and can connect them and show them a path, they want to follow you. And you can use that tribe, that group of people, to make change that matters.

Wired: What makes one tribe gel over another?

SG: The people who are successful at it, what they have in common is they take action for the tribe and with the tribe as opposed to doing things to the tribe. There are plenty of people out there who have an agenda they want to achieve, but sometimes they get so caught up in themselves and the agenda that they forget that they have to nurture the tribe if they want the tribe to follow them.

Wired: So for a tribe to succeed the leader needs to get his ego out of the way?

SG: Ego turns out not to be relevant. There are some people who do it completely without ego … and [then there's] Steve Jobs who has an ego bigger than the Empire State Building and also leads a movement. The people who are buying Apple stock don’t do it for Steve, they do it for themselves. They do it for the way it makes them feel … like an insurgent, a creative-class member, somebody who is part of something.

Wired: Speaking of Apple, the company managed to build a tribe of people who wanted to identify themselves as being different, but it also created a backlash against the tribe, which was viewed as elitist and snobby. Is there a danger in a tribe becoming too popular?

SG: I think you’re bringing up two interesting points. The first point is you can’t have insiders unless you have outsiders. All tribes have outsiders. That’s what makes them a tribe. If everyone is a member, it’s not a tribe anymore…. So I don’t think there’s any problem at all for Apple with people saying they’re elitist.

The second thing you’re talking about is the paradox of building a tribe of outsiders, building a tribe of people who want to be seen as being different or independent, because once you succeed at that, it’s no longer true. The magical dance that Apple has done … for example with the iPod, at the beginning people like me bought an iPod because we wanted to show the rest of the world that we were cool and different and ahead of the curve. Now people buy an iPod because everyone else has one. And so they have gone from being the insurgent product to the default product. And that is an extremely difficult path to navigate, but they managed to do it.

Wired: You mentioned Al Gore. It’s interesting that if he’d tried leading the global environmental movement 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have succeeded. So it seems the timing has to be right for a tribe to gel.

SG: I think the scientists among us would say it’s almost impossible to prove whether that’s true or not. We do it after the fact. After the fact we say, oh yeah, that worked because the time was right. In terms of social movements, could Barack Obama or someone like him have been elected eight years ago? … All I know is that when it works, it’s proof that the time was right.

Wired: You’ve said that a tribe doesn’t have to be encouraged to connect, they want to connect with each other. And that you as the person in the center aren’t required to do anything.

SG: That part’s not true. It requires you to do a great deal. But what you don’t need to do is sell people on the fact that they want to connect. That’s human nature. We want to connect with like-minded people. What you have to do that’s very difficult is create the platform –- whether it’s a cocktail party or a technology -– where people can get over social friction, where people can make connections that would ordinarily feel awkward. So why does TED as a conference work? It works because after traveling all that way and paying all that money, it’s expected that you will join the TED tribe. Whereas if the TED conference didn’t exist and you just called people on the list and said why don’t 20 of us get together for coffee, that would be a weird phone call to make…. That’s part of what it means to make a movement – do something difficult to overcome the social friction.

Wired: So it’s all about sensing a need and filling the need and encouraging the connection.

SG: The need is always there -– the need to connect, to matter. I think the need comes and then the issue comes, not the other way around…. And what leaders do, whether they’re leading a small Christian evangelical community or trying to organize India to overthrow British imperialism … is they find a particular subset of people who also share a goal … and bring in the right people to support it. If it hadn’t been Al Gore, it could have been William F. Buckley who had led the fight against global warming and it could have been completely filled with people from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal…. It just happened that the leader who stood up and did it had a natural constituency, a constituency that was looking for the cause and the connection and the movement, and he was the man to do it…. My point is that people don’t become leaders because they have charisma; people get charisma because they’re leaders.

Wired: There are a lot of leaders who don’t have charisma.

SG: Well Al Gore has charisma now. Where did Al find his charisma? The charisma showed up because he was leading. I don’t think you can lead correctly with transparency and create a movement if you’re not passionate about it. The passion and the leadership go together and once you’ve done those things you are seen as being charismatic by the people who are following you…. What makes you a leader is not that you own a company with 150 people. What makes you a leader is that you are leading people who want to be led, going somewhere they want to go.

Wired: How do you put your tribe ahead of others in a land of too many choices and too many other things vying for attention?

SG: The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they’re the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in. It’s not for you to somehow beam your message to strangers and convert them, because you can’t convert strangers anymore. Not one major new consumer brand built in the last five years was built on the back of advertising. Google and Facebook, etc. are built because one person brought another one by the hand, not because someone bought ads on the Super Bowl.

originally published by TED http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-seth-godin.html

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