Tapping into Tribes – A 2.0 challenge for knowledge management [Godin]

In our true guru series we wanted to share Seth Godin. He is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age.

While his story looks to his concept of “tribes” from a marketing point-of-view we think this is also relevant voor nuturing knowledge management behavior (see the invitation for discussion at the end).

We apologize if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth to view the video, unfortunately there is not much we can do about that. You can try to download this one on www.ted.com. We’ve listed the most important quotes according to us here below.

“What do we do for a living? What exactly to the people watching this do every day? I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything. That we try to find a piece of the status quo, something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, Something that is itching to be changed, and we change it. We try to make big, permanent, important change. But we don’t think about it that way. And we haven’t spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like. And I’ve been studying it for a couple years. And I want to share a couple stories with you today.”

“I think about ideas. And I think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea has a lot behind it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Jewish wedding. But what they do is they take a light bulb and they smash it. Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it. But one reason is because it indicates a change, from before to after. It is a moment in time.’

“And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented.”

“We started with the factory idea. That you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. We then went to the TV idea. That said if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. And now we’re in this new model of leadership.”

“Where the way we make change is not by using money, or power to lever a system. But by leading.”

‘So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea. It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day. Because he’s got an efficient enough factory. Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars. You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built. You can change the fabric of an entire country. That the essence of what you’re doing is you need ever cheaper labor,and ever faster machines. And the problem we’ve run into is we’re running out of both. Ever cheaper labor and ever faster machines. ”

“But there is good news around the corner, really good news. I call it the idea of tribes. What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 thousand years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever. Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe. But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world,tribes are everywhere.”

“You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one.They’ve got their own flag. They’ve got the eyepatches. You can tell when you’re running into someone in a tribe. And it turns out that it’s tribes,not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.”

“That what we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea. And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves. It becomes a movement. So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn’t do it by himself. And he didn’t do it by buying a lot of ads. He did it by creating a movement. Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him.Because he can’t be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night.”

“You don’t need everyone. What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need, I don’t know, a thousand true fans. A thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round. And that means that the idea you create, the product you create, the movement you create isn’t for everyone. It’s not a mass thing. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about instead is finding the true believers. It’s easy to look at what I’ve said so far, and say, “Wait a minute, I don’t have what it takes to be that kind of leader.”

“So three questions I’d offer you. The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you’re not upsetting anyone, you’re not changing the status quo. The second question is, who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that’s what they’re in it for. The connections that are being made, one to the other. And the third one is, who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it, not the mechanics of what you’re building,but the who, and the leading part is where change comes.”

“You don’t need permission from people to lead them. But in case you do, here it is. They’re waiting, we’re waiting for you to show us where to go next.So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. They challenge what’s currently there. The second thing is, they build a culture. A secret language, a seven second handshake. A way of knowing that you’re in or out. They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe. Curiosity about outsiders. They’re asking questions. They connect people to one another. Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone. And tribe leaders can do that. It’s fascinating because all tribe leaders have charisma. But you don’t need charisma to become a leader. Being a leader gives you charisma.

If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading. Finally, they commit. They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. They commit to the people who are there.”

Why do we consider Seth Godin a true guru?

Seth Godin is an extraordinary good speaker with original ideas about the digital world we live in right now. His ideas of tribes intruiged us, when looking at it from a knowledge management perspective. Tribes might be effective ‘pseudo-organizational forms’  that facilitate knowledge sharing and that spur possibilities for original thinking and innovation. We have formulated a few questions that we would like to pose to you:

• How do you think knowledge leadership can tap into this concept of tribes most effectively?
• Could knowledge leadership also attract knowledge from other sources than their own organization, supporting their own organizational goals, by using this concept of tribes? And how could leadership do this? What would be the preconditions?

If you have ideas to share with us, please do not hesitate to submit it in a comment.