Grant Baldwin’s Blog

I’ve been reading a few books lately, but I thought I would share some thoughts that I underlined and circled from one I finished over the weekend - Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin. Here were a few of the thoughts that jumped out at me:

• “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”
• “You can’t have a tribe without a leader – and you can’t be a leader without a tribe.”
• “We want to belong not to just one tribe, it turns out, but to many. And if you give us tools and make it easy, we’ll keep joining.”
• “The real power of tribes has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with people.”
• “Leaders lead when they take positions, when they connect with their tribes, and when they help the tribe connect to itself.”
• “There’s a difference between telling people what to do and inciting a movement. The movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing. Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate.”
• “Ordinary folks can dream up remarkable stuff fairly easily. What’s missing is the will to make the ideas happen.”
• “Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.”
• “Great leaders don’t try to please everyone. Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.”
• “Leadership almost always involves thinking and acting like the underdog. That’s because leaders work to change things, and the people who are winning rarely do.”
• I loved this story – “It’s four a.m. and I can’t sleep. So I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Jamaica, checking my email. A couple walks by, obviously on their way to bed, having pushed the idea of vacation a little too hard. The woman looks over to me and, in a harsh whisper a little quieter than a yell, says to her friend, ‘Isn’t that sad? That guy comes here on vacation and he’s stuck checking his email. He can’t even enjoy his two weeks off.’ I think the real question – the one they probably wouldn’t want to answer – was, ‘Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?’”
• “The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”
• “Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.”
• “You can’t manage without knowledge. You can’t lead without imagination.”

Good book. Quick read. Lots of nuggets. Go get it.