Why You Need To Lead A Tribe – Seth Godin

Posted on Jan 13, 2009 - 7:26 PM PST

This is the first of 4 Mixergy videos from Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo and bestselling author. In this section, he talks about why and how you can build a tribe. Check in over the next 4 weeks for other big ideas that will help you leave your mark on the world.

Here’s a paraphrased summary of the discussion:

Andrew: What’s the point of having a tribe?

Seth: A tribe is nothing but a tactic, a method, an approach to getting change to occur. And that change could be growing your business, or getting elected or making the world a safer place. All of those things now require a tribe.

Andrew: Why didn’t popular moguls like Sam Walton and Ted Turner have tribes?

Seth: The world has changed fundamentally because a whole bunch of things that used to be critically important aren’t any more.

Darrin Stephens from bewitched got rich with Larry Tate because he bought enough TV time, to interrupt enough people, to sell enough stuff, to make enough money, to interrupt more people, to buy TV time. And around and around it goes.

Andrew: Do your tribe members need to communicate with each other?

Seth: People like talking to each other. We evolved to want to do that. So one of the most highly leveraged and powerful ways to grow a tribe is to connect people to each other. But if you just have that, you have nothing but a coffee shop.

On top of that, there needs to be a message from you, the leader, about where you want to go–about the change that you want to make in your world.

You need a mission, a movement, a place that people want to get to.

Andrew: How did you build your tribe?

Seth: I am not the poster child for how to do this properly. And everyone does it differently.

What I offered members of my tribe is a vocabulary. So if you were in a meeting and said, “purple cow” or “meatball sundae” other people who got it would immediately understand what you were saying.

So what I did was give you a way to communicate with those people.

Hear the full interview


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  • http://www.digforleadership.com Bruce

    Excellent stuff :-)

  • http://www.gogreensolar.com Deep Patel

    sweet! These interviews and seminars with Seth on mixergy have been very valuable to the development of my tribe. I have an online community, this week a member of our community and I acutally met up face to face. This is the first time I met someone on my community in person and I can already see the benefits of interacting with community members online as well as offline.

    I’m excited because I am starting to see a tribe developing around a cause that is not only important to society but something I am so passionate about, which is starting to materialize.

    What do you think is the most difficult aspect of building your own tribe?

  • Andrew Warner

    Deep: I think the toughest part is dealing with the early days when no one cares about what you’re doing. In the early days, I rented the tiniest places I could find for Mixergy events because it felt like no one would come.

  • http://www.gogreensolar.com Deep Patel

    @andrew: once you got people to join your tribe, how did you get them to come back?

  • http://www.twitter.com/agoutloud Anne Good

    Andrew,
    I came across you site yesterday and must say I’m loving the collection of interviews you have accumulated. It’s an excellent resource for those of us who are starting out to establish our personal brand and develop businesses.

  • http://thatcantwork.com GoTRENDS

    Always enjoy stuff from Seth Godin and have pretty much all of his books.

    Definitely agree with the benefits of creating a tribe around yourself and brand. A great example of this is the rise in interest of Gary Vaynerchuk.

    Because of his passion and drive and message, he’s been gradually building his fan base / tribe.

    It will be interesting to see how many people pick up on the whole Tribe mentality and get theirs going.

    - TRENDS

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