Quick read about leading your own tribe. And why there is a shortage of leaders in every field. I will look over these notes every time I need a reminder of how to lead others.
My Notes #
Her tribe of donors, employees, entrepreneurs, and supporters counts on her leadership to inspire and motivate them.
The Internet eliminates geography.
Everyone is not just a marketer—everyone is now also a leader. The explosion in tribes, groups, covens, and circles of interest means that anyone who wants to make a difference can.
The marketplace now rewards (and embraces) the heretics. It’s clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them, and for the first time, it’s also profitable, powerful, and productive to do just that.
With tribes flourishing everywhere, there’s a vast shortage of leaders. We need you.
Everyone in an organization—not just the boss—is expected to lead.
Individuals have more leverage than ever before.
The marketplace is rewarding organizations and individuals who change things and create remarkable products and services.
It’s engaging, thrilling, profitable, and fun.
Most of all, there is a tribe of fellow employees or customers or investors or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting for you to connect them to one another and lead them where they want to go.
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.
Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.
Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.
Marketing is the act of telling stories about the things we make—stories that sell and stories that spread.
Today, the market wants change.
“Established 1906” used to be important. Now, apparently, it’s a liability. The rush from stability is a huge opportunity for you.
All tribes are made up of partisans, the more partisan the better. If you’re a middle-of-the-roader, you don’t bother joining a tribe.
He galvanized them, inspired them, and connected them, through his idea.
Skill and attitude are essential. Authority is not. In fact, authority can get in the way.
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.
It takes only two things to turn a group of people into a tribe: - A shared interest - A way to communicate
The communication can be one of four kinds: - Leader to tribe - Tribe to leader - Tribe member to tribe member - Tribe member to outsider
So a leader can help increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members by:
- Transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change
- Providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications
- Leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members.
The tribal connections you can create with leadership grow; they don’t fade.
A movement as having three elements:
- A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build.
- A connection between and among the leader and the tribe.
- Something to do—the fewer limits, the better.
Three steps: motivate, connect, and leverage.
Ideas that spread win.
The ideas that are spreading are the remarkable ones.
Defending mediocrity is exhausting.
A true fan, he argues, is a member of the tribe who cares deeply about you and your work.
An individual artist needs only a thousand true fans in her tribe. It’s enough.
A true fan connects with other true fans and amplifies the noise the artist makes.
What they demand, though, is generosity and bravery.
I can’t imagine the technology mattering much. Blogs and Twitter and all manner of other tools will come and go, possibly by the time you read this.
Every day it gets easier to tighten the relationship you have with the people who choose to follow you.
Creating products and services that are remarkable is fun. Doing work that’s fun is engaging. So not surprisingly, making things that are successful is a great way to spend your time.
There you go: initiative = happiness.
When we envision our dream jobs, we’re imagining someone who reaps huge rewards as a result of her insight. Or someone who has control over what he does all day, creating products or services that he’s actually proud of. It certainly involves having authority over your time and your effort and having input into what you do.
What’s missing is the will to make the ideas happen.
The idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.
The fear is still there, but it’s drowned out by a different story.
It’s the story of success, of drive, of doing something that matters. It’s an intellectual story about what the world (or your industry or your project) needs and how your insight can help make a difference.
You can talk over the fear, laying out a game plan that makes the fear obsolete.
The proof is here. The power is here. The only thing holding you back is your own fear.
Ideas that spread, win. Boring ideas don’t spread.
Boring organizations don’t grow.
Why haven’t you and your team launched as many purple cows as you’d like?
By refusing to reveal the basis for his criticism, he’s being a coward, because there’s no way to challenge his opinion.
If I had written a boring book, there’d be no criticism. No conversation. The products and services that get talked about are the ones that are worth talking about.
If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about the criticism, then you have to compare that bad feeling with the benefits you’ll get from actually doing something worth doing.
The first thing a leader can focus on is the act of tightening the tribe.
It’s tempting to make the tribe bigger, to get more members, to spread the word. This pales, however, when juxtaposed with the effects of a tighter tribe. A tribe that communicates more quickly, with alacrity and emotion, is a tribe that thrives.
It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.
When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.
People don’t engage merely to remind one another of the status quo. Instead, they eagerly engage when they want something to improve. This microleadership is essential to the health of your organization.
Evangelism requires leadership
Curious is the key word.
A desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting.
Curious people count.
They’re the ones who talk to people who are in a stupor. They’re the ones who lead the masses in the middle who are stuck. The masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing, which the curious can’t abide.
All you need to do is motivate people who choose to follow you.
Trying to lead everyone results in leading no one in particular.
Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger.
They realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.
Some tribes do better when they’re smaller. More exclusive. Harder to get into. Some tribes thrive precisely because they’re small. Push to make one of these tribes bigger and you might just ruin the entire thing. “No one goes there anymore; it’s too popular.”
You can recognize the need for faith in your idea, you can find the tribe you need to support you, and yes, you can create a new religion around your faith.
When you lead without compensation, when you sacrifice without guarantees, when you take risks because you believe, then you are demonstrating your faith in the tribe and its mission.
Set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
The key elements in creating a micromovement consist of five things to do and six principles:
- Publish a manifesto.
- Make it easy for your followers to connect with you.
- Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another.
- Realize that money is not the point of a movement.
- Track your progress.
Principles:
- Transparency really is your only option.
- Your movement needs to be bigger than you.
- Movements that grow, thrive.
Movements are made most clear when compared to the status quo or to movements that work to push the other direction
Exclude outsiders.
Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up.
The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong!
The secret is being willing to be wrong.
The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.
The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
People don’t like to switch. To switch sides is to admit that we made a mistake.
The tactics of leadership are easy. The art is the diffcult part.
Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.
Leaders challenge the status quo.
Leaders create a culture around their goal and involve others in that culture.
Leaders have an extraordinary amount of curiosity about the world they’re trying to change.
Leaders use charisma (in a variety of forms) to attract and motivate followers.
Leaders communicate their vision of the future.
Leaders commit to a vision and make decisions based on that commitment.
Leaders connect their followers to one another.
Being charismatic doesn’t make you a leader. Being a leader makes you charismatic.
The secret, is to listen, to value what you hear, and then to make a decision even if it contradicts the very people you are listening to.
People want to be sure you heard what they said—they’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said.
Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance.
If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.
Today, of course, you can publish a book all by yourself. Just visit Lulu.com and you’re done.
The very nature of leadership is that you’re not doing what’s been done before. If you were, you’d be following, not leading.