Seth Godin - Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

JOEL SPOLSKY IS CHANGING THE WORLD.

Maybe not your world, but the world of programmers and software companies and the people who work with them. The way Joel is changing the world, though, is something every single one of us needs to pay attention to.

While Joel runs a small software company in New York City, his real passion is talking about how to run a small software company. Through blogs and books and conferences, Joel has changed the way many smart people think about finding, hiring, and managing programmers. Along the way, Joel has assembled a large and influential tribe of people who look to him for leadership.

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. Joel provides both. He runs a profitable job board that attracts the very best programmers (and the best jobs) in the world. He even created the widely used Joel Test, which is a measure of how programmer friendly a job might be. A Google search on Joel returns seventy-six million matches, and Joel Spolsky is first, right where he belongs.

Tribes need leadership. Sometimes one person leads, sometimes more. People want connection and growth and something new. They want change. Joels leadership provided change. Hes given this tribe a lever to dramatically alter the way business is done in their industry. Along the way, hes found his passion (and grown his company).

You cant have a tribe without a leaderand you cant be a leader without a tribe.

Long, Strange Trip

Forty years ago, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead made some decisions that changed the music industry forever. You might not be in the music business and you may never have been to a Dead concert, but the impact the Dead made affects almost every industry, including yours.

In addition to grossing more than $100 million during their career, the Dead helped us understand how tribes work. They didnt succeed by selling records (they only had one Top 40 album). Instead, they succeeded by attracting and leading a tribe.

Human beings cant help it: we need to belong. One of the most powerful of our survival mechanisms is to be part of a tribe, to contribute to (and take from) a group of like-minded people. We are drawn to leaders and to their ideas, and we cant resist the rush of belonging and the thrill of the new.

When one Deadhead says to another, 2-14-70, its like a secret code. The smiles and the hugs and handshakes define who we arebeing in a tribe is a big part of how we see ourselves.

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, well keep joining.

Tribes make our lives better. And leading a tribe is the best life of all.

Tribes Used to Be Local

Jacqueline Novogratz is changing the world. Not by leading everyone in her town, but by challenging people in twenty countries to join a movement. One at a time, Jacqueline is inspiring entrepreneurs in the developing world to create enterprises that enrich the people around them. Shes helping create organizations that deliver clean water, ambulances, and reading glassesand doing it in a scalable way that challenges expectations.

Jacqueline doesnt just love her job leading the Acumen Fund; shes also changing the very face of philanthropy. Her tribe of donors, employees, entrepreneurs, and supporters counts on her leadership to inspire and motivate them.

Geography used to be important. A tribe might be everyone in a certain village, or it might be model-car enthusiasts in Sacramento, or it might be the Democrats in Springfield. Corporations and other organizations have always created their own tribes around their offices or their marketstribes of employees or customers or parishioners.

Now, the Internet eliminates geography.

This means that existing tribes are bigger, but more important, it means that there are now more tribes, smaller tribes, influential tribes, horizontal and vertical tribes, and tribes that could never have existed before. Tribes you work with, tribes you travel with, tribes you buy with. Tribes that vote, that discuss, that fight. Tribes where everyone knows your name. The professionals at the CIA are a tribe and so are the volunteers at the ACLU.

Theres an explosion of new tools available to help lead the tribes were forming. Facebook and Ning and Meetup and Twitter. Squidoo and Basecamp and Craigslist and e-mail. There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didnt exist a generation ago.

All of it is worthless if you dont decide to lead. All of it goes to waste if your leadership is compromised, if you settle, if you dont commit.