I owe you a follow-up. From The Top 7 Business Themes on my 2009 Wish List:
5. The Role of the Manager reconstructed
Managers matter, yet we still don’t quite understand why they matter and how. Managers still work and operate in that vast wasteland called “middle management” where they are babysitting the mediocrity tolerated in our organizations instead of being stewards of the smart, professional, and mission-based disciplines which make them healthier. I am afraid that until the role of the manager changes, nothing else will.
A future preview:
Marketing Guru Seth Godin is enjoying some success right now with his latest book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and I will review it in a future blog post. In short, he seeks to elevate leadership —and I applaud his ideas in that regard, however he does so at the expense of management, and he depreciates the worth of managers nearly every single time he mentions them. I understand the comparison he is trying to make, however please don’t buy in to that notion that we don’t need managers —he is dead wrong.
As promised, this is my book review for Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.
I’m normally quite an enthusiastic fan of marketing author Seth Godin, with several of his books in my library. I read his blog regularly, and thus had sweet anticipation built up for Tribes once he announced the book was to be released, for I had caught his early blog posts hinting to the thoughts he’d had simmering, discussing them with the readers of my coaching site.
However this time, Godin has written a book which annoyed me with its careless construction (what little there is), and disturbs me for a reason which cuts deeply for someone who thinks of herself as the managers’ advocate; Godin didn’t have to knock management in order to elevate leadership. A pity really, for the book could have stood on its own without him doing so —and with more editing and thoughtful construction. Tribes is a book which seemed to have been rushed to publication for some reason, with something I found to be very out of character for the writing I have come to expect from Seth Godin —several contradictions and an incomplete thesis. Unfortunately, the book comes off as an added revenue stream in his publishing empire versus a book with an important message.
Godin is a master at something I frequently will advocate with you: He chooses his vocabulary carefully, to create a ‘language of intention’ which gets talked about and communicated easily. His fans can tell you all about his “zooming,” who a “sneezer” is, why “purple cows” are remarkable, and about the ingredients in a “meatball sundae.” Brilliance. In that regard he doesn’t disappoint in Tribes, for it is rife with several gems, mostly winners he’s pulled out of past blog posts proven to resonate. However this time they are lined up with a jab here, and a joust there, and Godin seems to sputter pronouncements one after the other with very little effort at substantiating them. He seeks to be concise and pithy, (and he usually is), but in a convoluted Tribes I found him to be impatient and incomplete.
Then the punch to the gut: Godin has selected a word I revere, leadership, and has sought to define it as the better comparison to an anti-management message that is riddled with rude assumptions in the generalities he uses. For example;
“Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done.
Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible.
Leadership, on the other hand is about creating change that you believe in.
Movements have leaders, and movements make things happen.
Leaders have followers; managers have employees.
Managers make widgets, leaders make change.”
Clearly, Godin doesn’t really understand what great managers really do.
Godin defines a tribe as “People connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” He says that tribes need two things; shared interest, and way to communicate. Oh, and a critical third need is this one: You “can’t have a tribe without a leader, and you can’t be a leader without a tribe.”
His core message is this one, a call to brave leadership: “Everyone is not just a marketer, everyone is a leader: Anyone who wants to make a difference can… The question isn’t ‘Is it possible?’ but ‘Will I choose to [lead]?’ …The market needs you, we need you, and the tools are there just waiting. All that’s missing is you, and your vision, and your passion.”
This is a good message, and Godin’s book, his apparent call to arms within leadership, seeks to talk to us about two things: Not wasting the tools newly available to us every day, and being the leader possible movements need to make them happen. He’s quick to use internet examples, but the internet is just one tool, and he explains why “You don’t need a keyboard to lead, you just need the desire to make something happen. If you want to lead, and have the right cause, you can.”
I agree with much of what Godin says about leadership. For example, “Leadership is an act of generosity: You are providing fuel for a movement.” He devotes some time to explaining his belief that “People want connection, growth, something new: They want change… Being part of a tribe is one of our survival mechanisms… We can’t resist the rush of belonging, and the thrill of the new.” Sounds pretty good, right? However with each page turned, I found myself voicing one “yeah, but” after another, seeing the opportunity for management and leadership partnerships versus one being lifted at the expense of the other.
I honestly could continue with more snippets which share the potential of Tribes, but as I’ve already done in these few paragraphs, to do so requires a repackaging that would take considerable more work, work I feel Godin should have done for the price of his book. So I think I will leave it at this:
If you are a Seth Godin fan I expect that you will like Tribes. He loves to tell stories, and he shares quite a few entertaining ones. I agree with Godin on the opportunity which exists for more leadership in our world, and I think that a reader eager to lead can come away with quite a few triggers which will steer them in the right direction. I simply ask you to skip over the anti-management message, for it is quite irrelevant to the rest of the book, and it simply isn’t as true as Godin would have you believe. Managers matter.
Recent Comments