4-5 months ago, I finished reading Seth Godin’s new book “Tribes: We need you to lead us”. The book is very short and is very interesting.
Tribes, the book is talking about leadership in the new age. The book makes sense in this age of social networking. “Tribes” is concept of few to infinite number of connected people where the group will be having a leader and the interested common topic for the tribes he attracted. The book helps us to realize that, there’s leader inside everyone.
Social network like twitter, facebook, and friendfeed are booming around and millions of people are roaming around various social networks that are having their own “tribes”. The best way explain about Tribe is to talk about twitter. Twitter is a simple website share the answer for a simple question “what are you doing?” There are people whom are following you and also you can follow many. The messages are simply limited to 140 chars. whenever you share a message; it’s been distributed to tens, hundreds, thousands of people following you. The interesting thing is that you can receive and send new tweets using your mobile phone itself.
I never realized the power of twitter and social networking websites before reading this book. The simple example is the posts in this blog. All posts and updates in this blog are shared to friend feed and friends feed is shared with twitter. This means that, all updates in this blog will be distributed globally to those who are following me through various social networks.
The book is starting with story of Joel Spolsky, one of my favorite blogger, entrepreneur, programmer etc. Seth explains how he attracted people and created his own tribe. The topic chosen by Joel was “how to run small software companies?” the interesting articles spread among people and thus he made his tribe.
Seth shared some interesting short stories connected to twitter.com. He explained how a housewife Laura attracted millions people to her social network by gaining their trust and keeping interests by small tweets and how she became a consultant. How Scott Beale thrown a party within no time by a simple tweet? It’s all about power of social networking, leadership and keeping your tribe with you.
The book is also talking about various short topics like
- Leading from bottom – how a person attracted many people with his innovative security ideas after World Trade Center disaster? What all he did was a 3 hours presentation discussing about various security challenges and solution for them.
- Opportunity of leadership – leading and marketing
- The difference between crowd and tribe – Crowd is a tribe without a leader and communication
- Changing the status quo – Trying something new – Changes from conventional systems and procedures. Few stories related to it.
- Difference between how a employees and tribe?
The book is really good give us a light on new age marketing, building social networks, earning trust, leading tribe following us etc. but the book misses details on how? It’s only provide some collected stories who are successful with their tribes. The book is really missing on how to do the ground work? Just trying view things in an abstract point of view. However we can learn lot many new things, which is up to date with current affairs and business styles.
Here are few quotes from the book.
- You don’t need a keyboard to lead, you only need the desire to make something happen
- Without leader, there are no followers. You’re a leader, we need you to lead us.
- Leaders are having followers while managers have employees.
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