Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us serves up a compact guide to be a leader of ideas. How should a leader of a tribe, a movement, cause, purpose devoted to a singular mission act or think? That’s what Godin covers with a mixture of anecdotes, stories from people who have led and succeeded or analogy or blunt deconstruction of a point.
At about 130 pages, it reads quickly with each point or example no more than 300 to 500 words. He writes with purpose and clarity. There are times when his anecdotes seem thin, needing more context or explanation. Or is this a clever trick for the reader to become curious about the person he mentions and Google them?
If you’ve read other Godin books, similar themes emerge. His emphatic belief that the factory mindset of cranking out widgets is broken. Education that invokes follow the rules behavior is an unsuccessful path. People fail not by the act of failing, but by not doing anything due to fear.