The tribes we lead | Seth Godin

294,469 views ・ 2009-05-11

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
So sometimes I get invited to give weird talks.
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I got invited to speak to the people
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who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes
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to perform at sporting events.
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Unfortunately I couldn't go.
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But it got me thinking about
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the fact that these guys, at least most of them,
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know what it is that they do for a living.
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What they do is they dress up
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as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting events.
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Shortly after that I got invited
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to speak at the convention of the people
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who make balloon animals.
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And again, I couldn't go. But it's a fascinating group. They make balloon animals.
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There is a big schism between the ones who make
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gospel animals and porn animals, but --
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(Laughter)
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they do a lot of really cool stuff with balloons.
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Sometimes they get in trouble, but not often.
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And the other thing about these guys
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is, they also know what they do for a living.
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They make balloon animals.
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But what do we do for a living?
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What exactly to the people watching this do every day?
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And I want to argue that what we do
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is we try to change everything.
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That we try to find a piece of the status quo --
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something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved,
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something that is itching to be changed -- and we change it.
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We try to make big, permanent, important change.
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But we don't think about it that way.
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And we haven't spent a lot of time talking about
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what that process is like.
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And I've been studying it for a couple years.
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And I want to share a couple stories with you today.
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First, about a guy named Nathan Winograd.
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Nathan was the number two person at the San Francisco SPCA.
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And what you may not know about the history of the SPCA
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is, it was founded to kill dogs and cats.
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Cities gave them a charter
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to get rid of the stray animals on the street and destroy them.
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In a typical year four million dogs and cats were killed,
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most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off of the street.
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Nathan and his boss saw this,
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and they could not tolerate it.
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So they set out to make San Francisco
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a no-kill city:
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create an entire city
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where every dog and cat,
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unless it was ill or dangerous,
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would be adopted, not killed.
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And everyone said it was impossible.
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Nathan and his boss went to the city council to get a change in the ordinance.
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And people from SPCAs and humane shelters around the country
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flew to San Francisco
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to testify against them --
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to say it would hurt the movement and it was inhumane.
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They persisted. And Nathan went directly to the community.
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He connected with people who cared about this:
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nonprofessionals, people with passion.
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And within just a couple years,
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San Francisco became the first no-kill city,
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running no deficit, completely supported by the community.
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Nathan left and went to Tompkins County, New York --
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a place as different from San Francisco
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as you can be and still be in the United States. And he did it again.
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He went from being a glorified dogcatcher
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to completely transforming the community.
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And then he went to North Carolina and did it again.
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And he went to Reno and he did it again.
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And when I think about what Nathan did,
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and when I think about what people here do, I think about ideas.
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And I think about the idea that
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creating an idea, spreading an idea
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has a lot behind it.
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I don't know if you've ever been to a Jewish wedding,
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but what they do is, they take a light bulb
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and they smash it.
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Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it.
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But one reason is because it indicates a change,
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from before to after.
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It is a moment in time.
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And I want to argue that we are living through
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and are right at the key moment
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of a change in the way ideas are created
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and spread and implemented.
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We started with the factory idea:
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that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory
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that could churn out change.
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We then went to the TV idea,
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that said if you had a big enough mouthpiece,
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if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win.
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And now we're in this new model of leadership,
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where the way we make change
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is not by using money
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or power to lever a system,
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but by leading.
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So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle.
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Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea.
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It enables him to hire men
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who used to get paid 50 cents a day
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and pay them five dollars a day.
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Because he's got an efficient enough factory.
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Well with that sort of advantage
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you can churn out a lot of cars.
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You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built.
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You can change the fabric of an entire country.
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That the essence of what you're doing is you need
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ever-cheaper labor,
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and ever-faster machines.
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And the problem we've run into is, we're running out of both.
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Ever-cheaper labor and ever-faster machines.
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(Laughter)
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So we shift gears for a minute,
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and say, "I know: television;
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advertising. Push push.
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Take a good idea and push it on the world.
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I have a better mousetrap.
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And if I can just get enough money to tell enough people, I'll sell enough."
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And you can build an entire industry on that.
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If necessary you can put babies in your ads.
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If necessary you can use babies to sell other stuff.
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And if babies don't work, you can use doctors.
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But be careful.
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Because you don't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition,
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where you're talking about one thing instead of the other.
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(Laughter)
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This model requires you to act like the king,
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like the person in the front of the room
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throwing things to the peons in the back.
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That you are in charge, and you're going to tell people
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what to do next.
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The quick little diagram of it is, you're up here,
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and you are pushing it out to the world.
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This method -- mass marketing --
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requires average ideas,
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because you're going to the masses,
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and plenty of ads.
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What we've done as spammers
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is tried to hypnotize everyone
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into buying our idea,
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hypnotize everyone into donating to our cause,
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hypnotize everyone into voting for our candidate.
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And, unfortunately, it doesn't work so well anymore either.
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(Laughter)
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But there is good news around the corner -- really good news.
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I call it the idea of tribes.
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What tribes are, is a very simple concept
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that goes back 50,000 years.
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It's about leading and connecting people and ideas.
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And it's something that people have wanted forever.
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Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe,
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having a work tribe,
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having a community tribe.
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But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media,
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thanks to a lot of other things
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that are bubbling through our society around the world,
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tribes are everywhere.
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The Internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all.
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Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest.
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So you've got the red-hat ladies over here.
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You've got the red-hat triathletes over there.
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You've got the organized armies over here.
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You've got the disorganized rebels over here.
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You've got people in white hats making food.
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And people in white hats sailing boats.
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The point is that you can find Ukrainian folk dancers
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and connect with them,
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because you want to be connected.
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That people on the fringes
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can find each other, connect and go somewhere.
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Every town that has a volunteer fire department
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understands this way of thinking.
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(Laughter)
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Now it turns out
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this is a legitimate non-photoshopped photo.
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People I know who are firemen told me that this is not uncommon.
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And that what firemen do to train sometimes
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is they take a house that is going to be torn down,
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and they burn it down instead, and practice putting it out.
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But they always stop and take a picture.
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(Laughter)
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You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one.
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They've got their own flag. They've got the eye patches.
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You can tell when you're running into someone in a tribe.
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And it turns out that it's tribes --
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not money, not factories --
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that can change our world, that can change politics,
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that can align large numbers of people.
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Not because you force them to do something against their will,
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but because they wanted to connect.
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That what we do for a living now,
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all of us, I think,
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is find something worth changing,
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and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes
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that spread the idea and spread the idea.
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And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves,
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it becomes a movement.
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So when Al Gore set out
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to change the world again,
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he didn't do it by himself.
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And he didn't do it by buying a lot of ads.
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He did it by creating a movement.
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Thousands of people around the country
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who could give his presentation for him,
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because he can't be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night.
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You don't need everyone.
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What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need,
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I don't know, a thousand true fans --
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a thousand people who care enough
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that they will get you the next round
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and the next round and the next round.
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And that means that the idea you create, the product you create,
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the movement you create isn't for everyone,
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it's not a mass thing. That's not what this is about.
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What it's about instead
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is finding the true believers.
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It's easy to look at what I've said so far,
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and say, "Wait a minute, I don't have what it takes to be that kind of leader."
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So here are two leaders. They don't have a lot in common.
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They're about the same age. But that's about it.
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What they did, though, is each in their own way,
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created a different way
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of navigating your way through technology.
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So some people will go out and get people to be on one team.
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And some people will get people to be on the other team.
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It also informs the decisions you make
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when you make products or services.
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You know, this is one of my favorite devices.
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But what a shame that it's not organized
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to help authors create movements.
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What would happen if, when you're using your Kindle,
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you could see the comments and quotes and notes
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from all the other people reading the same book as you in that moment.
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Or from your book group. Or from your friends, or from the circle you want.
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What would happen if authors, or people with ideas
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could use version two, which comes out on Monday,
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and use it to organize people
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who want to talk about something.
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Now there is a million things I could share with you about the mechanics here.
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But let me just try a couple.
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The Beatles did not invent teenagers.
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They merely decided to lead them.
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That most movements, most leadership that we're doing
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is about finding a group that's disconnected
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but already has a yearning --
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not persuading people to want something
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they don't have yet.
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When Diane Hatz worked on "The Meatrix,"
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her video that spread all across the internet
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about the way farm animals are treated,
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she didn't invent the idea of being a vegan.
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She didn't invent the idea of caring about this issue.
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But she helped organize people,
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and helped turn it into a movement.
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Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected
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middle and lower class of Venezuela. He merely led them.
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Bob Marley did not invent Rastafarians.
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He just stepped up and said, "Follow me."
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Derek Sivers invented CD Baby,
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which allowed independent musicians
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to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man --
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to have place to take the mission
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they already wanted to go to, and connect with each other.
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What all these people have in common is that they are heretics.
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That heretics look at the status quo and say,
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"This will not stand. I can't abide this status quo.
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I am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward.
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I see what the status quo is; I don't like it."
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That instead of looking at all the little rules
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and following each one of them,
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that instead of being what I call a sheepwalker --
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somebody who's half asleep,
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following instructions,
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keeping their head down, fitting in --
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every once in a while someone stands up and says, "Not me."
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Someone stands up and says, "This one is important.
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We need to organize around it."
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And not everyone will. But you don't need everyone.
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You just need a few people --
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(Laughter) --
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who will look at the rules,
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realize they make no sense,
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and realize how much they want to be connected.
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So Tony Hsieh does not run a shoe store.
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Zappos isn't a shoe store.
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Zappos is the one, the only,
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the best-there-ever-was
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place for people who are into shoes to find each other,
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to talk about their passion,
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to connect with people who care more
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about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow.
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It can be something as prosaic as shoes,
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and something as complicated as overthrowing a government.
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It's exactly the same behavior though.
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What it requires, as Geraldine Carter has discovered,
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is to be able to say, "I can't do this by myself.
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But if I can get other people to join my Climb and Ride,
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then together we can get something that we all want.
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We're just waiting for someone to lead us."
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Michelle Kaufman has pioneered
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new ways of thinking about environmental architecture.
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She doesn't do it by quietly building one house at a time.
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She does it by telling a story
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to people who want to hear it.
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By connecting a tribe of people
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who are desperate to be connected to each other.
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By leading a movement and
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making change.
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And around and around and around it goes.
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So three questions I'd offer you.
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The first one is, who exactly
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are you upsetting?
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Because if you're not upsetting anyone, you're not changing the status quo.
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The second question is, who are you connecting?
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Because for a lot of people, that's what they're in it for:
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the connections that are being made, one to the other.
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And the third one is, who are you leading?
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Because focusing on that part of it --
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not the mechanics of what you're building,
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but the who, and the leading part -- is where change comes.
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So Blake, at Tom's Shoes, had a very simple idea.
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"What would happen if every time someone bought a pair of these shoes
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I gave exactly the same pair to someone
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who doesn't even own a pair of shoes?"
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This is not the story of how you get shelf space at Neiman Marcus.
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It's a story of a product that tells a story.
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And as you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes
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and someone says, "What are those?"
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You get to tell the story on Blake's behalf,
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on behalf of the people who got the shoes.
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And suddenly it's not one pair of shoes or 100 pairs of shoes.
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It's tens of thousands of pairs of shoes.
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My friend Red Maxwell has spent the last 10 years
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fighting against juvenile diabetes.
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Not fighting the organization that's fighting it -- fighting with them, leading them,
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connecting them, challenging the status quo
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because it's important to him.
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And the people he surrounds himself with need the connection.
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They need the leadership. It makes a difference.
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You don't need permission from people to lead them.
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But in case you do, here it is:
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they're waiting, we're waiting
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for you to show us where to go next.
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So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge
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the status quo.
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They challenge what's currently there.
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The second thing is, they build a culture.
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A secret language, a seven-second handshake,
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a way of knowing that you're in or out.
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They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe,
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curiosity about outsiders. They're asking questions.
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They connect people to one another.
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Do you know what people want more than anything?
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They want to be missed.
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They want to be missed the day they don't show up.
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They want to be missed when they're gone.
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And tribe leaders can do that.
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It's fascinating, because all tribe leaders have charisma,
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but you don't need charisma to become a leader.
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Being a leader gives you charisma.
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If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded,
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that's where charisma comes from -- from the leading.
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Finally, they commit.
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They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe.
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They commit to the people who are there.
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So I'd like you to do something for me.
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And I hope you'll think about it before you reject it out-of-hand.
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What I want you to do, it only takes 24 hours,
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is: create a movement.
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Something that matters. Start. Do it. We need it.
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Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
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(Applause)
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Original video on YouTube.com
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