Tribes


Read about our pricing and services

List Price: $20.99

PriceQuantity
$16.791-24
$14.6925-99
$12.59100-499
$11.54500-999
$10.291000+

Bulk discounts are non-returnable.

Customize It

FREE US Ground Shipping on 25+ copies

Hardcover
151 pages
ISBN 9781591842330 Published Oct. 2008
Portfolio
See all formats


Tribes
We Need You to Lead Us
By Seth Godin 

Related Blog Posts
The Leader in You
Posted Oct. 17, 2011 8:09 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

In Tribes, Seth Godin writes, "Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. This scarcity makes leadership valuable. In other words, if everyone could do it, they would, and it wouldn’t be worth much." His book then gives evidence that leadership no longer has to come from the corner office, but that anyone no matter how atypical can 'step up.' If you have even a spark of a leader in you, Tribes will help you fan the flames.

So, you're inspired. You know you've got 'it.' The need to lead hums through your veins. You've worked your way up to the position you've always wanted. You've gathered your tribe. But then what? As a leader, what do you believe? As a leader, how do you communicate what you believe to the people who choose to follow? One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership by Mike Figliuolo is a simple step toward clarifying your own philosophy and sharing that philosophy with others.

Figliuolo, who is Founder and Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC--a professional training firm focused on leadership development, is as efficient in introducing the premise of his book as the title implies:

Imagine being able to explain your leadership philosophy on one piece of paper--a simple 8.5-by 11-inch summation of all you are and all you want to be as a leader. How powerful would it be to have a discussion about that single page with the members of your team? They would be thrilled to have just one page to read, understand, and internalize. Envision how that one page could simplify and clarify how you want your team members to conduct themselves. Think about how impressed candidates and new hires would be if they could quickly understand your standards, expectations, and goals easily and from one single solitary page.

To do this, to distill your leadership philosophy into one page worth of words, Figliuolo says you must first evaluate four aspects of leadership and then create leadership maxims ("principles or rules of conduct") that are "clear, pithy, and personally meaningful." One Piece of Paper shows you how to create maxims that are emotionally charged and devoid of jargon (nobody wants to be instructed to think out of the box one more time in this lifetime, after all.)

Much of Figliuolo's book is, of course, not only for learning about yourself, and what it means for YOU to be a leader, but about communication. It's about creating a vocabulary that has meaning and authenticity, but can also be understood by others, memorized and assimilated by the group. It's about a common language for your tribe.



The Linchpin Voltron
Posted March 9, 2010 12:53 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Books can do a lot for us: inspire, teach, jolt, enlighten. They can be a call to action, but they can't actually make us act. You have to find the gumption to do that on your own. Or do you?

Seth Godin's Linchpin is certainly a call to action. His last book, Tribes: Why We Need You to Lead Us, showed the high regards he holds his readers in. With Linchpin, he reveals what high expectations he has of them... indeed, that he thinks they can and should be (or become) indispensable. In fact, I'd say Linchpin is more than a call to action; it's a challenge. It's a challenge to break the factory mold of productivity we were educated in and become an artist in whatever we do. And it's a challenge you don't have to meet alone. The good Mr. Godin is offering a Linchpin 5 Pack Bonus.

What is the bonus, you ask? I'll tell you.

Seth has just developed "The Linchpin Group Discussion Guide" and is offering it free to groups who order five copies of the book. (The PDF will be sent by email to arrive before your books do.) I like to think of it as the Linchpin Voltron, as five individuals forming some larger force—maybe not to defend the universe as the original Voltron did, but to do work indispensable to the world (or at least your corner of it). So order the Linchpin 5 Pack Bonus, gather your team together and do something with those ideas and the excitement the ideas generate.

LET'S GO VOLTRON FORCE!



Jack Covert Selects - Linchpin
Posted Jan. 15, 2010 7:08 a.m. by 800-ceo-read

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? By Seth Godin, Portfolio, 256 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, January 2010, ISBN 9781591843160

Seth Godin has a high opinion of you. In his last book, Tribes, he told you that “We need you to lead us.” In his new offering, Linchpin, he asks, “Are you indispensable?” and fully expects that you can be.

In the past, it was safe and even profitable to be a “cog” in the machine. Today, to obtain any kind of security, to truly be valuable, you must try to become a “linchpin.” A linchpin is someone you can’t run the machine without. Though becoming indispensible is not easy, Godin explains why it’s necessary. He traces where our indoctrination into mediocrity comes from, and shows us how to break free of it… however uncomfortable that may be. Godin is ultimately trying to help you reverse that indoctrination and discover the artist you inherently are. If we can do that, we can begin “standing out” in our work rather than “sticking it out” at a job.

The business book genre is changing, allowing a space for titles that change not only the way we look at the workplace, but at the world. In Linchpin, Godin writes early on: “This book is about love and art and change and fear.” It’s an odd thing to read in a business book, but it fits. We spend most of our lives at work in some way or another, and accepting the reality Godin sees (full of opportunity as it may be) can be daunting. He’s asking us to abandon a way of thinking about ourselves, and the “factory model” of work that we were raised in.

It seems that some business authors have come to an epiphany that how we all go to work is how we build our society, that the building blocks of business are placed on the foundation of something larger. Here we have Godin telling us we need to abandon the factory model and mindset. Last year Douglas Rushkoff challenged the corporate model we define our very lives with in Life, Inc. The useful “nuts and bolts” business books that helps us focus on a specific problem at work aren’t going away, but there are more books than ever addressing the larger problem of work, and Seth Godin’s Linchpin is an important and delightful one. Oh, and did I mention it is filled with illustrations from Jessica Hagy and Hugh MacLeod? Great stuff.



In the Books - Off to the Printers IX
Posted Jan. 11, 2010 8:01 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

In our second to last installment of articles from past editions of In the Books, we have a short essay from mister Jon Mueller. In it, Jon shares some of his insights on an oft-discussed topic around these parts—the future of the book and distribution of ideas.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The Shifting Landscape of Moving Ideas: The Art of Publishing in a Socially Empowered World BY JON MUELLER

The book remains the definitive source for deep exploration of knowledge on a topic. Whether developing a fictional idea, characters and events, or explaining a non-fiction theory or process, the potential size and portability of books allows them to continue to function as a useful tool of communicating information. All in all, books haven’t changed much. But the ways people receive information sure have.

Each year the number of book titles produced rises as publishers attempt to increase their odds of having a bestseller. But is it working? With each title, there’s less time to create an impact, yet a greater number of opportunities to communicate the idea as readers find more methods to receive information. Within that irony is a solution to publishing’s dilemma.

Random House publisher Jonathan Karp existed in a title-saturated world for many years before forming his own imprint called Twelve. As the name of the company suggests, it produces twelve titles per year, and invests more time and energy into each title than larger publishers, which might produce hundreds of titles per year. This focused method allows Twelve to examine many different ways to spread the idea and spend more time implementing those methods, which greatly increases the chances that more people will hear about and support the idea—in whatever forms it takes on. In an August 2005 BusinessWeek article, Karp explained, “Most writers I know don't think of themselves as working in only one format. It's entirely possible that something will begin as a magazine article in Time, then become a book, then become a movie, then become a television show.”

For publishers like Twelve, the rules seem to be: Know your audience, produce fewer titles and do more with those titles. As audiences are continually introduced to new ways to receive content, there are great possibilities for authors and publishers to make an impact with their work. If an idea is revealed when a reader holds a book, gets online, reads a magazine, watches television, sees a movie and more, that idea, that author and that publisher will have communicated a variety of things to their audience, and captivated its attention in ways a single format could not.

This year, The Word of Mouth Manual by Dave Balter was published online. This 128-page book was offered for free to anyone as a digital file, and word spread rapidly as people began downloading and reading. A physical edition of the book was also produced. Featuring a waterproof cover, and an original piece of art from an artist-in-residence at the author’s company, the physical version fully utilizes the tactile experience absent from reading the text online. Though the physical book carried a price tag with it (as opposed to the free download), the point is that different people want different things. Fortunately, for author and publisher, whichever version the audience members use, it’s likely they will tell others about the great free book they read, or the interesting presentation, touch and interaction with a book unlike any they had read before.

Those conversations are the goals of marketing, and are essential for authors and publishers to be able to continue to do what they do. Offering various formats is a trend not only practiced in the book publishing world, but in many mediums, as blog writers acquire book deals, recordings are paired with exclusive film work and further conglomerations of all angles from all media are formed. Addressing all these formats takes time, so it makes sense that a lesser amount of titles would be published to put these to full effect. In this scenario, ad hype will give way to a clear understanding of what is good, and what isn’t, as those absorbing content will understand it deeper than they might have from traditional methods of promotion. In other words, you can’t reveal the content any clearer than by offering an entire book for free. Then it’s up to the audience to decide which other ways they want to see that content. Some will be content to simply read it once online. Others will want a reference guide on a shelf that they can pull, reread, take with them places and not require any sort of electricity to activate.

Multiple formats are not only beneficial for digesting ideas, but also for spreading them. As more people are getting information from different sources, more people inevitably are talking about that information. As Deirdre Breakenridge states in her book, PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences, “Social networking empowers the twenty-first century consumer to choose what is newsworthy and relevant to them. Consumers are leading a 2.0 revolution in their social networking communities. They pass more and more information back and forth through connections; relying on an extended network of family, friends, business associates, and acquaintances. The movement toward social media enables easy information sharing” (141). As publishers and authors utilize social networking, the ideas spread in ways that previously would take much longer to work, and to a much lesser extent. This process also teaches publishers and authors more about their audience.

As Bill Tancer states in his book Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters, “In our increasingly connected lives, we’re bombarded with news and information from a multitude of channels (television, print, radio, and the internet), some useful, some not so useful. It gets interesting…when we react to that information by interacting with the source itself. What information we react to and how, when viewed collectively, reveals insight into what affects us. From a business perspective, having a view into the feedback loop is invaluable – from the simple, tactical use of planning when to promote products online, such as prom dresses and engagement rings, to the visualization of Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point…” (201).

Through the human/technology interaction, there is a substantial growth of opportunities for authors and publishers. As content gets into the heads and hands of the audience, it has the potential to flourish, creating a scenario where the content creator can explore other methods of generating income. As Dave Balter states on his web site, “The publishing industry, much like the music industry, is teetering on a massive change in control—from publishers to authors and consumers! The distribution of the book itself is an indication of the power of Word of Mouth.” As this change continues to occur, the process isn’t necessarily becoming easier to manage, but for those dedicated to spreading their ideas, the resources for getting those ideas to people (who will hopefully become evangelists), are more plentiful than ever.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Books from 2008 that can help.

More on this book

Lists & Bestsellers