“People today are being encouraged to make connections, solve interesting problems and to lead”, declared Seth Godin, business guru, author of at least a dozen books including Purple Cow and Tribes. Godin was the keynote speaker at the 2010 Small Business Summit in New York City last week.
The Summit was a remarkable opportunity to be with over 500 small business owners and hear from thought leaders like Seth Godin. The best thing I can share with you about the Summit was some of Godin’s ideas from his recent book Linchpin (Penguin Books), in which he describes a revolution of people becoming essential building blocks of great organizations. The following are some of the highlights as they touched us.
1. The industrialization model of the past century was effective in maximizing production efficiency. It produced scaleable cookie-cutter businesses, but also ordinary products and ordinary people. The model depended upon a workforce culture of obedience and conformity. It carried a promise to people working in the factories that they would be safe, but they would have to follow the rules and perform work that did not require thinking. The result was that it created a labor pool that was easily replicable, interchangeable and dispensable.
2. The problem, however, with a business based on inexpensive, interchangeable, dispensable parts is that once the system is determined others will be able to replicate it less expensively. Management, as a result, would have to produce a product without personalization or connections, and would have to lower its prices to compete, which means a race to the bottom.
3. The world is a different place (again). Today, people are not obedient and are not following rules. They are instead being asked to think. They are being encouraged to make connections, solve interesting problems, lead, and express the art of what they do. This is a race to the top.
4. These people are the linchpins. They are people who lead regardless of title. They connect others, invent, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They stand up and do work that matters. They make significant differences in whatever they do. They are making their own choices for their own futures. They are the essential building blocks of great organizations.
5. Under the old model there was management and workers. Management needed workers for its factories, and workers needed factories for work, but workers were more dependent upon the factories than factories were dependent on workers. Today, the means of production are a worker and a laptop connected to the Internet, which results in a fundamental shift in power and control. This shift has released the genius in people, who are breaking away from everything they learned. They are breaking away from everything that meant being obedient to the rules of industrialized productivity that produced “perfect” products.
6. Doing it perfectly is boring. It results in ordinary people and ordinary products. Godin sees that what new business really wants is to pay people, not for being competent, but to invent … to be adverse to bowling and every game where what’s perfect is pre-determined.
7. Linchpins do two things for their organizations. They exert emotional labor and they make a map. And when they do that they are indispensable to the organization. They then have more power than management, and when management attracts, motivates, and retains great talent it has more leverage than the competition.
Seth Godiin may be ahead of the curve for many small businesses that are following an industrialization model for their small businesses by creating systems and hiring qualified, but “least” qualified people, to handle routine tasks, as described by Michael Gerber in his best-selling book, The E-Myth Revisited (Harper Business). Godin even writes about Gerber’s model in Linchpin. We may still struggle with how would we get anything made if there were only leaders and no followers. But that may be the wrong question. Rather, what could you accomplish if a leader made everything you produced.
The time with Seth Godin was exciting. I hope I have shared a small sense of his creativity and passion; and I encourage you to go to his website (www.sethgodin.com), and follow his blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/).
