Episode 6: Seth Godin
Song of Significance with Seth Godin
Episode 6: Show Notes
Productivity, innovation, and leadership are three key pillars that drive success and growth within any organization. When effectively combined, they create a powerful synergy that propels a company to new heights and ensures its sustainability in an ever-evolving business landscape. In this episode, we are joined today by blogger, entrepreneur, best-selling author, and Founder of The Carbon Almanac, Seth Godin, to discuss the world of productivity, innovation, and leadership. Seth is a prolific writer, having authored 20 bestselling books. His works serve as profound resources for understanding key concepts in various aspects of life and business. In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest book, Song of Significance, which offers readers a thought-provoking exploration of the state of work and leadership in the modern world. In our conversation, we delve into the consequences of treating employees as mere cogs in a machine, how organizations can pinpoint productivity aspects in need of optimization, and the difference between managers and leaders. We explore the importance of defining one's value and significance, tailored metrics for success, and the power of unconventional paths in finding solutions. He also provides valuable insights into overcoming innovation dilemmas, redefining leadership for inclusivity and collaboration, balancing creativity with operations, and much more! Tune in and discover how to reimagine the world of productivity, innovation, and leadership with Seth Godin!
Key Points From This Episode:
What it means to be a useful imposter and the definition of productivity paranoia.
Examples of treating a workforce like machines and the resulting impacts.
How organizations can identify the productivity aspects that need optimizing.
The steps for individuals to overcome productivity paranoia.
Defining your value and significance as an employee.
Identifying key metrics for success that are relevant to your target audience.
Learn about the differences between a freelancer and an entrepreneur.
He explains finding the correct path by way of non-paths.
Creating the right environment for embracing innovation.
The Carbon Almanac project, what it achieved, and the lessons learned.
Explore the concept of “Page 19 Thinking” and why it is essential.
Seth shares the Harry Aker story from his book.
Discover the problems with the traditional archetypical leader approach.
Attending to annoyances in order to identify solutions.
Open-sourcing problem-solving for The Carbon Almanac project.
Maintaining a balance between the creative and operational side of a leader.
Valuable insights into good and bad types of turnover.
Quotes:
“If you're doing generous work and leading, well, then, of course, you're an imposter because no one's ever done that before.” — @ThisIsSethsBlog [0:02:00]
“It is possible to create value in the world that doesn't simply relieve pain but elevates people in a way that they would go out of their way to engage with you.” — @ThisIsSethsBlog [0:10:46]
“If you want to be successful as a freelancer, you need to get better clients. If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, you need to build a system bigger than yourself.” — @ThisIsSethsBlog [0:12:39]
“The goal is not to collect as many assets as possible. The goal is to turn on lights, create systems, and then get out of the way.” — @ThisIsSethsBlog [0:13:57]
“I would rewrite every one of my books if I had time, but then they wouldn't be markers in time.” — @ThisIsSethsBlog [0:35:32]
“You cannot manage your way to greatness. You can only manage your way to good.” — @ThisIsSethsBlog [0:38:41]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
EPISODE 6 [TRANSCRIPT]
SEASON 3 EPISODE 6
“SG: In terms of turnover, there's two kinds of turnovers. The turnover in Amazon's warehouses, where according to what I just read, is more than half of all the warehouse injuries in America happened last year, in just one company's warehouse. That turnover cost them a third of their total profits in 2021. That turnover isn't about enrollment, it's about people being exhausted and broken after just 90 days. That's not good. Because you created conditions that were unacceptable.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:37] JU: You're listening to Paint & Pipette. I'm your host, Jeremy Utley. I teach innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. Thanks for joining me to explore the art and science of bringing new ideas to life. Let's dive in.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:00] JU: All right, folks. Let's dive in today. I am joined today by a man who needs no introduction. Some people say that, but this is actually true. I'm joined by Seth Godin. Thanks for being here today, Seth.
[0:01:13] SG: Thanks for having me, Jeremy. It's great to see you.
[0:01:14] JU: Yeah, likewise. I've got to say, I've got to tell you, just right at the very beginning, how much I appreciate – you may not know this. You talk in the book, actually, about useful impostors, and you gave me permission a couple of years ago to be a useful imposter. You mentioned how you should write a blog post every day in one of your other books, and I literally googled how to start a blog, and then I started a blog because of you. I don't know if you want you to say anything about useful impostors. I find it to be a very, very helpful encouragement to those of us just finding our voice.
[0:01:48] SG: Well, I'm glad that worked. Imposter syndrome is an epidemic. It's that feeling. It afflicts just about all of us of showing up and feeling you don't have a permit, or authority, or expertise. The thing is, if you're doing generous work and leading, well, then, of course, you're an imposter because no one's ever done that before. If you're doing something again and again, that's different. To be a useful imposter, someone who seeks the additive, who seeks to make something better, but isn't sure. This is the opposite of fraud, the opposite of being a hustler. You're not doing it for you. You're doing it for the other person.
[0:02:25] JU: Yeah, that's beautiful. Now, and to have that permission, because you can think, “Well, what can I add to the conversation? Or what can I add?” Just giving that language was phenomenally helpful to me. But we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about your book, which is awesome. Song of Significance. I took more notes that we could possibly cover in 45 minutes, so I hope you blocked three hours. Does that work? I wanted to dive into, there's a particular quote. You mentioned Satya Nadella has this phrase, ‘productivity paranoia’. Would you tell us a little bit about that phrase and why it's meaningful to you?
[0:02:59] SG: So 110 years ago, Frederick Taylor wrote a short book about the way to make factories more efficient, and it involves using a stopwatch. It involves treating people like a resource, not a human. If they're a machine, you want the machine to go faster. If you time every move, if you jerk them around, that's where the phrase came from. Like puppets, you can make your output go up. That has been the watchword of most industrialism ever since.
Well, if you are doing programming, we don't need a stopwatch. All we need to do is look how many lines of code you write. If you say, good programmers write a lot of code, that's what you're going to get. A lot of code. You're not going to get good code, important code, or useful code, you get a lot of code. Productivity paranoia is the idea that a lot of tech companies and non-tech companies have, which is let's measure whatever is easy to measure and make that number go up. What the Microsoft team was trying to say is, let's figure out what's important and focus on that instead.
[0:04:04] JU: Which begs the question, what is important and how did they, or how have you seen organizations focus on that instead?
[0:04:11] SG: If you've ever called a call center, you will see that they think what's important is how many calls per hour an agent can handle. If you're a particularly difficult case, they'll just hang up on you, because they will make their numbers go up. On the other hand, Tony Hsieh, who's missed by so many, as Zappos said, “We are going to celebrate people who spend the most time on a call.” I believe, the record is nine hours.
[0:04:36] JU: What? No way.
[0:04:38] SG: Yes. No one got in trouble for spending 20 minutes on a call, even though it was a $100 pair of shoes. You say, well, how does that make sense? Tony says, “Look, we're a shoe store. We sell what everybody else sells. What we really sell is trust and connection and the benefit of the doubt and belief.” If someone has a problem and in 20 minutes, I can solve it, that is productivity. If it's a 20-minute problem and I only give that person three minutes, I just lost the customer. That was a $5,000 mistake.
[0:05:10] JU: I love the example of Zappos. That's great. How does an organization – you just eloquently rushed past Tony's identification of the thing they're actually selling. How does an organization identify the thing that they actually need to be optimizing for?
[0:05:26] SG: Okay. First, you got to make a choice. Either the model of your organization is you can pick anyone and I'm anyone. That, for example, is most screenwriters when they're not on strike, because Hollywood’s got a lot of choices. Just take whoever you know; your cousin, or whatever. Or you'll pay a lot, but you get more than you pay for. Those are the only two choices. In the category of you'll pay a lot, but you get more than you pay for, you have great clients, you have important work, and you have reputation. What makes that happen? Let's think about Thomas Derry's car wash. He has more than one now, I think two or three. It costs time and money compared to other lesser car washes to get your car washed at Rising Tide Car Wash. Does your car come out cleaner? I have no idea. There's no scientific data on this.
Do you feel better when you drive away? Yes. Why? Because everyone who works there is treated like a person, and many other people work there are neurologically diverse and are challenged by some disabilities. You leave probably tipping more, feeling better about the entire environment. That is what they sell. He shouldn't be spending a lot of time picking out a better wax. He should be spending time figuring out how to make his employees comfortable enough to do good work.
[0:06:54] JU: Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. I love that story in the book. One of the things that I can't help but wonder about is with going back to productivity paranoia for a second is there's an organizational level, and you and I've been talking right now about the organizational level. I find even if you strip away the – we can blame organizations for a lot of stuff. I find, even as of the organization, it's a deeply personal issue as well. Can you speak to how an individual overcomes productivity paranoia as well?
[0:07:23] SG: Well, the first thing I'd say is we're looking for a mutual commitment. You’re not going to find a job where the boss gives you significance. You might find a job where you can take significance in a dance with the boss, where you make a commitment to each other. What I wrote about in Linchpin is the idea that the individual has a lot of agency in this respect. What I wrote about in The Practice is overcoming press fields resistance and measuring the right things.
What does Mark Zuckerberg want you to measure? He wants you to measure how many angry comments you have, who's talking about you behind your back? How many people call friends around the thing, what your numbers are. None of which are actually important to your life. You are doing it, because our instinct is to keep track of our neighbors. Our instinct is to exceed some metric. If you can pay attention personally to what you're trying to do – in my case, there are authors I respect, who sold 40 times as many books as me. That's fine. It's great. But what I would need to do to sell that many books isn't what I'm measuring, so I'm not going to try to write a book, or promote a book that does that. I think sometimes my publisher wishes I would, but that's okay with me. I have a different agenda about what I'm trying to do, and that's what I measure.
[0:08:36] JU: How do you define that agenda, or how would – going back to advising an individual relative to an organization, because it strikes me. I like that phrase. You mentioned that mutual commitments of significance. It's a two-way street, right? It's not like, it's the organization's job, or it's my job. There is that mutual commitment. How does an individual, I mean, now with employees having more agency, or ability to choose than ever before, how did they start to define for themselves their half of the significance equation?
[0:09:04] SG: It's super simple and really hard. You have to answer two questions. What is the change I seek to make and whom am I trying to change? That's it. If lots of people are going to see your new line of skateboards or the movie you're writing, it's not for all of them. It can't be for all of them. Which ones is it for? What do they believe? What do they want? What do they dream of? What are they afraid of? Then what is the change you seek to make? If you can be clear about those two things, you will find the metrics and you will find a way to talk to yourself about whether you're achieving what you seek.
[0:09:41] JU: It strikes me, part of my role at Stanford is advising entrepreneurs. One of the phrases that we use in the entrepreneurial world is, is your product a vitamin, or is it a painkiller? If it's just a vitamin, people are going to forget it, right? I forget to take my Flintstones, right? If it's a painkiller, people are going to remember. One of the challenges, I would say, for an entrepreneur that I've observed is finding the person for whom your thing is a painkiller. Can you talk it all about? Because the way you phrase that, it makes it seem like it's an a priori decision that you're going to decide ahead of time who it's for. But I know that it's not quite that simple. How does one go about discovering the audience, or the people for whom they desire to make a change?
[0:10:24] SG: This is such a great analogy. Let me take it apart a little bit if I could. I apologize if it's your analogy. If you don't have enough vitamin C, you're going to get scurvy and die. If you take too much fentanyl, or even a little, you're going to die. What we're really talking about is, would you be missed if you were gone? It is possible to create value in the world that doesn't simply relieve pain but elevates people in a way that they would go out of their way to engage with you.
Placebos and vitamins in North America are placebos, because I have never met someone with scurvy, have a useful purpose if you don't focus all your energy on vitamin C palmitate, or whatever that is, but on the story that goes with it. I think what thoughtful entrepreneurs do is, yes, a priori, they announce who are the people they're trying to serve, not by name or by gender or by race, but by what they believe, what they seek, what they want. If I'm going to come out with a $9,000 baby stroller, it's not just who has enough money to buy a $9,000 baby stroller, who desires the status and possible peace of mind that comes from having the most expensive baby stroller in the world. I'm not going to hide from that. Those are the people I'm looking for.
If you come to me and say, “Do you have any $200 baby strollers?” I won't talk you out of buying a $200 baby stroller. I will give you the phone number and address of the $200 baby stroller store because I want you to buy it from them, not from me. Because you don't want what I'm selling. The second thing, since you brought up the word entrepreneur when I was at the business school, the distinction wasn't made. The distinction is rarely made between a freelancer and an entrepreneur.
Many people who call themselves entrepreneurs are not entrepreneurs. They are freelancers. I am a freelancer. You cannot buy stock in my company. I'm not building something that I can sell and someone else can make bigger. I don't make money when I sleep. I do the work myself. I have no staff. I'm a freelancer and proud of it. If you want to be successful as a freelancer, you need to get better clients. If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, you need to build a system bigger than yourself. There's a lot of pain and confusion that comes from people who don't understand the difference.
[0:12:56] JU: You discover it one way or the other, I suppose. If you build in what reflection cycles, that's the key.
[0:13:01] SG: Right. I've done both. I've been successful as an entrepreneur, but I never enjoyed it as much as I like being a freelancer.
[0:13:08] JU: How do you resist, maybe just going on a slight tangent. You can cut it off if you're not interested in it. How do you resist? Because I'm sure there's lots of people going, “You should scale this.” There's no lack of noises, I'm sure, in your life telling you that imagine if it were bigger, how do you check those – how do you silence those influences?
[0:13:29] SG: The quick case to be less is I invented email marketing. Then later, I built one of the first social media networks and pioneered a different way of doing online learning. In all three cases, it has gone on to become something so much bigger than what I started. I don't know any of it, right? Email marketing is now a 30 billion dollar a year business. At it when it was a 0 billion dollar a year business. Then I just said, “Go. Go for it. It's fine. Now I can go do something else.” The goal is not to collect as many assets as possible. The goal is to turn on lights, create systems, and then get out of the way.
[0:14:06] JU: That's beautiful. All right, I want to talk about, this is a nice transition, actually. One of the things you said in the book is “Finding the path is largely the work of finding non-paths, until the path is evident.” You want to say anything about that? I've got a follow-up question. But do you want to clarify that, or expound on –
[0:14:23] SG: Let's talk about one of Stanford's biggest exports, which is Google. It is said that two people founded Google. The fact is Google was failing. It was failing for two reasons. One, because there wasn't enough computing power available to them to do the searches they said they were going to do. Two engineers, not named Larry and Sergey, figured out how to solve that problem. The second problem they had is Yahoo, who I was working at the time, was the Internet. We owned the whole thing.
A woman named Marissa Mayer said to her bosses, “There's only going to be two links on the homepage.” At the time, Yahoo had a 183 links on the homepage. Think about what it took for Marissa, whom I don't know, 25, 30-years-old, stand up and say, “Nope. Two links. That's all.” That built Google. Because what we know is in 1998 and ’99, if you took the Google results, the Yahoo results and switched the logos, people preferred and said, the Google results were better, even though they were Yahoo results. Because Google's brand wasn't built by its search index, it was built by those two links on the homepage.
What I'm getting at is Sergey and Larry deserve credit for launching the thing. But how many people did it take before it became Google? The answer is a lot. You had to do all these other things that didn't work until you found something that did work. When you're doing the things that work, most people don't like them, don't approve of them, don't cheer you on. When I was at Yahoo, we had the chance to buy Google for 10 million dollars. The Yahoo guys were like, “That's stupid. There's only two links on the homepage. We already have a search engine. Go away.”
[0:16:11] JU: It strikes me that this works for organizations that are obscure, right? Google is nothing at the time, where for whom, you could say, non-paths are a non-issue. What about the organizations for whom non-paths are a deal breaker? Meaning, it's easy for a small company to find its path by way of non-paths. What I hear from a lot of organizations, though, is, “Our brand is too important,” or some version of that. What do you say to folks for whom –
[0:16:40] SG: That one’s a layup. The list of products that have been canceled by Microsoft and Apple is more than 350 long. If you go to Starbucks and ask for a Via portable powdered coffee to go, they can't hand it to you. If you ask them for the here music CD collection, they don't have it anymore.
[0:16:59] JU: Oh, I remember those. Those were great.
[0:17:02] SG: I mean, there was a time when the number one seller of CDs in America was called Starbucks, more than any record store. They sold that many records. I can go down a long list of any company that matters. Nintendo used to make playing cards. You can go down the list and say, the companies that say their brand is too valuable to risk are gone. Every time. If I think about my friends in the publishing industry, Simon & Schuster, Random House, they're going to be gone really soon. The fact is that 25 years ago, they could have started Google. You only needed two people, and they didn't. Because instead of saying, we're in the business of organizing the world's information, they said, we're in the business of chopping down trees and making independent bookstores happy. They lost.
[0:17:48] JU: Then what do you do? Let's take Simon & Schuster. They come to you and they say, “Seth, we want to find the path by finding non-paths.” Are there mechanisms or structures that you – because when it's two folks in a garage, right? You’re non-path finding all the time. How do they create the right space, or systems to do non-path elimination?
[0:18:10] SG: Okay. There are two interesting things that I would talk about companies needing to overcome for the innovator’s dilemma. The first one happened to me at Yahoo. As I said, when I was there, Yahoo was everything. I went to Jerry Yang, who was the co-founder and I said, “Jerry, you're busy buying companies for 5, 6 billion dollars at a time. Why don't you just let me take a 80% pay cut and two people and we'll go across the street and we will bring you companies that you already own that you don't have to acquire, that once you plug Yahoo into them, will work.” He looked at me. It’s like it was yesterday. He looked at me and he said, “I would love to do that, but then everyone would want that job.” Which is one of the stupidest reasons I can imagine.
[0:18:55] JU: He wants that one back. I think he wants that one back.
[0:18:58] SG: The first one is, you got to figure out where the skunk works is, as the late Tom Peters has written about so eloquently. If you peek in on them too soon, your desire to match the way you deal with every other tiny innovation will kick in and you will kill it. In the great project management book, Microsoft Press has, his name just escaped me, the idea of version 3.0 kicks in. Version one and version two at a company like Microsoft, you can do without Steve Ballmer looking at them. Only after it succeeds does the lawyer and the CEO kick in and that's when they wreck it. But you got to do a couple versions where nobody's watching.
The second thing, what are the assets that Simon & Schuster owns besides its backlist? The assets it mostly owns is a sales force and a relationship with independent bookstores. If you are going to use those two assets to get to the next place, the only thing you're going to build is something that those two assets smile at. That's what killed all the book publishing people. They have always viewed innovation as a threat because they've tried to protect the independent bookstore. Independent bookstore doesn't know what to do with audiobooks. They don't know what to do with CD-ROMs. They don't know what to do with casual online games. They don't go down the list, because every single time they're like, “Wait. Our customers won't like this.” You've got to decide if you're going to explore paths, which customers are you trying to change and who's it for? I've been thrown out of some of the best publishers in New York City with this rant.
[INTERMISSION]
[0:20:39] JU: How much time and effort does it take to test an idea? When I ask individuals in organization this question, they typically overestimate both the time, effort, and expense required. Tests need to be quick, fast, and cheap. You need lots of tests. When I work with organizations, I help them take ideas out of the waiting for testing pile and move them into the tested pile. That's where lessons are learned and impact is created. Do you want to make impact for your organization's good ideas? Let's talk. Check out jeremyutley.design, or write me at jutley@jeremyutley.design. Let's test some ideas together.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:21:24] JU: One of the examples, just if it's worth it by way of a gift to you that I love to use is Jerry Seinfeld. It's 10 or 20 million people think he's a genius on Letterman. But the cost of getting to that point is bombing at nightclub after nightclub after nightclub. There's hundreds of people who think he's a moron, right? To your point about skunk works, perhaps what places need of this small nightclubs, where they can look like a moron to a few people to get to the point where they've got a set for Letterman or something like that.
[0:21:51] SG: Yeah.
[0:21:52] JU: Okay, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about The Carbon Almanac. It's all folks who aren't familiar with the project. Just generally what the achievement was with The Carbon Almanac to begin with.
[0:22:04] SG: I wrote my first blog post about the climate crisis more than a dozen years ago. It didn't solve the problem. I realized that I wasn't talking about it very much. Then I realized, the reason is because I'd been indoctrinated and pushed to feel incompetent and like a hypocrite. I thought, if I feel this way, I bet other people do, too. I used to make almanacs for a living. I know how to make an almanac. I went to my publisher and said, “I'm going to do this as a volunteer with other volunteers.” They said, “Yeah, if you do that, we will pay you a small advance and you can go make it.”
Then I recruited 300 people, most of whom I had never met in 40 countries. We came together online. We never once had an all-group meeting. We worked asynchronously as time zones around the clock.
[0:22:48] JU: Wait, how did you get these people, by the way?
[0:22:50] SG: I just wrote a PS on a blog post and then invited the people who came to invite some other people.
[0:22:54] JU: Okay. Okay.
[0:22:56] SG: Nobody got paid. The next five months, we invented, wrote, designed, edited, fact-checked, researched, typeset, and delivered a 97,000-word almanac without one significant error. It has won awards. It has been published in many languages around the world. It is a foundational text for how we can think as normal non-scientist humans about what is happening to our climate.
[0:23:24] JU: Wow. I mean, congratulations. That's an incredible accomplishment, by the way. It's incredible.
[0:23:29] SG: Thank you. It was over a year of my life as a full-time volunteer and it was worth every moment of it. I learned so much. I met some really cool people.
[0:23:38] JU: Just talking about that phrase, full-time volunteer, you're basically shoulder to shoulder with 300 perfect strangers. Anything you realized about marshaling a cause that you hadn't known before from that project?
[0:23:50] SG: Oh, so many things. That's what The Song of Significance touches on there. That book wouldn't exist without it. A couple of things we came up with is this. Enrollment is critical. Every single person listening to this podcast probably needs to work. You don't have to work where you work now. Going where you work now is a voluntary choice. If we aren't enrolled in the journey, if we're just phoning it in, then we are begging to be managed. If you want leadership to happen, people have to want to be there, which leads to turnover is a good thing. Some people came, stayed an hour, and left. We were like, “Thank you. Thanks for trying.” We need that.
Other people stayed, sprinted for a month and then said, “I got to go.” We're like, “Thank you.” Other people stayed the whole time. It's up to them. Now we’re up to 1,900 people in 90 countries because new people came along and joined in. That's enrollment.
Then the third one is what do you do about the lack of expertise? Because nobody, including me, knew how to do any single page of the Almanac from soup to nuts. Couldn't be done. But we knew that hey, the page had to exist. How are we going to get there? We coined Page 19 Thinking.
[0:25:03] JU: Yeah, I was hoping you'd touch on that. Tell us more about Page 19 Thinking. What is it about?
[0:25:07] SG: It’s going to be a page 19, but you're holding back, because you're not the expert. We're like, “Okay. Can you give us one line about what page 19 should be about? Hand it to us.” Then someone else can say, “Wait. I'm going to do a little research and come back with a paragraph.” Then someone else is going to take that paragraph and make it into a page. Someone else is going to take that page and add a graph. Someone else is going to improve it. We relentlessly criticized the work. At every moment, the work is criticized. We never criticize the worker, because the work is our form of taking away the marble bits until David is standing there in the sculpture.
Who is holding the chisel doesn't matter. That's why the names aren't on every article. They insisted they put my name on the cover, but I didn't even want that, because it's not our work. It's just true. When we think about who's it for? What's it for? What's the change we seek to make? How does an enrolled community come together with a leader to do something that might not work? The answer is one step at a time. You're waiting for me to show you the finished product. You will wait too long.
Look at the early pages of Yahoo. Look at the early pages of Amazon. Look at the early pages of any website on the Internet. It wasn't done. When was it good enough for you to join the team? The answer is, joining the team becomes part of the process. Do the reading, show your work.
[0:26:31] JU: I love the question that you asked. I don't know if you remember in the book. I don't want to quiz you on your own, but you said something to the effect of, “Here's what I made. Can you make it better?” Is that it?
[0:26:43] SG: I think that that please make it better, not can you? It's not –
[0:26:45] JU: Yeah, please make it better. I love that. I love that. I don't know if you've heard the – go ahead.
[0:26:50] SG: This goes against our instincts to say that. I know how I feel. There are a few people, like the great Niki Papadopoulos, who I can send a book to, and she will make it better. But most people who are amateurs, can't. I won't show it to them, because it'll just screw up the work and my head. One thing that I do is I send the book to a professional copy editor before I submit it. That way, the person who's good at editing doesn't have to get hung up on serial commas and that stupid Oxford comma and everything, because it's all perfect, right? I know it's wasted because I don’t have to do it again. But it's finding that person who gets where you are trying to go.
If you pull over on the side of the road and say, right, before GPS, “Can you please tell me how to get to Domino's Pizza?” They don't say, you shouldn't go there. Go this place instead. You want someone to give you directions to go where you are going. The key for the almanac and just about everything else is please, start by telling us where you're seeking to go. Don't build a 250-page almanac, until you have two pages that you're really proud of. It needs to rhyme with this. If it doesn't rhyme with this, we're going to make it better. But we're not going to argue about this after we've approved these two pages. This is the point.
[0:28:09] JU: You're reminding me right now of the story, my business school days. We went to Slovenia for a study trip while we were in business school. This is pre-iPhone, pre-GPS, or widely available GPS. We'd driven into Italy for dinner and then we didn't know how to get back to Slovenia. We'd stop every a 100 yards and say, “Excuse, eh?” Somebody would look, we'd say, “Slovenska?” They'd point, we'd say, “Grazie.” We'd get back in our car, drive 200 yards. “Excuse, eh? Slovenska? Grazie.” We got all the way back that way. But that's it. That's why we are saying, please make it better. It's too good. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. That's hysterical. Okay, so one thing I want to talk about, I love the story of Harry Acker at Sleepy’s. Would you tell us the Harry Aker story?
[0:28:57] SG: All right, so in this era of Casper and all the other online things, most people don't go to mattress stores anymore. A mattress store is a sad place. It's a bunch of empty beds and two lonely salespeople.
[0:29:07] JU: It's true.
[0:29:09] SG: We're at the mattress store and the phone rings. You can just feel the stress in the air. There's, “Ooh.” The guy reaches over and picks it up and says, “Yes, sir.” Turns out, there were 90 Sleepy’s at the time. Harry Acker was Mr. Sleepy. He owned it. He was, I don't know, 80-years-old. All he did all day was call each store. When you picked up the phone, all he said was, “What's wrong?” If you couldn't answer the question with something that was wrong, you were in trouble, and then he got it fixed. He got 80 bits of feedback every single day about something to make better. Then he got it fixed.
[0:29:47] JU: It's so good. You hear this adage, right? Don't bring me problems. Bring me solutions. What do you think of that archetypical leader, the don't bring me problems, bring me solutions leader?
[0:29:56] SG: First, that person might be a manager, not a leader. Second, awareness of the market belongs to the zone of market capitalism, which is, if I can solve the market's problems, I can grow. This doesn't belong to industrial capitalism. After Henry Ford figured out the Model T, the next 20 years of Ford was not, what does the market want? It's, what can we make cheaply next that will cause our competitors to fall behind? How do we get the people out in the world to become the engine of our industry? Not, how do we solve a problem in the world?
If you need to be aware of the market, you need the problems. You need a team of people to think about solutions. But if you're saying to someone, “Do not bring me any problems, unless you can also tell me how with all these constraints, we can solve it,” then you're in bad shape. If you think about Apple, which I think is at some level, the apotheosis of what happens when you stop listening to your customers, there's no solution to the problems that people are saying. If someone shows up and says, “This iPhone won't let me do X, Y, or Z, because the cost of the store are too big,” there's no solution for that. If someone says, “You haven't updated Keynote in seven years,” there's no solution for that, right?
People aren't surfacing the problems. The very successful executives can pretend that is a luxury good with no defects. When in fact, it's riddled with defects, creating all sorts of opportunities for the people who are going to replace them.
[0:31:40] JU: The great Bob McKim, who's one of the progenitors of the design program at Stanford, he gave a very simple assignment, I thought of when you told the Sleepy story, it's keep a bug list. I don't know if you've heard of that. But it's just a list of things that bug you. Not errors in computer code. This is before computer programming entered common parlance. It's just, write down the stuff that bothers you. If you attend to your annoyances, you're likely to identify solutions.
[0:32:04] SG: Yeah, love that. If you can open-source the list, it's even better.
[0:32:09] JU: Going back for a second, speaking of that, going back to The Carbon Almanac, because you mentioned, you wouldn't just trust your manuscript in the hands of anybody, right? Niki, a few others. How did you solve that problem that the please help me make it better problem, which ostensibly can't be solved by everyone, how did you open-source that?
[0:32:28] SG: Well, because it wasn't my manuscript. It was our manuscript. We had a standard. The standard was clear. If you can rewrite this sentence, so that the other people who are standing next to you is like, “Yeah, that sentence is more clear than the sentence you got.” You got rid of it. It stayed. It wasn't Wikipedia with strangers coming in and flying by. You had to be in our circle and you earned trust, because of your track record on previous stuff.
Vivek, who lives more than 10,000 miles away, shows up and English is not his first language. He says, “How can I help?” He sees the list of articles that haven't been written yet. He writes the first draft, six paragraphs long. It's not very good. Not very good at all. Somebody, I don't know if it was me or not, rewrote it for him and said, “Hey, Vivek. Look at this.” He was like, “Oh, you mean we're not trying to do this as fast as we can? Okay.” Then the second one was twice as good as the first one.
[0:33:29] JU: Sure.
[0:33:30] SG: He ended up writing 18 articles. By the last six, we couldn't make them better.
[0:33:35] JU: That's great.
[0:33:36] SG: I will never meet Vivek. I have never met Vivek. I am grateful to Vivek. We danced together for months. Then one day he said, “I'm out.” We're like, “Great. Thank you for all the fish.”
[0:33:49] JU: Where is Vivek now? Do you know?
[0:33:50] SG: No idea.
[0:33:51] JU: Wow. That's too cool. Okay, I have one more question and then we'll turn it over. We've got a bunch of folks’ questions on LinkedIn. I know some folks wanted to ask. Or actually, I wanted to offer a word, a humble submission to your word list. You make a word list of words that we should be using more often. How many times do we use these words? One word I wanted to submit to you for your consideration is wonder, wonder. It's a word that I feel in the boardroom, I joke, don't wonder here. We don't want to know what you wonder, right? Yet, the interesting stuff actually starts with wondering. Do you have any thoughts on that word in particular?
[0:34:25] SG: I'm going to put a little aside, because I thought you meant it the other way. There are two words that if you say you're going to do them, you can't. One is sulk and the other is a sense of wonder. If you're looking out on the Grand Canyon, or an Algonquin Park, or something, you go, “I feel a sense of wonder.” It's just gone, right?
[0:34:43] JU: It's gone. Right.
[0:34:43] SG: That's what I thought you were going for, because I'm in favor of wonder. But the other wonder is brilliant because the other wonder is similar to saying, “I have a feeling that.”
[0:34:56] JU: Yeah, exactly.
[0:34:57] SG: I am stating that. I wonder if it opens that doesn't close them.
[0:35:03] JU: Yeah, that's a nice way to say it. It opens the door. That's beautiful. All right, let's look at some folks. We won't be able to get to everybody, folks. I apologize in advance. One of the folks I admire most in the innovation space, Diego Rodriguez. Hi, Diego, if you're there. He asks, is there any aspect of Seth’s book, Purple Cow, which you have rethought in the years since you published it? Diego, I was reading The Purple Cow just last night. Seth, what do you think? Anything?
[0:35:31] SG: Oh, so much of it. I would rewrite every one of my books if I had time, but then they wouldn't be markers in time. I think we've all been overwhelmed by the greedy, selfish, hustle, narcissism of so many people who once they got a microphone, figured out how to sell something. I went in, I dedicated it to the book to my late friend, Lionel Poilane, because of his craft, his commitment to it. I went in telling a story to people who actually cared, telling a story to people who wanted to put their name on stuff. If I was writing it again, there'd be a whole long chapter saying, “If you are any of these people, please put this book down right now and walk away.” The same way my heart was broken after Permission Marketing because I assumed that people were going to approach this magical medium of email as the asset it was, not as strip mining that they could use to make a profit in the short run.
[0:36:31] JU: Yeah. If someone's wanting to qualify, or disqualify themselves, put the book down. Who should put the book down? I think of The Royal Tenenbaums, like, who'd you slap the book out of their hand up? What are you looking for there?
[0:36:44] SG: I think the two points are, if you want me to teach you while you stand on one foot, I politely decline. All learning is autodidactic. You have to learn through experience, what you see. I'm just trying to help you see. If you're here with a TLDR, taking notes about how you can turn around and use this in five minutes, I'm not interested. Then the second thing is, which we talked about at the beginning, would we miss you if you were gone? I got to tell you, the publicist who sent me an email every four minutes, the spammers who sent me an email every 30 seconds, the people who are trying to steal my credit card every 10 seconds, I wouldn't miss any of those people if they were gone. Please, don't pretend. If that's who you are, you should move on.
[0:37:27] JU: Yeah. Thanks. That's great. Let's go to another question here. We've got one from Parker Gates, a good friend in Nashville. He says, “Top of mind for me today is how to maintain the creative side of being a leader with the more operational side. What's the secret to maintaining a balance?”
[0:37:46] SG: Managers are very clear. They use power and authority to get people to do what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. We need them. No airlines, no fast food could exist if it weren't for managers. If you're trying to optimize a supply chain, you better have managers. But don't pretend to yourself, or to your people that you are leading. Because leading is voluntary. It's exploring the liminal space between here and there. It's doing things that might not work. It's possible for a manager to lead, but you need to wear a different hat and you need to be very clear about which hat you're wearing.
What happened, for example, Yahoo is as the company crossed 2,000 people, they got rid of anyone who was allowed to lead, except for four people. Everyone else became a manager, because they were milking so much money and the stock was going up $3 a day. That's going to – fine, your career is done. If you manage, you cannot manage your way to greatness. You can only manage your way to God.
[0:38:46] JU: We should put that on a bumper sticker. That's a good one. The last question and then I know you've got – it's pub day, so you've got, I'm sure many things that you have to do. I'm, again, so grateful for the chance to talk with you today. I wanted to bring it back to Amazon. The reason is because you didn't pull any punches in some of the data that you shared about Amazon. For me, the thing that's interesting is in many ways, they're an exemplar of innovation and yet, they're also a cautionary tale about what to avoid.
You talk in the book about Amazon turnover. I wonder, and yet, you also mentioned that even in The Carbon Almanac, some turnover is good. I wonder if you wanted to elaborate a little bit on what kind of turnover is good and what turnover is troubling.
[0:39:31] SG: Amazon used to be an exemplar of innovation. Now they're an exemplar of profit-seeking, cost-cutting and stock price rising. Some of it has to do with Jeff leaving the building. When Jeff built the organization, he announced what the cost of acquiring a customer needed to be. If you could beat that, you could do it any way that was ethical. The number of experiments was huge.
Then on the sales side, he said, “We're going to be the store that sells everything, but we're never going to be good at selling anything.” People went to them with promotional ideas and stuff. They couldn't hear it, because there wasn't a system in place for that. As they built each new innovative entity, it began with, who's it for? What's the change we seek to make? There was a lot of innovation. Then, as soon as they found something that they could lock down and cycle, it was about, how do we cost reduce this?
I'd say, this is the first independent outsider that they started a publishing company with. I've been in the building. Let's just look at the Kindle. When was the last time that Kindle was improved? It hasn't been improved since just shortly after it came out, because they're just cost reducing. They're not saying, “We have this magical device in millions of people's hands. Well, how can we make the software even more magical?” They don't think that way.
In terms of turnover, there's two kinds of turnover. The turnover in Amazon's warehouses, where according to what I just read, more than half of all the warehouse injuries in America happened last year. In just one company's warehouses. That turnover cost them a third of their total profits in 2021. That turnover isn't about enrollment. It's about people being exhausted and broken after just 90 days. That's not good, because you created conditions that were unacceptable. They report, internal documents say, that there are some cities where they have run out of people to hire who haven't already worked at Amazon. They've blown through everybody. That's different than the turnover that I would love to see in the Kindle group, because there, you're looking for people who are coming and saying, “Yeah, we got this baseline. What are the things we can try here that haven't been tried yet?” They're on the creative side.
Today's pub day for Song of Significance, but there's going to be another 20 books published by Penguin tomorrow. They have turnover all the time. That leads to innovation when they're new authors. That's different than the tough stretch that Marvel and DC hit in the 70s and 80s because you had the same 20 writers writing the same comics over and over again.
[0:42:09] JU: Right. As I said, I've got a couple more hours, so we'll book another time soon. One last question for you, just a fun one. Next month, we've got Kevin Kelly on the show. He's going to talk about his new book, Excellent Advice. I wondered if you could ask Kevin a question, what would you want to ask Kevin?
[0:42:24] SG: Kevin knows that I think he's one of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life. I would ask him to explain, while talking slowly, what the book, what technology wants is about. I would ask him to talk in detail about the walks he takes every year, because the new book, which I helped provoke by sending him an email is –
[0:42:50] JU: Thank you for doing that, by the way.
[0:42:51] SG: - is lovely and people will enjoy it, but it will not change your life if you read it fast.
[0:42:57] JU: Yeah, I agree. It's like the Proverbs. You can't just rush through the Proverbs, right? You need them to go through you.
[0:43:03] SG: There needs to be a page-a-day calendar. Part of the magic of Kevin Kelly is this human over his huge career has figured out how to distill beautiful insights and wisdom into things you can use, but only if you're willing to think about the stories behind it and take your time. I think about Kevin's work every single day.
[0:43:28] JU: It's beautiful. I'll be sure to pass along the compliment and send you what he says as well. Seth Godin, thank you so much for joining us. It's an incredible pleasure to have you here. Folks, if you haven't gotten it already, Seth's new book, The Song of Significance is available today, wherever you buy books. Support a local bookseller and dive into this content. There's lots here that we didn't cover today, but it will be sure to amplify your contribution and your organization's contribution in the world. Until next time, everyone, have a great day. Thank you.
[0:43:55] SG: Make a ruckus. Thank you.
[0:43:57] JU: Cheers.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:43:58] JU: By day, I'm a professor. But I absolutely love moonlighting as a front-row student next to you during these interviews. One of my favorite things is taking the gems from these episodes and turning them into practical tips and lessons for you and your team. If you want to share the lessons you picked up from this episode with your organization, feel free to reach out. I'd be thrilled to do a keynote on the secrets that I've gleaned from creative masters, or put together a hands-on workshop to supercharge your next off-site adventure. Hit me up at jutley@jeremyutley.design for more information.
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