Seth Godin - This Is Strategy

Our guest is the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work on art, including me. He's been a massive inspiration for me. And his latest book is a must read for anyone seeking to drive positive change. That is the listener to this show, whether you're revolutionizing an industry, sparking a movement or building a career he challenges us to do so much.

Identify our smallest viable audience, understand and influence the systems shaping our world and to see them in the first place to prioritize long term thinking over instant gratification and much much more i'm gonna keep the intro short i just want to tell you he is a guy who helped me do what i do today and this book it's deceptively short looking but it makes you think it makes you marinate and it makes you walk away changed and that's the source of all his

work it's a great honor to have him on the show he was my first guest on the show he took a punt on a nobody back nearly ten years ago he is the inimitable. Seth Godin, welcome to the show. Well, thank you. You have never been a nobody. Maybe people didn't know about you, but you weren't a nobody. So it's a privilege to be back.

Reading this new book, your latest book on strategy reminded me of the metaphors you use to help people change how they think and ultimately lead better lives. One of , the rituals I've picked up Seth, since we first met. Is I wear a pin to reflect each show. And this one is about inspiration. It says to the stars who dream and the dreams that are made. And I thought that speaks to your work, man. I thought we'd share that because.

I think people jump straight into your content the whole time and they forget your origin so maybe we'll just share that before we get into the content of this particular book. Well, I think all teachers want to change people, right? I mean, that's what teaching is, is being able to show up with ideas that open doors for people and help them get to where they want to go. So I became a teacher when I was 17 in 1977, teaching kids up in Canada.

And that feeling of helping someone light up and feel possibility, that's what I keep seeking every day.

One of the things i thought we'd talk about with strategy is people think it's like. The instructions and lego and you talk about it being more like the picture on the box so you have to have a fuzzy vision of the future in order to start i thought we'd start there because so many people even in corporations go straight into the tactics go straight into the doing at the expense of the thinking Yeah. That's a great point. So let's talk about Lego to get us started.

The Lego company was built on some very specific principles. And one of the principle was that every piece of Lego has multiple uses. And this served them well until it almost put them out of business. And about 20 years ago, sales started to rapidly decrease. And someone at Lego invented Lego kits. Lego kits come with instructions, and there's only one way to put them together. That's what saves the company, because that's what people want. They want the instructions.

They want to do what they're told. And it's not a surprise. I mean, think about all their years in school. They never ask you a question they don't know the answer to. So, then we get into the real world and people say, Figure it out. Come up with where you want to go. And someone says, Well, where are the instructions? So, I have no interest in writing an instruction manual. What I was hoping to help people do is figure out what they want the box to have on the cover. To build that.

it's interesting Seth, i was looking at the comments and, i've read lots of books on strategy here by the best of people in the world and they're always quite academic their frameworks, and we live in a world today where people want the answer they want to jump straight to the answer they want the pill they don't want to do that hard work they don't want to go through the discipline, and i felt that that's something that you've.

always fought against and this book does that it's it challenges us to go through the Difficulty and the discipline of strategy in order to get simpler in the future but very few of us do that Yeah. And so if, if my goal is to sell as many books as possible, I should write very simple instruction manuals and go on TV. And I don't want to do that. So I'm here for people who want to listen to that voice inside to make things better. That's my goal.

you share your thoughts particularly on games on empathy and systems we've limited time today but i thought we'd zoom into some of those everything is a game you tell us in this book Well, it's useful to see everything as a game. Serious things can also be games. So, if someone is doing surgery, it's serious.

But they should also understand, for example, that if the anesthesiologist adds a little bit of a chemical to make one part of your body relax, it might cause a different part of your body to have a different response. We can view that as a game. It's a system where one input changes a different. And The reason it's useful besides the fact that understanding game theory helps us make better decisions is because we don't take it so personally.

If you do something that doesn't work, it's not because you're a bad person. It's because you did something that didn't work. So make a different move next time. So when we seek to You know, work our way through the grocery store, talk our way out of a traffic ticket, or get a job. They're still, they're games. What move should we make? Oh, that move didn't work. I should make this move instead. When you can see the moves that have been made, then you can get better.

But if you take it all personally, and you're being, quote, authentic, unquote, you can't change, because you're who you are. I don't buy that. I think we are showing up for the job. If we're seeking to make a generous change, we're playing a game and we should make moves help us accomplish that.

one of the things that does for us is that it makes the inevitable losses so the failures that we have more tolerable and this is something that paralyzes people is the fear of failure or as you say in the book. We become plankton and it's easy to be plankton because we just go with the flow instead of actually challenging the status quo. Yeah, there's a, there's a Russian term office plankton. The way you say it in Russian apparently is office plankton. I, I, I looked it up.

Office plankton is a great term. It's the people who show up at work to do what they're told, they're disposable. They move around in herds. And if you want to be an office plankton is working for you. I'm not going to argue with you, but. I don't think it's working for you. So the question is how do we choose not to work for a thoughtless boss, not to work for AI, but to have them work for us to have our own agenda to get to where we seek to go.

That thing about AI is very relevant today about the fact that if you are office plankton, you're probably the first element to be outsourced as well. I'm sure this comes up in a lot of your work at the  moment? Yeah. I mean, if you work for AI, then the moment that AI can do your job, your boss is going to have AI do your job because it's free. Right. So. The only alternative is to have AI work for you. And AI is stupid, but it's really good at mediocre work.

And if you're doing mediocre work, which means average, then a stupid system is going to take it over. The same way you probably didn't want to be a telephone operator in 1950, or a ditch digger in 1910, because a new machine was about to come along and put you out of work. i was lecturing recently, Seth, and the students were talking about, say, for example, the movie industry and how wrong it was. It was, it was so interesting because I've been given a similar lecture about the threats of AI.

And if you don't do really remarkable work, as you would put it, or work that's infused with humanity. Work, that makes a difference and they never listened to me one year, a kid put a tinfoil hat on my desk as a joke, because that they thought it was this conspiracy theory saying AI is coming this year was different. And this year. One of the students said, it's just so unfair. They're going to wipe out all these jobs in the movie industry for example, and we need that real art in movies.

And she asked this question. She said, what do you think? And she said, I think it's really unfair because we need the humanity in the arts. And I was, I was actually a little bit stumped because I didn't want to give my opinion, but I really felt that you can't stop progress. This is coming no matter what. I think it's pretty clear that Bill Shakespeare would have been opposed to movies.

Because you take away the humanity of actors repeating this thing night after night when you put it on a movie and, you know, Jimmy Cagney or Catherine Hepburn isn't around, but we can still watch them. That the movies have always been about technology. I mean, they got rid of the horses because you could just make a noise. But the point is it's gonna happen, not because We can't stop progress, but because people want it.

And if Hollywood and the unions ban it, well then people who aren't in Hollywood are going to make it better. And the thing that we can do is understand, since my birthday, technology has invented 7 billion jobs on this planet. And it will invent more jobs if we figure out how to put it to work to solve problems. Because as long as you are solving problems for people who can afford to pay you, there's work for you to do.

And, you know, when I see people talking about, for example digitizing voices or digitizing movies, one thing that you could do is you could now, instead of making 300 movies a year, which is what Hollywood generally does, you make 30, 000 movies a year. And some of them are going to be terrible. And some of them are going to come out of nowhere and delight people. Well, you're not going to be able to dance with that. If you say, I don't even want to look at it. I don't even want to explore it.

I'm going to cut this out and actually share it back to the class I think this is a brilliant segue for the book, because to understand where you can add value, you need a strategy. You said most important part, well, what I felt the most important part is to realize that your strategy fits in a system and the systems are often until you actually make them visible. So I thought we'd share that because it's such a vital aspect of the whole book.

Systems like to be invisible because it's safer for them to be under the radar. We're less likely to confront them. But there are systems everywhere we look. So in our country, my country the college industrial complex indoctrinates kids and parents from a young age to do well in school so they can get into a famous college and on and on and on, pay all this money. There's professors, there's the placement office, there's the sports teams. All of those things seem normal.

You go to a place where they don't exist and then it's fine without them because the system 400 years old isn't there. So the Hollywood system, which includes the movie theaters, the agents, the studios, Netflix, all these pieces, we notice it. when it's under stress, when it's changing. So when DVDs showed up, Hollywood's system was noticeable. Streaming makes Hollywood systems noticeable.

So we are seeing different kinds of shows being made by different kinds of people and watched by different kinds of people because the system is shifting. And so what systems do, is they fight to maintain the status quo. And one way they do that is by inventing culture. Culture makes things normal. Systems want things to be normal and keep them as is. So you have a couple choices.

You can show up to fight the system, and if you're going to do that, it really helps to know what the system is and how it works. Or you can show up to make a change and get the system to help you make a change, right? So in my case, I didn't invent book publishing. I didn't invent public speaking. I didn't invent the idea that people would fly to a conference. Those systems were all in place. I just showed up with a different way to work with that system. To make a change happen.

The audience of this show, Seth, so many of them subscribe to your blog as well. And for change makers or catalysts, you say it's difficult to strategize and make a difference if you don't understand the systems that are working to keep things as they are. And a brilliant example, a striking example that you give.

Was the massacre of sperm whales for their oil and i love this is the kind of a metaphor for what happens when you're trying to fight the system without really understanding what the incentives are for that system. So the metaphor is pretty simple. Let's say 400 years ago, you were an evil James Bond villain and you wanted to destroy all the whales in the world. Well, you couldn't use space lasers cause we didn't have them.

But what you could do is just train five people on the fact that if they could capture a sperm whale, they could use its oil to make a lantern and light up the night. Cause if you did that, they would start to build. an oil refinery business, a lantern business, a business that benefited from light at night. Some of them would build boats, and the word would spread. And eventually, All the whales would be gone because a system would consume them all.

And what saved the whales wasn't people arguing we should save the whales. What saved the whales was kerosene. Because kerosene was a cheaper, more reliable way to solve the same problem. So when we look at the systems of our world, we see that no one who was involved in the whaling industry, except for Captain Ahab, actually wanted to kill all the whales. But the output of the system was to wipe out these, most of these creatures. The same thing is true for our climate.

The same thing is true for the fashion industry. 8 percent of our climate problem is caused by fast fashion. None of the people who are buying or selling or designing or weaving fast fashion are evil. But all of them are part of a system.

That is creating this unhappy output, Seth's struggling from a cold and i reminded him that i read on his blog that these readers, past deals are excellent for when you lose your voice i use it because i lose my voice a lot so thank you you're the one who taught me about them as well so.

He's sucking on one of those here for those people that are just listening to us, but there's a term you use to write the book as well and I notice in my stats that The people will peter out or they get distracted and they leave after a while. So I want to get this up front, which is the term an elegant strategy.

You say systems respond to strategies and elegant strategies give us leverage. All right. So we're going to do our best to make sure that no one leaves in the middle. An elegant strategy is easy to describe and hard to stick with an elegant strategy uses the forces to help us get to where we want to go. So if you watch a good surfer. and a mediocre surfer, you can instantly tell the difference because the good surfer makes it look easy.

They're picking waves and a posture and a structure and a board and an approach that matches the waves. Whereas the struggling surfer is just trying hard all the time because they don't get the idea that the system can help them. So what we're looking for is a way to make the change we seek to make But with the wins and the support of the system at our back. So a company like Patagonia, which is worth billions of dollars, a company like Apple.

Apple figured out how to bring the system of luxury goods and the system of technology together. No one had ever done those two things, but those systems wanted to be with each other. And once they were aligned, They've created the most successful consumer products in the history of the world. There's three things you say that we need to focus on to create this elegant strategy. , I'd love you to riff on this. The strategy gets better as you grow.

Systemic advantage defeats heroic effort, which is a huge problem for changemakers. I made this failure as a head of innovation, trying to do it all yourself. And then they are simple to explain and difficult to stick to. I'd love you to expand on those three key points in the book. I will, let's do them one at a time. And, and we can use Apple, I guess. The first one is this idea that they get better as you go. So the first three months that the iPhone was on sale.

It was not successful and it did not get a lot of great reviews. Over time, as more people used it, more people used it. Over time, as it became more of a luxury good, it became more of a luxury good. Over time, the network effect plus Moore's Law plus technological advantage kept cycling and cycling and cycling. The App Store grew. It gets easier as you go. This is the opposite of what happens to people who hustle, right? If you, if you're out hustling for a sale, the first couple of sales.

you make because you're new. But then the hustling starts to fade because we don't want to hear from you anymore. You didn't have the wind at your back. And that keys into the second one, which is this idea, and Steve Jobs is as guilty as anybody of purveying it, of we need a hero who's going to magically take care of all the problems. When in fact, it's systemic effort. the tens and tens of thousands of people who work at Apple and the millions who are part of the ecosystem.

That's what made Apple the most valuable company in the world. Not one guy parking in the handicap space, right? And so it's tempting to think this organization needs a hero, but what is probably true is this organization needs a system. And what I'm talking about, and I mentioned it before, right? you're doing well, it's working. And so you're tempted to make a compromise, bring on a new product, start a new line of business, do this other thing.

And these compromises muddy up what you stand for. They muddy up the long term arc of your elegant strategy because now you've added another thing and you've added another thing. So McDonald's had a very elegant strategy. They said the system is changing because of cars. People are now going to be driving in places. where they've never been before. And the system is changing because the television, they're going to discover brands in a new way.

So McDonald's put those two things together and made a super simple, easily scaled fast restaurant that they could advertise like crazy on television. And it worked. They serve one out of every seven meals in my country. But then they said, well, why don't we have tablecloths? Why don't we serve popcorn? Why don't we serve pizza? And every time they extended. that to compete, right? They just came a couple of years ago. They went after Starbucks for coffee.

Every time they do that, they walk away from their elegant strategy. Maybe they make some money, but it doesn't make their elegant strategy work better. That challenge Seth is, The mammoth one we see in this show all the time. So the show is mainly heads of innovation, heads of change, or lone wolf consultants like myself that work with these companies or consultancy companies the whole time.

And if you take what you said there as a kind of a template and generify it and say, I'm trying to change a company, the company then has pressure from shareholders and stakeholders to drive more profit from wall street. And they then get into this incremental innovation cycle and they go away from what they're really, really good at, or else they get bought by a fund and the fund then just milks the cash cow as much as they can.

How do you get them to see the lenses that you present in this book to be able to see where they're going wrong and where they can go in the future

I think we should get our terms right. It is possible. that someone who's listening to this is the manager of incremental improvement. Incremental improvement can be managed and should be managed. And if that's what you do, that's what you should call it. So when Demings got Toyota to start doing quality in the 60s, Everything that happened after that was incremental improvement. And it works, right?

You get from the, you know, the 1968 Toyota Celica to the Lexus of today is a huge step change, but it happened incrementally. Wall Street understands that, and you can bring that to people on teams. That's different than the way I see innovation. Innovation cannot be managed, it can only be led, because it doesn't come with a guarantee. And innovation has to begin with the sentence, this might not work. Whereas incremental improvement always works.

Innovation, if you're not willing to say this might not work, then you're not in the innovation business. And so when you pick your customers, you pick your future. And if I'm the leader of innovation, I don't have to work here tomorrow. I got to work somewhere, but I don't want to devote my tomorrow to a place where my client doesn't get the joke. So what I am promising the client is not that this is going to work for sure tomorrow. What I'm promising is.

We're going to put in place a process, a system that will lead to innovations that we would rather have than our competition having. And if you're not signed up for this might not work, I should go work somewhere else because we need enrollment from our bosses to do leadership. And so if your job is too challenging, it's because you haven't sold the people you work with what it is you're here to do.

And I think it's worth having that conversation to find the resources and the leverage to do the work that needs to be done, which is innovation.

you mentioned our previous guest steve blank in the book as well. And Steve Blank introduced me to the term innovation theater. And a few different pieces together here, because many people who work in innovation actually engage in innovation theater and they don't even know they are because they're in a way being brought on a ride by the organization. Then being hired as head of innovation is the innovation strategy. That's it. It's not a real strategy just to show.

The public or to somebody on the board said, we need to be more innovative. We have a head of innovation and I was just putting a few pieces together. Then. Then there's this sort of AI Damocles hanging out for people and they're like going, Oh, Oh crap. I can't actually do the work I really want to do. I can't provoke here. And there's this kind of perfect storm in moments like this, these kind of step change moments in society. And in there, we Ruckus creators.

Okay. So I hadn't heard Steve use that expression. I love that expression. It's a riff on security theater, which is all the stuff at the airport that pretends to increase security, but just makes us nervous. You know, if you have a Sinecure, you're getting paid well, and you don't mind being part of innovation theater, I'm not going to argue that you should stop.

It's, I can, I know people who have pulled that off for three or four years in a row at a company, getting paid a lot of money and not shipping anything. As an innovator, it's heartbreaking. The guy's name, who I dealt with at the, at the publishing world 30 years ago, I still remember it was Gutenberg, which I love that because of the Gutenberg printing press. He was the head of the, of innovation and a major book publisher. And this was when DVD roms were going to be the next big thing.

I wasted a year of my life being proposed, bringing proposals to them. And finally he confessed to me his job. Was to take meetings and never to buy anything. That was his job. He knew it. And he liked me enough by the end that he just told me the truth. So what do you do if you're in a role like that? Well, what we learned from the security world is that you use that to actually do real security behind the scenes. You use your role as theater to build new systems.

that lead to innovation and the systems can be super simple. Just the way things are around here, the way we communicate with each other, what we keep score of shifting from false proxies to useful proxies, highlighting things so that the entire piece of the organization you care about looks at the world slightly differently. That is way more important than you discovering the truth. Some big new innovation because it's not going to get adopted if you haven't changed the culture first.

You know, it's, it's so serendipitous. You mentioned that because when we first met, when I had your first on the show, I was working in innovation theater. I was going, I was doing the innovation behind the scenes, including interviewing you, by the way, I used to do these shows during my lunch break or off, off company time, Because I knew I would maybe punished for that in the future, which they did try to do. And it actually also gave me the courage then to leave there.

And my previous job, just so you know, it was, I actually bought the dip and I read the dip. I'm in the dip so this is one of the sets folks there on the shelf there behind me as well and in their set goes get out before it's too late get out when you're kinda on a high and the way i actually resigned was i just put a post it note.

On the page where you mentioned, you mentioned this time to move and he gave it to my boss and go, this is a great book, really short, you'll read it very quickly, but particularly look at that page and I let it marinate and then a week later he came back as well. So just to say there's loads of people like me that you don't get to meet, that you've, you've had a dramatic impact on. I used that word earlier on planting a seed, causing a ruckus and.

Being a lone wolf because I wanted to also highlight that Andrew McAdam. Thank you for sending me a copy of this. You sent me Seth's calendar for 2025, go make a ruckus, seeds, insights, and provocations for people making a difference. And that is where I wanted to just little segue, just to mention that as well. mentioned being a lone wolf, so I like working for myself. I like not having too many dependencies, but it comes with the risk of.

Constraining yourself a little bit and you talk if you're gonna build a really meaningful system or coordinate with the system coordinated human effort creates productivity and value. When we work together, we get far more done. So I just wanted to see your thoughts on this because many people who listen to the show are consultants, solopreneurs or whatever you want to call these guys and girls, and you can still cause a ruckus if you try to almost coordinate communities. of communities.

And this is again, something that you talk about in the book that this idea of understanding how different systems work and actually maybe be the catalyst or the glue between them is a way to be able to manage a strategy. Right. So let's just talk specifics. You brought up the podcast and how you used it.

If we're talking about one of these innovation heads who's doing innovation theater, one thing that you could do that's a useful, practical tool is you could do an internal podcast and simply interview people at all ranks in the organization 15 minutes at a time and get them to talk about it. an innovation that they've, that they're working on, innovation that changed things for them. You can normalize these conversations and that's how we start to plant the seeds of culture.

So in 1983, my first job, I was actually a beta tester for the original Mac. So I had the first desktop publishing rig in Boston and I had 40 engineers, none of whom worked for me. And I was the brand manager for a line of Software I did with Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury and others. So my newsletter, which I made in desktop publishing and then put, printed out in every single person's mailbox of this 60 person company.

All I did twice a week was name people who were doing something innovative, right? Dan just had a breakthrough on this and so and so just had a breakthrough on that. I had no authority, but all I was doing was using 60 sheets of paper. So no one was going to be upset with me. And I would just put, and there was a little restaurant review at the end, and I would just put it in every single person's mailbox.

And after about a week, two weeks, people started coming by to mention to me something they'd done because they wanted to be in the newsletter. And by narrating this, I changed the system because the system responds to information. And in this case, the information was simply who was doing interesting work. But there's other sorts of information that change systems as well. The same way the U. S. News and World Report college rankings changed the way colleges in the United States work.

Because simply ranking the colleges caused the colleges to change their behavior. So what we're looking for are useful proxies, not false ones. What we're looking for is a way to bring the information. ideas to people in the system that they are open to hearing so that they then change the way they see the world.

I love that when you talked about the college and bringing in the rankings and how it changed behaviors and I saw it so synonymous with what happens inside organizations, depending on the rewards, even psychic rewards like that, like naming somebody, calling somebody out for a positive behavior, and equally the other way, because you mentioned in the book, because you mentioned there, your little restaurant review, the Zagat guide, and also inbred puppies.

So how the system can actually trap you in some ways, like the inbred puppies. You say systems have outcomes and sometimes they are undesirable. Yeah. I did a podcast episode about why there are so many pit bulls in the United States. And it's absolutely fascinating to look at the systems that are at play. It's interesting to think about how information about where there are dogs to be adopted completely changed the pet adoption system around the world.

And we aren't stuck with the system we've got because information keeps changing and the way we deliver information keeps changing. So it's easy to say, well, I'm a victim of this part of social media or I'm a victim of this bureaucracy, but we have not just access to information. We can publish information. So we need to figure out how to do that. in a way that the system will notice and respond to.

, because you mentioned there the pitbulls, I thought about Justin Kobylak, I probably butchered his name, but the snake guy. That you mentioned in the yes. Yes. I have, I have trouble with his yeah, Justin, Justin, the snake guy. So Justin, the snake guy reminded me of that Chinese proverb, proverb that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

The second best time is now, but this idea of planting seeds the metaphor throughout the book, because if you say, if you want to grow a garden, you'll need to plant seeds, but it's the ecosystem. And the climate that will determine what happens after that. Our job is to find a plan and then create the conditions for our project to spread from person to person within and across the systems that already exist.

But sometimes we can be early and we can build the capability for when the ecosystem changes. The right place, right time, and we can flourish. And I love this story. I'd love if you'd share this and the thinking behind this story of the snakes. . Okay. So a ball Python is only about a third of a meter long, like a foot. And if you go look at some Google images, it'll blow you away. You can now buy a beautiful collectible ball Python for 60, 000. This is insane.

Now, the people who breed these things, it used to be a shoebox, backyard sort of situation, and a ball python would cost you 20 bucks. And what Justin saw was that the information that would flow through the system, thanks to the internet, would transform the collecting of ball pythons. So he made several choices. The biggest one being dramatically reinvesting in two things, his facility and the stock, the DNA of the ball pythons he was breeding.

So there are ball pythons with little checkerboards on their back and really striking things. And it takes generation after generation of thoughtful breeding to get there.

And he knew, or he asserted, that over time, the internet, the information on the internet, the growing collector community, the idea that you could ship a python across the world and wouldn't have to just sell it at the local show, meant that owning the best reputation, the best facility, and the best gene stock would keep increasing in value. So he helped change the system. of ball python collecting at the same time that he profited from the new system.

And one of the things he argues in the profile I read about him is he might have a 20, 000 ball python, but not selling it so that he can then raise the next 200 descendants of that gene branch is the smart thing to do. If you think that the system is going to persist, you invest in it, you don't take the money and run.

I thought that was so beautifully placed that story just before when you mentioned Walter Mischel's marshmallow effect and delayed gratification, that if an organization isn't under stress. That they'll make these long term decisions. If a organism isn't under a stress, it will make these long term decisions. If it's been trained not to, it won't, but also if it can't see that future, or if it doesn't have a strategy, it's never going to do that.

And this idea of long term thinking is, core to the book idea of long term thinking , is lost in many ways in an age of. next day delivery, same day delivery over in New York when I was there, we don't have that yet in Ireland, but instantaneous gratification kills earning things, and you gotta earn strategy, you talk about this in the book, you gotta go through the struggle of even articulating the strategy.

Yeah. I mean, I think that the Amazon is working on something where I can get something delivered yesterday, but they haven't launched it quite yet. The, it's very tempting when we hear about longterm strategy to just roll our eyes because it feels like a way of hiding and longterm strategy doesn't mean we settle for mediocre stuff along the way. It means we do hard work now measuring the correct proxies in anticipation of what's to come.

And we wait for the second marshmallow instead of eating one marshmallow right now. But it's still rigorous. It's not lazy. It's saying, I will hold on to this snake because I can articulate why it's going to be worth more in a year to do so. And the problem with the public stock market and with social media is they don't reward those things. Those things are put aside because you could hustle today. And we're seeing this happen to human beings with reputations.

The easiest way to get a lot of clicks is to pick a fight with somebody, is to disappoint somebody, is to shortcut. The problem is, and I've seen this firsthand, my peers from 20 years ago, I don't know where they are now, or 15 years ago, or 5 years ago, because they succumbed to the short term hustle and you can't get back.

Absolutely, Gilda, and the, an organization that has been well established, you mentioned here, and what I read was the hubris of success here, you said one can copy the leader, What if the leader has deep roots and continue continues to plant new seeds following will always be difficult and this was partly to do with justin the snake guy but in an organization, they have this head start and they stop or they start getting into incremental cycle the whole time.

And the, the willingness to be able to plant new seeds. I'd love you to share the, people say you need to create a burning platform. That's not always helpful. Cause people go into this closed down mindset, but how can you get people to see through the hubris? Maybe like you talk about in the Icarus deception, If you're listening to this, you're not just in the system, you are creating the system. You're not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.

So how do you create the proxies that push people to do what needs to be done? So the simple example, and we're going to have to wrap up soon, but I would, this story still sits with me. I had three senior people when I was running one of the first internet companies, and every Friday we would have a company wide meeting. And one of my guys was doing pretty well and he said, you know, things are going really well.

And I said when was the last time you did something that didn't work, that actually didn't work? And he said, months and months. I said, well, if you don't have a screw up this week, I'm going to fire you in front of everyone in the company on Friday. And I meant it because if you're not prepared to fire people who don't make a mistake, you're not serious about innovation and creating that expectation, as opposed to the proxy of. Well, you don't screw up. So you get a better parking space.

You get a promotion and this is what we do around here. Well, then why are you surprised that no one wants to do anything risky because you just made it clear that doing something risky is stupid. Well, if you reward the people who with good effort and good intent, do something that doesn't work and then publish their results to everybody so they can learn that's going to happen more, and that is at the heart of how we build this kind of system.

Internally, if you're actually a leader of innovation or you're a consultant, because if that's not happening, why are you surprised that there's no innovation? beautiful Seth. And for those who don't know, Seth's going to join us via zoom directly here in Dublin for the reinvention summit, April 29th and 30th next year and there's a reason he's there. It's not just because he's Seth Godin. I have a real gratitude towards you, Seth, and I picked a quote out.

There were so many I picked from the book, but one for me to sign off. And then I'd love you to have your final message for our audience, why you wrote this book, why you're reaching into people's heads to get them to. Cause a ruckus, but I love this line. I'm just going to share this and get out of your way. You said often we go from yesterday to today as a bystander floating on the currents of change, but when we are at our best, we actually create our future with intent.

The future counts on us to make it better. Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow. Beautiful. Over to you man.

You know, it's so easy to look around the world and be disheartened and to feel frozen and to look at so many things that are getting torn down or missed opportunities. And what I keep coming back to is three words, which is better is possible. And then the second part of it is, but we can't waste any time. It's not going to happen in one day, but if we don't start now, it's never going to happen. I'm with your brother and that's why I love your work. I love your mission.

I love what you're doing. I love your strategies. Author of This is Strategy, Seth Godin. Thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. Keep leading. We need you, sir.