Document Actions
Tribes Used To Be Local
Filed Under:
Jacqueline Novogratz is changing the world. Not by leading everyone in her town, but by challenging people in twenty countries to join a movement. One at a time, Jacqueline is inspiring entrepreneurs in the developing world to create enterprises that enrich the people around them. She's helping create organizations that deliver clean water, ambulances, and reading glasses ... and doing it in a scalable way that challenges expectations.
Jacqueline doesn't just love her job leading the Acumen Fund; she's also changing the very face of philanthropy. Her tribe of donors, employees, entrepreneurs, and supporters counts on her leadership to inspire and motivate them. Geography used to be important. A tribe might be everyone in a certain village, or it might be model-car enthusiasts in Sacramento, or it might be the Democrats in Springfield.
Corporations and other organizations have always created their own tribes around their offices or their markets-tribes of employees or customers or parishioners.
Now, the Internet eliminates geography.
This means that existing tribes are bigger, but more important, it means that there are now more tribes, smaller tribes, influential tribes, horizontal and vertical tribes, and tribes that could never have existed before. Tribes you work with, tribes you travel with, tribes you buy with. Tribes that vote, that discuss, that fight. Tribes where everyone knows your name. The professionals at the CIA are a tribe and so are the volunteers at the ACLU.
There's an explosion of new tools available to help lead the tribes we're forming. Facebook and Ning and Meetup and Twitter. Squidoo and Basecamp and Craigslist and e-mail.
There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didn't exist a generation ago.
All of it is worthless if you don't decide to lead. All of it goes to waste if your leadership is compromised, if you settle, if you don't commit.
Many tribes. Many tools. I'm writing to you about both. The market needs you (we need you) and the tools are there, just waiting. All that's missing is you, and your vision and your passion.
Excerpted from TRIBES: WE NEED YOU TO LEAD US by Seth Godin, by arrangement with Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Do You Zoom, Inc., 2008.
Jacqueline doesn't just love her job leading the Acumen Fund; she's also changing the very face of philanthropy. Her tribe of donors, employees, entrepreneurs, and supporters counts on her leadership to inspire and motivate them. Geography used to be important. A tribe might be everyone in a certain village, or it might be model-car enthusiasts in Sacramento, or it might be the Democrats in Springfield.
Corporations and other organizations have always created their own tribes around their offices or their markets-tribes of employees or customers or parishioners.
Now, the Internet eliminates geography.
This means that existing tribes are bigger, but more important, it means that there are now more tribes, smaller tribes, influential tribes, horizontal and vertical tribes, and tribes that could never have existed before. Tribes you work with, tribes you travel with, tribes you buy with. Tribes that vote, that discuss, that fight. Tribes where everyone knows your name. The professionals at the CIA are a tribe and so are the volunteers at the ACLU.
There's an explosion of new tools available to help lead the tribes we're forming. Facebook and Ning and Meetup and Twitter. Squidoo and Basecamp and Craigslist and e-mail.
There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didn't exist a generation ago.
All of it is worthless if you don't decide to lead. All of it goes to waste if your leadership is compromised, if you settle, if you don't commit.
Many tribes. Many tools. I'm writing to you about both. The market needs you (we need you) and the tools are there, just waiting. All that's missing is you, and your vision and your passion.
Excerpted from TRIBES: WE NEED YOU TO LEAD US by Seth Godin, by arrangement with Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Do You Zoom, Inc., 2008.
Thank you for making Tribes visible
When we think of social entrepreneurship, the idea of taking leadership is at the core. That is why Tribes is an important book for every social entrepreneur. It defines the entrepreneurial mindset in the broadest perspective of leading a tribe to new places.
Thank you for including this as a core topic for future and continuous consideration.
Shallie Bey
Evolving toward the Planet Earth Tribe
Thank you for this exciting excerpt. I can't wait to see the book I see the evolution of tribes beyond borders as crucial toward evolving a the sense of global citizenship that is required if the many different tribes are to survive on this small planet without killing each-other off or destroying the vital life systems that make our planet habitable.
One of the key reasons our planet is in trouble is because we have allowed our tribal loyalty to be stuck at the artificial nation-state level. You need only to take a look at our planet from space to see that these lines we draw on the maps aren't real - yet we fight over them like kids on a playground daring anyone to step over their imaginary line.
On the playground we have teachers to keep the fights from getting out of control; within nations we have law and courts and police to check tribal rivalries from disintegrating into chaos and war. But at the global level we have no enforceable law, no governance. If we wouldn't think of running a school, a company, a city or a country with no central system of governance, why do we think we can run such a complex organism as a planet that way? No wonder our world is spinning madly out of control.
Yet quietly, without fanfare or recognition of its potential, I believe a new operating system for our planet is unfolding that will eventually enable Brazilian rubber-tree workers to police the land-grabbers destroying the rainforest, Iraqi teens to stop guns from blasting their neighborhoods, and Masai tribesmen to reverse the global warming ravishing their livelihood.
Right now, it doesn’t look like government – it looks like villagers Googling to find micro loans, activists you-tubing police-abusers, NGOs e-conferencing climate solutions, and people working on the same page in Wikipedia. However, every time we enter cyberspace we step into a new space beyond the boundaries of nation-states, into the reality of our one world.
In this new space, “netizens” are evolving a global neural network with the potential to evolve new forms of planetary government more wise, creative, interactive, and participatory, than any governance ever seen in the history of the world.
I'm working on a film on this subject - see www.onefilms.com. Seth, would you be open to being interviewed on camera?