SETH GODIN: Bestselling Author of The Song of Significance
Episode Notes
Company culture was a hot topic in 2020 due to the worldwide work from home the pandemic imposed on us. My show was born into that conversation. Enter Seth Godin and his book, ‘This is Marketing’. He said one line that shifted the axis of my show from conversations about company culture from the C suite to emerging leaders.
What was that line? Culture is strategy.
Since entire companies conducted business in their kitchens, the rise of no bullshit work life balance was not just important, but critical. This impacted the growing mental health issues that piggybacked the pandemic. Now we find ourselves with many conversations from quiet quitting to what leadership can be. Can we shift more than the narrative and create the best job you ever had?
Seth Godin is the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work. His latest book, and soon to be his 22nd bestseller, is The Song of Significance.
Godin writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, and two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the altMBA, the social media pioneer with Squidoo, and Yoyodyne, one of the first internet companies.
At this critical juncture in business and culture, I'm excited to have THE Seth Godin on my show. Join me, as he ushers in powerful lessons for business in The Song of Significance.
Get the book, The Song of Significance
Get the Audible version, The Song of Significance
Get the Kindle version, The Song of Significance
Holly Shannon's new Youtube Channel, Subscribe here!
#Coffee #barista #pumpkinspicedlatte #Starbucks #DunkinDonuts #blackcoffee #darkroast #lightroast #latte #macchiato #cappuccino #espresso#centralperk #Bulletproof #howtomakecoffee #coffeebeans #coffeedate #virtualcoffee #coffeebreak #coldbrew #coffeemachine #coffeegrinder #connection #community #frenchpress #coffeehousemusic #cafe #arabica #espresso #cuppajoe #decaffeinated #caffeine #coffeeaddiction #cappuccino
Transcript
Holly Shannon 0:00
Coffee Culture is brewed for connection under the guise of coffee. We've been meeting in cafes for centuries. Today is no different. Coffee Culture, the podcast explores the meetup. If you are a coffee enthusiast, maybe seeking Modern Love on a coffee date, we'll want some health hacks. We'll dig into that too. I'm Holly Shannon, come wrap your hands around a hot cup of connection with me on coffee culture.
Seth Godin 2:50
Well, I roast my own beans, and I make coffee every day for my wife. But I can't drink coffee because it doesn't agree with me. So I taste it. And I love it. But I'm drinking herbal tea, as I often do, like 20 cups a day. Wow, well, so nice that you still engage in the ritual for your wife. I think that's really special. It's it's a wonderful combination of mechanics, and science and art. And the way you're supposed to do it is measure everything and measure nothing. So who knows? But she's still drinks the coffee every day. So I guess it's good. I mean, she was she went off it for a little while. But then guests to our house kept reminding me how good my coffee was. So now she's back on. So who knows? Excellent. Well, I want to dive into your new book. I'm very excited to share the song of significance with everybody. So what I'd like to do is start at the beginning, and talk about the infrastructure of industrialization. And you You state in the book that we get prizes for standing on the red.it starts in school, it bleeds into our work life and into our leisure time. So can you share that theory and why it has led industrialization thrive.
Holly Shannon 0:30
company culture was a hot topic in 2020, due to the worldwide work from home, the pandemic imposed on us. My show was born into the conversation. Enter Seth Godin and his book, this is marketing. He said one line that shifted the axis of my show, from conversations about company culture from the C suite to emerging leaders. What was that line? Culture is strategy. Since entire companies conducted business in their kitchens, the rise of no bullshit work life balance was not just important, but critical. This impacted the growing mental health issues that piggy back to the pandemic. Now we find ourselves with many conversations, from quiet quitting to what leadership can be, can we shift more than the narrative and create the best job you ever had? Seth Godin is the author of 21 International best sellers that have changed the way people think about work. His latest book, The Song of significance, he writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world. And two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time. He's the founder of the alt MBA, the social media pioneer with Squidoo and yoyodyne, one of the first internet companies at this critical juncture in business and culture. I'm excited to have the Seth Godin on my show. Join me, as he ushers in powerful lessons for business in the song of significance. Hello, coffee culture, family, I am really excited because today, Seth Godin and Holly Shannon are going to be together on the show. So welcome, Seth.
Seth Godin 2:32
Well, thanks for having me. I'm sorry, we can't share coffee from the same machine. But I could talk about coffee and culture, better and magic all day. So.
Holly Shannon 2:43
Alright, right. So why don't we start with the easiest question. What do you drink? What's in your coffee cup?
Seth Godin 4:14
So we're so in deep in the water. We don't even realize we're in the water. industrialism made us rich industrialism gave us the computers we're talking on it give us the food we eat the clothes we wear. 120 years ago, the average person in the United States owned two pairs of shoes and two pairs of pants, that there were no cars, there were very few roads. Everything was different. And so it was a miracle where we figured out how to create management, and the assembly line and the stock market and financial instruments and all the things that go with us. And one of the things we did as soon as we realized just how powerful it was. We built public school and modeled private Let's go on it as an institution to train people to go to work and do what they're told. So if you say, Will this be on the test? You're asking a smart question, because even at the age of eight, you realize that your job is to only do the things that they can measure and leave everything else wet, aside. And if you mess up, they quote, fail, you hold you back a year, reprocess you, and then spit you out, which sounds a lot like a factory to me, because it is. The end result of all of that is in addition to the magical side effects that we all get to enjoy, we also got a huge amount of industrial pollution. We burned so much carbon, we changed the climate of our entire planet. And we have deadened our souls. At the same time, we spend more money on self storage units than we spent at the biggest year ever at Hollywood. It's this weird situation are now 2023 rolls around, we've got AI, we've got outsourcing, we've got robots, we've got layoffs, we've got turnover, we've got systems that can measure everything we do, we are under surveillance. And I think people are finally starting to realize that being a cog in the system is not what they want. And so my book is a rant and a plea for shining a light on the fact that there is an opportunity to sing a different song, the song of significance, and build a job that we're thrilled to be part of.
Holly Shannon 6:28
So if the song of significance is work that matters, work that cannot be automated, mechanized, or outsourced, as you said, would the onset may be of AI in a growing freelance economy? Could this be an opportunity to make way for significant work?
Seth Godin 6:52
It's a huge opportunity. You know, when the steam shovel came along, you and I didn't speak up on behalf of the ditch diggers, because we weren't ditch diggers and the fact that they couldn't dig ditches anymore wasn't our problem. But amazingly, the people who used to dig ditches after some dislocation found something better to do. And my argument about the end of mediocrity is that any average job that can be done by a computer will be done faster and cheaper than you do it. And what are you going to do instead? Well, the only thing you can do is a job a computer can't. And that doesn't have to be a fancy job with a fancy title. It can be a barista, who's going beyond pressing the button on this layer. And beyond handing over a cup and collecting the money and actually making you feel like it was worth going out of your way to walk into that coffee shop, instead of using your AeroPress at home. And that human connection is available for nurses, it's available for doctors, it's available for baristas, it's available for people who write books and podcasters, and everyone in between. But we have been seduced into walking away from it.
Holly Shannon 8:03
I feel that so much I feel such a degradation of customer service, because everybody is so focused on the machine that they're taking your order from, and asking for a tip and giving you a survey as you leave in your email. How was the service? And can we give you a survey for our survey? Like it's never ending, but there's really absolutely no connection happening whatsoever.
Seth Godin 8:32
Right. So here's something I do for fun. I don't know why they killed man, I guess, when I get those surveys from companies that should know better than ones that are three or four pages long. On the last page, it says anything else we should know? And I said, Well, yeah, there's plenty, but you don't care. And if you did care, you would call me here's my phone number. And I have done that 50 times and no one has ever called. Wow, that's because it's not anyone's job to care.
Holly Shannon 9:00
It's, it's, it's sad to me that empathy and hospitality and customer service are basically in the toilet at this moment. And I actually think that COVID perpetuated it in my opinion.
Seth Godin 9:15
Yeah, I think that once we had to emotionally and socially distance from each other and wear masks and confronted our own mortality, it adds up to a lot of survival, selfish behavior. But in this moment, we have this unbelievable opportunity. Because the world is changing whether you want it to or not. We are moving toward a more resilient climate based economy. We are eliminating huge swaths of mind numbing labor. And there's more people on Earth than ever before. We've invest invented a billion jobs since I was born, where those jobs come from. Right and We were going to invent some more jobs. So maybe you could invent some jobs. Or maybe you could invent a job for yourself, where you add actual value in a way that you would be missed if you are God.
Holly Shannon 10:11
That's beautifully said, actually. I'm in your chapter, compass. Before we draw a mount, you posit that what each revolution has in common is that it is inconvenient, and that revolutions happen on the edges. And whatever it interacts with it changes. So Seth, can an established and industrialized company salvage their culture and create a revolution that brings that rare form of connection that comes from significant work? And to that point, you did mention Microsoft does it exemplify this?
Seth Godin 10:52
Yeah, I was about to rant about Microsoft. So thank you for tuning in.
Holly Shannon 10:56
To my job. Steve Ballmer
Seth Godin 10:58
did everything he could to destroy that company. And he single handedly created an organization that missed five of the five most important revolutions in technology of the last 15 years. And he created a culture where the people who cared probably were thinking about leaving if they already didn't, and his successor, such an Adela showed up and said, We're famous, we're big. And the marketplace isn't going away for us anymore. Everyone's talking about other big tech companies, but not us anymore. What would happen if instead of measuring keystrokes, instead of challenging programmers to do one more line of code per day, we created a kind of place where people could do something that wasn't in the manual. And you don't have to like chat GPT, you don't have to like the new Bing. But you can look at what they did. At a time when everyone's had Google was insurmountable, and how they did it. If you look at how Facebook has squandered 10s of billions of dollars, and has had to layoff an enormous number of people, they didn't even know what they did for a living, because they were just shoveling coal into their machine. And you compare that to Microsoft's careful nurturing of a thing like LinkedIn, which most people don't even know they own. You know, there is a way for a giant corporation to do this. But it also works for small institutions. Right? If you think about the king of hospitality, Danny Meyer, and how Shake Shack showed up, and anytime a Shake Shack goes near McDonald's Shake Shack wins, hands down. If you think about what is it like for a doctor who has an office with four people in it, to go up against the Kaiser Permanente? How is it that even though it's less convenient, and possibly more expensive, you can't get in? Well, because sooner or later humans, when given a choice, we'll make a choice. And what we really want is not to just feed the cycle of technology and profit, but maybe just do work we're proud of instead,
Holly Shannon 13:12
I personally go out of my way to find all the little entrepreneurial businesses. I don't want to feed the machine either. In the side question here are kind of a left field question and not where I was headed. But you did mention chat GPT. And I know Elon Musk just you know, put out there that he believes we should put like a halt on it because of everything that literally happened almost overnight. Once everybody got their hands on that technology, like the average person got their hands on the technology. What do you feel about that?
Seth Godin 13:50
My general rule is always do the opposite of Elon Musk.
Holly Shannon 13:57
Looks like they answer.
Seth Godin 13:59
No, I think we should put a temporary hold on Twitter, I think we should put a temporary hold on full self driving and we should definitely put a temporary hold on flying to Mars, because it's not gonna save anybody's life and it's going to burn an enormous amount of fossil fuel. We need very thoughtful approaches to what GPT can do. It is a magic trick that is fooling us. I studied computer science. As an undergrad. I took that advanced computer science seminar at a PhD level at Stanford a long, long, long time ago. And I did a project with Isaac Asimov. So I understand science fiction and AI, more than the average person. And the way Chet GPT works is one word at a time. It figures out what to say, but it doesn't know anything. It's stupid, but we imagine that it is smart because that's how our brains work. And do I believe If that as a group of humans who create culture, we have the obligation and the right to come up with guidelines to make sure that the cars are safe. medicines don't kill people and computers don't make things worse. Absolutely. But it is not clear to me that this skeptics of AI, have done a good job of differentiating it from how in 2001 Space Odyssey, it is entirely possible the world will end in our lifetime. I think it's unlikely to end because of an evil AI.
Holly Shannon 15:32
I don't disagree I but what I find really fascinating. You know, I've been on LinkedIn and Twitter and there are AI. I don't even know, bots, masquerading as humans. Oh, yeah, on there. And here I am working tirelessly to put out quality content and thoughtful ideas, and deep thinking and share beautiful and wonderful voices like yours on these platforms. And there's like this AI girl that looks like Lara Croft that's got something like a million followers. I've like been on the app for like, 12 years, I think I have five followers, like, why would people want to follow something that is non existent? And would feed their brains with the garbage that industrialization wants them to have? Like, why would they? Why would they do that?
Seth Godin 16:31
Well, that's a brilliant point. And it's going to get 10,000 times worse, the spam, the scams, the disruptions, more so much worse, we're gonna look back at today as the good old days. But it's not because it's at TPT. It's because people are gullible and stupid. And it's because that gullibility has been fueled by a lifetime of indoctrination. And when the industrialists figured out how to build factories, people are stunned when I tell them this. They were sure, like Andrew Carnegie and the rest of the big shots, that their biggest problem was going to be that people weren't going to buy enough stuff. That they looked at the mindset of the typical person who was not called the consumer back, then they were a person. And they said, How are we going to get these people to define their lives by what they buy, and what crowd there is. And it was 100 year project that cost a trillion dollars, and it worked. And so now you have very sensible people who are going into debt to get a handbag when they already have a handbag, because that handbag is a symbol for them. So Lara Croft has a lot of followers, because the people who are following her who have friends who are following her. And, you know, we're sort of hardwired for that. So we're gonna have to build new systems really fast, to be able to tell the difference between a friend who texts us and a computer who texts us between someone who's honestly engaging with us, and someone who wants us to get something from some prints somewhere who left a lot of money in a briefcase, it's going to be really weird for a long time. And that's why we have to figure out whether the humans in our life that we care about and not worry about reaching anybody, but those people.
Holly Shannon 18:21
I agree. I agree. I, you make a point in your book, that scale is not the point. So I think this is perfectly plotted right here. You said WhatsApp had 19 employees when it was sold. When I read the story of Zappos, they had a culture that embraced the significance of the team, and more importantly, the customer. And when they got bigger, they lost their culture. So if scale is not the point, and can actually deconstruct the song of significance, how do we know when to stop? How does an organization know when more does not equal more?
Seth Godin 19:13
Okay, so to add to the indoctrination, we have the make believe Nobel Prize economist, Milton Friedman, and the argument that the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value that's not written down anywhere before he went on about it. And it's not really true. CEOs think it's true, because that's how they make more money. But in fact, that's not why you're here. And so when I think about my friend Sean Eskenazi and his chocolate company, their motto is, it's not about the chocolate, it's about the chocolate. And what he means by that is, he visits every farmer who grows the beans. These are, this is the lowest paid profession on Earth. We're talking about millions of people make $3 a day we're talking about milling tons of kids in child labor, slavery situations who are harvesting the cacao that Nestle's in Hershey's is selling. He visits every one of those farmers who supplies his beans every year, he pays them five times the market rate five times he sends their kids to private school. He has open book management, he only sells to stores that sell directly to the customer. He doesn't deal with any wholesalers, which is why he can't find them at Whole Foods. And he makes profit. But he doesn't make the most profit. He makes profit. And the race to be big, and then sell or the race to be big and then make an even bigger profit isn't why the people came to work for you work with you? It's not what, for example, coffee culture is about owning the most Starbucks isn't the answer. The answer is to say, there is a place where you can spend your time and your money and in that window of time, your life will get better. And if we can make a living doing that. That's enough, because the goal is not to sell more coffee, the goal is to make people better.
Holly Shannon 21:12
I really love that. I wonder if if more businesses thought to be to build in public and to let everybody see what's happening if transparency would keep it in check? I don't know.
Seth Godin 21:32
Well, these are great questions, Holly. You know, transparency is a weird thing. Because if you get enough transparency, the photons overwhelm us, and we stop paying attention to that, too. So we've gone from one page of disclaimers when we get some drugs to 40 pages of disclaimers, and we still don't know what the side effects are. Because there's transparency, but they didn't say and said if you take this, you will get a headache that will last for four days, because that's what I need to hear. But they don't have an obligation to talk directly to me. And when we think about companies that make things better, when they get bigger, it sometimes happens. But it takes guts to be the CEO who says Now we're going to pause. And that happens. Sometimes it doesn't happen a lot. But it happens sometimes we look at a musician or director who has maintained a reputation for decades, it's because they didn't sell out and do the easy thing of making five sequels. Right. And those people if you talk to them when they're eight years old, probably had a better life than the person who just kept churning out crap.
Holly Shannon 22:44
Hey, coffee lovers, I have two quick announcements. I am opening a YouTube channel at Holly Shannon. And I'm gonna have all of coffee culture on there. So you can capture the little shorts for five minutes here and there. Or you can capture the full length interviews. Also, my book zero to podcast is on Amazon, and it's on my website. And it is the How To Guide to start your podcast really fast and get your voice and ideas on iTunes and Spotify like I did, makes a great holiday gift for you. Perhaps a graduation present. Or maybe it's your New Year's resolution. Both links are in the show notes. And now back to our show coffee culture. You stated when we sing the song together, significance is is a choice. And you discussed a carpet business called interface that lead by example and created the best jobs that they ever had. Would you like to share that story?
Seth Godin 23:45
though? I don't know about you. But I could never imagine working on the factory floor of a company that made carpet. It's dirty. It's hot. It's smelly, dangerous. You're taking petroleum from the ground, turning it into things like nylon, backing it with hot kind of rubber backing, churning it out by the millions. And that was the business that Ray Anderson built. And in the 70s, they did find they were growing. And then he read a book by Paul Hawken, Paul's first book about the climate. And he had an epiphany. And he called a meeting of his 12 most senior people and he walked in and he said, Look, we are destroying the only planet we have, not just in general, but specifically us. That's what we do for a living. And he said, I want to build this company into the first fully sustainable, resilient floorcovering company. I want this company to make things better than we found. And he said I don't know how to do it. And I'm not sure how long it will take. Here's a piece of paper. We will be sustainable by blank. And he said you figure out how to get it done. Have, you fill in the blank, and then he left the room. And his job was to create the conditions for these people to do this impossible thing. Now, it's interesting to know that along the way, they made more money, generated more shareholder value, and made a better product for more clients than they would have if they hadn't done. It's worth noting that at the beginning of the century, by the year 2000, they were well on their way to being climate neutral. And now, they actually sequester and remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they create. But the punchline of the story, is in the movie that I saw that had interviews with all these people, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years later, even the ones who don't work there anymore, say that was the best job I ever had. And they don't say that was the best job I ever had, because they got paid a lot. Or because they didn't have to work very many hours. They say it because they got more done than they thought they could, because they were treated with respect. And they did something that mattered. And if you can do it at a carpet company, and you can do it when you're a barista. Not sure which job you can't do it.
Holly Shannon 26:14
That makes perfect sense. Actually, I'd like to bookend that question. Because you brought up carbon and emissions. So if cultivating significance breeds leaders that work together to create the very best work? Can you share the story behind the design of the carbon Almanac, and how it taps into the song of increase? And if you also want to share what that project was about, I would love for that because I know on your podcast akimbo that I consume all the time, it is your baby. So I want to give it pride of place here.
Seth Godin 26:56
Well, thank you. It changed my life. And I can talk about it quite a bit. About two years ago, I realized that I wasn't talking about climate change on my blog that much about my first post about 18 years ago. And the reason I wasn't talking about it that much is because I felt stupid. I felt under informed. I felt manipulated. And I thought well, if I feel that way, I bet other people do too. So I organized I did not write but I organized a project with 300 people in 40 countries. We've since grown to 1900 people in 90 countries that all volunteers including me, came together and built a 97,000 word 300 page, footnoted fact checked, illustrated, copy edited almond almanac of what's going on in the climate. And I learned so much from this project and met some really extraordinary people online. But one of the things that I learned is that extraordinary work is possible. If the right people choose to do it with each other if there's enrollment in the journey. And the second thing which we talked about, which I talked about in the song of significance is page 19 thinking. And page 19 thinking is a concept that we came up with me and three or four other people inside the group. And we said, look, the almanacs gonna have page 19, we know that there's an 18, there's a 20, there's gonna be a 90. We also know that there's not one person in this room who's ever written that page before. Nor is there anybody here who knows how to do the typesetting and writing and copy editing and all the other tasks needed to get page 19 Done. And yet, there's going to be a page 19. So how are we going to get that done? And the answer is patient it and thinking which is you don't have to finish the page. But you do have to start it, you do have to make it a little bit better. You have to be able to say to the group, I made this. And there's a difference between criticizing the work and criticizing the worker. We had enormously high standards. That's why there are no significant errors in the book. We criticize the work all the time. But we weren't criticizing the person who made the work. And this feeling that human beings get the liminal space from here to there to be on this journey of creation. That's what Jacqueline Freeman calls the song of significance song of increased the song of increase is that leap, that feeling that we're headed into the void, and she got it from the bees she works with as a beekeeper. But we're not bees were humans. And so I took that original concept of the song of increase and expand it into what I want to talk about when we think about work, which is we need to make a living but we also need to make a life
Holly Shannon 29:55
so I love the page 19 theory And what I find very interesting is that you is bringing clarity between the criticizing of the person or the content. And I think people are take things personally and on the defense because it's been drilled into us through industrialization, through school, and so forth. But like you were saying, like you knew nothing about what you were building, and let's face it, somebody could build page 20. And all of the content in there is perfection, and there's nothing to change. But, you know, a year later, it might not be relevant and has to be changed again. But if you if you build a team that understands that what they did in that moment was great work, then they're not going to take it personally that now it has to be completely redone. But but we don't do that. Like, we don't do that in school. We don't even do that with each other. You know, how do we adopt that song of increase? How do we do that?
Seth Godin 31:20
Lots of people want to run the marathon. And if you hire a coach, and say, please train me to run the marathon without getting tired, they will not be able to help you. You can learn to run the marathon. But you also have to understand that the people who finish the marathon are the ones who figure out where to put the tired. So when we are looking at this opportunity in front of us, I can't help you get there without it feeling odd without it feeling like you're on the spot without it feeling like it might not work. Yeah, that's part of it. And that is what we got trained to be worried about that, you know, Instagram pushes teenage girls to become very unhappy by elevating surface optics over everything else. And when someone doesn't, quote, like you, you feel like they don't like you, when in fact, they don't know you. They just didn't press some button somewhere to make money for Mark Zuckerberg. And we just keep reminding people from, you know, elementary school on that you're being judged all the time. And what I'm trying to help people understand is that their work is being judged all the time. And you can change your work without not liking yourself.
Holly Shannon 32:40
That's like, perfection. I have a question about mission statements. Glad that I made you laugh before. They're usually a joke, right? You know, mission statement we are for people plan it and whatever. You know, it's it's, it's always a joke, right? Um, a bunch of people talking heads sitting in a conference room, and they come up with the same jargon that everybody else does. Should businesses throw away mission statements that they don't live up to embrace the song of significance, and proudly put it into practice and applaud the song of increase and change?
Seth Godin 33:27
Oh, that's out the chorus, I thought you're gonna ask you know, someone who devoted so much of their life to writing this book, I think everyone could probably have a useful conversation talking about it. I don't think everyone will or should agree with me, but I think we should have the conversation. But the mission statement thing has fascinated me for a long time. Because we need to, before we do anything at work, figure out what it's for. Right. And mostly what a mission statement is for is to make the people on the committee feel glad that they were on the committee and to deflect certain kinds of criticism from the institution. Carnegie Hall's mission statement is written in 5000 points type on the outside of their building in New York City, and it's meaningless. What makes it a mission statement meaningful is does it help everyone in the institution make a decision? If it is not going to help you make a decision, it has no purpose. But if you make a decision based on the mission statement, write the Postal Service to hail and snow and whatever. Well, yeah, that means if you're a male person, you've got to deliver the mail. Even if it's raining out. You don't get to stay home. That's the mission statement. So at the beginning, Federal Express had two elements to their mission statement one, when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. And as a result, for example, a driver a driver at Federal Express, use their credit card or to charter a helicopter to get over snowed out mountain pass to deliver one package? Because that's what they're supposed to do. They don't do that anymore. And the second thing that FedEx used to do is answer the phone on the first rate. And they made it very clear that they weren't the post office. And if you're somebody who's paying 20 bucks for a package, instead of 14 cents to mail something, we're gonna answer the phone on the first string, they don't do that anymore, either. Nobody has now. Well, that's actually not true, there are plenty of institutions is still do, because they have decided that that is a cheap way to stand for something. And so what we need to do, if we want people to be significant, is give them the chance to make a decision. Because if you're not making a decision at work, that you're just a cog on the assembly line. And we've got to figure out which decisions can we give other people the privilege to make and still live with whatever they choose. In that moment, we can always decide tomorrow that we have to do something different based on that. But we've tended to reserve decisions to just a few people. And every chance companies get to have frontline workers not make a decision. For example, McDonald's, they don't get to decide how long to cook the french fries, press the red button, it starts cooking. And when it's done, it comes out, they took that decision away, which probably leads to more reliable french fries, but also makes your job less important. Because now they're going to find a robot to press the red button. And we don't need you anymore at all. And so I guess what I'm getting at, in my book, is what we actually make for living is decisions. And if you're going to run any sort of institution, you better get comfortable with that.
Holly Shannon 36:56
I'm, I'm wondering because I see this on LinkedIn. Now you're saying with McDonald's, you press the red button before I start, and then it goes off. But in an effort to have the workforce specialize. You know, where I'm kind of going with this, don't you to specialize like to, to literally give somebody the narrowest channel possible to do their job. What I see on LinkedIn all day long, is the person that announces I got a new job. And I'm so excited to work at this forward thinking company with these great humans doing this wonderful job. And, you know, they use all of the catchphrases and acronyms and whatever else. And it's their, you know, entrance speech, you know, so excited. And literally three months later, the same identical post is up saying, with regret, I'm leaving this job. Great things on the horizon, you know, stay stay with me, it's been such a pleasure to work with these amazing humans for this great company, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the entrance and exit speech are I done? What is your take on that?
Seth Godin 38:24
Well, controversially in the book, I say that turnover is a good thing. Not the turnover of the brutality of Amazon or Twitter, where you're racing as fast as you can to be a cog in a machine. But to the turnover of I want to go this way. And they want to go over there. Because the industrial mindset is doesn't matter. If you want to eat come with us, that's the only option you have. But if you want people to be engaged in where you're going, they need to be enrolled in the journey. And one of the challenges I think you're talking about is, at many institutions, the people who are doing the hiring and the people who are doing the working are different. And so, if a good hiring professional seduces you to enroll in one thing, and you get to work and it's a different thing. Well, then I think everyone knows it. Everyone else is just involved. But being really clear about what things are like around here is the key. So it's the beginning of the almanac. Again, it was all volunteer easy and easy out. I worked full time and a lot of people most people didn't. The first month, a whole bunch of people came and went dozens and dozens and dozens people I was thrilled because it meant we stood for something that we weren't willing to average it out to make everybody happy. We knew exactly what we were trying to do. And four people from a really well known company came sort of on a quasi volunteer assignment from their boss just to help us and five days later They were all gone. Because they wanted to be way more corporate. They wanted way more reporting, they wanted way more hierarchy who's in charge or who, who tells you what to do. And I was like, good luck to you. But that's not what we are. And that's not where we're going. So thank you for speaking up. I'm glad this isn't gonna get in the way of you feeding your family. But this isn't a good fit.
Holly Shannon 40:21
So that kind of speaks to your line in the book that management is the race to the bottom. But developing leaders lets us climb to the top together. Right in, in a song of significance.
Seth Godin 40:38
Right. And you know, so as we wrap this up, some people are hearing this and saying, Wow, I wish my company would do that for me. Or they're saying, Well, I've been doing that all along, but no one will come with me. And what I'm arguing, and the reason it's a book and not some piece of digital stuff, is books are really good thing to use to have a conversation. Let's talk about this. As Manav Khosla says, Let's Get Real, or let's not play, if you're not serious about these sorts of things about diversity about overcoming caste system is in false proxies, then I don't want to work with you, I have enough talent to go somewhere else. Because if the people with the choice start going somewhere else, the system is going to change.
Holly Shannon 41:28
I suspect that the song of significance is going to start a lot of revolutions. I hope it does, because I've been studying culture for a while now. And, and started in the middle of the pandemic, or when the pandemic just started. And the the degradation of the human experience is been sad to watch. And we need work life balance. I think the song of significance is the answer to that. I really do.
Seth Godin 41:57
I hope so. I'm doing my best, but people like you are making a very big difference. Thank you. I appreciate your focus and your care and time. And, you know, we only get tomorrow one time. Let's do it better than we're
Holly Shannon 42:12
expecting. Thank you, Seth Godin, for all these mic drops. Obviously, all the links are going to be in the show notes. My last question for you is about a tour. Are you doing one?
Seth Godin 42:29
Well, here I am. And here you are. You know, the idea of a book tour has transformed over the years. My first book came out in 1986, I worked with Chip Conley, and I did a book signing at a Barnes and Noble. And the day before I did it, serious sprain of my ankle playing Ultimate Frisbee. But a deal's a deal. And I showed up on crutches. And I'm sitting there behind the table, and there's like, you know, 40 copies of the book. And someone walks up to the table, picks it up with the front cover, looks at the back cover, puts it down and walks away. Like that's heartbreaking. That is heartbreaking. Golden's rules if the author is anywhere nearby, if you get within 10 feet, you got to buy a copy of the book. Absolutely. At least hide it somewhere in the store, but do not put it back on the table. No, that's, that's horrible. So ever since then, I I've been hesitant to show up in bookstores, I don't fly anymore. So there isn't going to be a lot of me dancing around the planet. But I will tell you one conversation I had with my former publisher. I used to give a lot of speeches around the world. And one particular week when a book was coming out was very busy. And I was in six airports in four days. And I sent them a note, I say, I was in six airports in four days. And I'm here to tell you that not one bookstore and one airport had my book. And he wrote back and he said, don't worry. If you tell us which bookstores you'll be passing as you race through the airport, we'll make sure that there's a book there for you to notice. As like your understand. The point is to trick the author into thinking the book is everywhere. I was just giving you data point. So all along we're saying in the digital world, things are different. One of the things we're doing is if people buy five copies of the book, we're giving them 25 copies into the pamphlet, so you can just hand them out like candy. Because the theory is you don't write a book to sell books. You don't write a book to cut down trees. You write a book to make a difference. And if I can use this moment in time to talk to people like you and elevate the conversation, it the whole thing is worth it. Well, thank
Holly Shannon 44:44
you that's a huge compliment. I thank you so so much and I'm sorry I won't be able to meet you in person to have you sign the book. But I do get it it but I might want to point out that after you know 21 best sellers, I have a feeling that people will show up. It's a little bit different story now sash.
Seth Godin 45:08
We'll see. We'll see. Anyway, thank you keep making a ruckus.
Holly Shannon 45:12
Thank you, I appreciate it very much. So I just finished this interview with Seth Godin with a song of significance. And, to quote, Sash value can only come from change from humanity. And that rare form of connection that comes from significance. It's the emotional labor of showing up because we care. Connection is what we all seek. In the Song of significance. Seth Godin shares how companies can create the best job you ever had. And the key is through leadership sets shares that a team will rally around a project or a company, if they know and feel they are connected to and part of the song. The race to the bottom is by managing people and showing that they stand on the red dot. It's industrialism. And it survives, because you only sing their song. I'm Holly Shannon, and you've been with me through five seasons, as we have traversed all things culture. Are you ready to start a revolution? Are you poised to be a leader and to take this blueprint to capitalize on connection instead of human capital? Thank you. That's a wrap on Season Five coffee culture. Thanks for being part of it. Would you like to join the party coffee lovers? I have two ways for you. Please go over to YouTube now and subscribe to at Holly Shannon. And there'll be all the videos of this podcast there as well. What's the second way you can do that? You can leave a review with your ideas in Apple podcasts. Either way, I would love it if you share a hot cup of connection and coffee culture with a friend. And if you'd like to support this in the podcaster you can buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. Thank you coffee lovers.