How To Make An Impact And Create Culture As A Leader - Seth Godin | 014

hustle culture as I understand it is a selfish trap and it's a trap because it doesn't scale that people say well you're Seth Godin yeah but I was in Seth Godin for a really long time but I showed up and I always created some opportunity for value and respected people's attention write a blog post for 100 people or in your case make a podcast for 100 people well you don't have 100 listeners anymore Nick how did that happen did it happen because you hustled but it happened because the people who listened to your podcast told other people that is a long-term community-based strategy it's resilient but what I have found is that the waves of spammers that show up in whatever category we're talking about they look like they're the next big hot thing and then they're gone if you're really in this for more than a couple years you can't do it by hustling foreign dive into today's episode I want to thank you for tuning in and supporting the podcast now we just launched and released a new flavor of whey protein and this is my signature flavor quite possibly the best flavor of whey protein we've ever created and it is Key Lime Pie if you like key lime pie you're gonna absolutely love this flavor even if you don't love key lime pie you're probably still gonna love this flavor it's a limited launch so once we're sold out we are sold out forever you can go to the link in our description and use code nickbear10 to save 10 off your order so go try our key lime pie away protein and let us know what you think well Seth thank you so much for being on the show today welcome well it's an honor people who show up on the regular selflessly teaching folks come in so as I was telling you before we started recording this I've been a massive fan of your work for for years now and I have shared that work with our entire team it is shaped the trajectory of of my business the way that we operate the way that we think and I know you have a new book coming out that I would love to learn more about and I know it's not released yet but your team sent over some some notes and some topics on that book and I'm extremely excited because of the way that the workplace and the environment and culture has changed over these last two to three years and some of the topics that you kind of outlined that are going to be in this book which is titled the song of significance it's meeting me at a very interesting pivotal point in my career as an entrepreneur where I need to learn from a lot of these things that you have discussed over the topics and I really just want to read over a quick blurb of what your team sent over to give some context before you dive into this and this new book the song of significance a new Manifesto for teams the workplace has undergone a massive shift remote work and economic stability have depressed Innovation and left us disconnected and disengaged paychecks no longer buy loyalty happiness and effort alarm managers are responding with harsh top-down layoffs surveillance and mandatory meetings workers are responding by quiet quitting and working their wage but there is a better answer a human answer and it is within everyone's reach so I'm curious what is the song of significance so we need to talk about bees just for a minute um a feral bee Colony at the end of a winter if they've survived will be out of honey totally depleted and the Maiden to run the hive will instruct the workers to go out and collect as much pollen as they can and in less than a couple weeks they will replenish all the honey and then they'll have the Queen lay a new egg a queen egg which is very rare to have two queens in the same Hive and then in a 10 minute period of time 12 000 bees will leave the hive all at the same time Jacqueline Freeman calls this the song of increase the song of increases a miracle to see this Leap Forward but then when the bees leave they form a tight ball in the tree nearby because they need a place to live and they only have three days to find one and they sing the song of safety the song of safety is what we've been doing as humans ever since the pandemic or before hunkering down hoping everything will get better trying not to extend ourselves but we're not bees and so I wrote a book about the song of significance which is what people actually want to do more than they thought they could to achieve something to be treated with respect and dignity to be part of a team that's what makes it the best job you ever had and it turns out amazingly in 2023 it's also what makes you a living and then when you first started writing books you're writing a book a year kind of on that Cadence and then you stopped that Cadence to really start putting out I don't say more meaningful work but I guess more intentional based off of what you were experiencing in the world in your personal life what was it that happened over these last two to three years that you personally observed that made you say I need to write this book okay so I just want to clarify the first part I only wrote a book a year because my publisher wouldn't let me write three books a year uh that you needed to to like not wear them out but I didn't set out to write books I set out to teach and what I found over the years is that I could reach more people with a blog post or a YouTube video or a course often than I could with a book so I only write a book if I feel like I have no choice if I feel like the medium of the book delivers something that we need to talk about and what I saw in the last year after all the trauma of a worldwide pandemic was things that range from billionaires firing people online for public Sport and humiliation to Big corporations having the lowest productivity they've had since they started measuring productivity most of all to the pain that so many of us were feeling the dislocation the loneliness the disrespect and when I heard about the bees and the song of increase I realized that we are settling for a race to the bottom and that even entrepreneurs who are hustling all day stealing attention strip mining it trying to get some one more sale we're all cogs in a system that's outlived its usefulness and so what I wanted to do was start a conversation was get people to speak to each other their bosses their employees and say we could do this differently what are things like around here let's talk about that do you think that hustle culture is an issue in today's world surrounding entrepreneurs and especially in in the social media space of Entrepreneurship hustle culture as I understand it is a selfish trap it was invented by people who were selfish and has been adopted by people who are selfish and it's a trap because it doesn't scale that people say well you're Seth Godin yeah but I was in Seth Godin for a really long time but I showed up and I always created some opportunity for value and respected people's attention so no spam no outbound Hustle No sending people notes saying quick question that isn't a quick question and trying to get more of that instead it's write a blog post for 100 people or in your case make a podcast for 100 people well you don't have 100 listeners anymore Nick how did that happen did it happen because you hustled would it happen because the people who listened to your podcast told other people that is a long-term community-based strategy it's resilient but what I have found is that the waves of spammers that show up in whatever category we're talking about they look like they're the next big hot thing and then they're gone right and if you're really in this for more than a couple years you can't do it by hustling yeah I've I've been uh I've been at this for about 11 years now and I started my business in in 2012 and I've I've really been proud of the culture that we've created within the business with the people and and the mission and the organization but what I have found is as you scale and as you grow it is harder to maintain that culture and you know I watch other businesses promote and and talk about culture all the time but I don't know if they actually do care about the culture and you know one of the things you talk about is culture amplifies enrollment and I would love to learn more about about what that means to you and what is enrollment sure let's break it down so I believe that everyone listening to this has options you don't live in a company town where there's only one Factory where you can work by because you can only get there by walking you have options which means that wherever you work is voluntary you could work somewhere else if you're going to show up at work voluntarily at some level you're enrolled in where that organization is going and the best organizations are filled with people who are eager to make a change happen that's what enrollment is you don't have to tell somebody who's you know on the A-line of a hockey team at the Stanley Cup finals that the game starts in five minutes they know it and they can't wait to go out and play not because they're going to get paid but because they want to they put in all that training and time and effort so that they could do this enrollment is what we do when we emotionally commit to the journey and it doesn't have to be Sports and it doesn't have to be some company that's doing important non-profit work it could be somebody who makes Widgets or a barista at a coffee shop and what culture does culture is simply what are things like around here for example if you've got a sales rep who's a bully and a jerk but they keep hitting their numbers and you keep them around you have sent a message to everyone in your organization which is we will tolerate bullies and jerks as long as you hit the numbers that's your culture and who we reward who we Elevate who we applaud these things determine what things are like around here and so if you start looking for people who are enrolled in the journey and give them confidence and support highlight them applaud them other people will follow in their footsteps what it says on the back cover of my book is purpose of a beehive isn't to make honey honey is the byproduct of a healthy Hive do you think that you can maintain the same type of culture in a digital workplace as you can in person I've helped on the summer camp in Northern Canada for 43 Summers nothing makes me happier than walking into a building that's filled with that bus but I have discovered that you can in fact create a better more powerful more resilient culture in a distributed way but you can't do it by saying it's just like real work except we're distributed so in my case as a volunteer I organize the carbon Almanac 300 people now 1900 we created a 97 000 word book footnoted graphs charts tables typeset fact check didn't make a single error that was important shipped it in less than five months beat our deadline by three days we gotta translate into six or seven languages it's been a bestseller around the world and every person was a volunteer every person in 40 countries we worked Around the Clock shift by shift by shift and the people who were part of that care about each other they take care of each other they go to each other's weddings when they have the chance it's a real community so yes it can be done Matt mullenweg who runs automatic which Powers part of what we're talking on right now 40 of the internet is run on things that automatic and WordPress built they don't have an office 2 000 people no email no office they are hugely productive they are really profitable you don't have to have an office you just have to do things with intent I'm curious your thoughts on on what you think most people are looking for in a job and I'll give some context to that as I'm building my business and we're we're scaling the executive team or bringing in people of more experience I've interviewed so many people that won they've gone remote and they've gone digital and they want to come back into the office and two I'm interviewing a lot of people who are leaving their previous job because they took that job for the pay and I've heard this time and time again of this is the first time my career I've taken a new job because of pay and it was the biggest mistake of my life so do you think people are looking for more meaningful work than ever before or has it always been that way so here's what the boss thinks but you can do this just by watching how they behave the boss thinks that workers want two things get paid a lot don't get fired because those are the only two things they ever talk about right that they list how much you get paid when they're trying to hire you and they use don't get fired as the way to discipline you well I surveyed 10 000 people in 90 countries and I said what's the best job you've ever had everyone has an answer to that question everyone and then I said here's 14 attributes which were the ones that made it the best job and the bottom two the two least important ones were I didn't get fired and I got paid a lot and so people are taking a deep breath and saying I don't get tomorrow over again so I want a job where I am paid fairly you're not going to get off easy you're not going to pay me less than I'm worth but that's not why I'm showing up I'm showing up because I'm here to make a change happen and to be treated with respect as I do so and the flip of this which you mentioned about interviewing a bunch of people is job interviews are a false proxy that unless the people you are hiring are going to become people who for a living are interviewed a job interview doesn't tell you what you need to know it leads to permanent systems of caste and social standing and discrimination against all sorts of groups because we're looking for people we'd like to hang out with have lunch with date whatever it is but that's not the measure of whether we are going to be able to together make a change happen and these false proxies get in the way ever since we started you know taking the s.a.t the SAT doesn't tell you if you're going to be good at anything it's just this accepted measure of whether you're going to get to the next level or not so what we have is the chance to find people who are enrolled in the journey create a culture that brings out their search for meaning and then rewards them and the team as they build something that matters I would love to talk about turnover and I noticed one of the things you've highlighted is that turnover is okay and that for me I'm not gonna lie it kind of shook me because one of the things I've always been proud of in our business is we've had low turnover and I've kind of bragged about that and we have low turnover in operations and marketing and you know fulfillment and I'm curious what makes turnover okay because I'd assume that a lot of entrepreneurs business owners they want low turnover because they would assume it reinforces this strong culture but am I incorrect in saying that so I agreed with you for a long time the turnover at the companies I built and I built one of the first internet companies um was close to zero and I thought that that was part of being a good human here's what I have found we were talking about enrollment before it used to be that the boss wanted zero turnover and if you they saw you were working on your resume they would fire you they didn't want the employees to think they had options because then they could get the employees to do whatever they wanted and pay them as little as possible also turnover is really expensive because training takes three or four months where you're paying this person and they're not producing very much but thanks to slack and Google Docs and seven other things a committed competent person can get up to speed in a day and a half now they can read all the threats of what came before not they're not a superstar in two days but the disruption is much smaller but the key to the whole thing is this let's get real or let's not play if you don't want to be here don't be here that like with our blessing we're going to run classes where everyone can update their LinkedIn page if you can get a better offer where you can contribute more and be more involved please do so that that's not a moral failing by me or by you this bus is going to Cleveland if you want to go to Tucson getting off this bus is a good idea but if going to Cleveland is what you need and want here we go and now I don't have to spend any time cajoling you or bullying you because you want to be here you want to go where I am going and once that is in place I mean what we saw in our all-volunteer carbon Almanac is a bunch of people came and stayed for an hour two hours four hours and they said nah not for me but the people who stayed contributed an enormous amount more than any employee ordinarily would and then when life got in the way they said I gotta go but they left their work behind and someone else could take on it on so as we're looking at this new way of work yeah you can have some people who are Journey people who are doing a set of tasks but you should probably Outsource that work anyway the core team the court you know you don't want Ringo to stay in the Beatles Because he has no choices you want to stay in the Beatles Because he wants to be in the Beatles are there any organizations that do this very well have a very healthy turnover that you've kind of seen that are larger organizations because I know you talk about how Amazon has a turnover problem I'm curious your your perspective there and what they're doing incorrectly okay so Amazon's turnover problem is a different thing it is a symptom of brutality that half of all the warehouse injuries in the United States happened in Amazon facilities in 2022. that if you go to work for Amazon as a driver or warehouse person which is most of the people who work there in terms of numbers the chances are that you will last less than 90 days because if someone was a stopwatch with someone who's constantly uh turning the crank on your labor and eager to replace you with a robot that's very different than what happens at a place like Union Square Cafe Union Square Hospitality Group Danny Meyer one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world Shake Shack's worth over a billion dollars the turnover at one of his restaurants is definitely not zero because the very nature of working in a restaurant is it's unlikely you're going to be front a house or back a house for 10 years in a row but if you visit myolino or Union Square Cafe or the modern you will have a world-class experience because what Danny and his team did was they said we're going to build an onboarding system that gets someone to understand our culture in a matter of days to not tell them every movement and what to do but to teach them our attitude spreza Torah our culture how things are around here and here's a business that does tens hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue for tens of thousands of customers and the customers don't notice the turnover the turnover is fine because Danny has standards they keep raising the standards and if it's not working for you you should go work somewhere else so you don't believe that the scale and growth of a company is an excuse for a poor culture or um the issues that's in these larger corporations experience I think that scaling for scaling's sake is a Fool's errand it doesn't increase often the revenue or the Peace of Mind of the owner and it ends up commoditizing what you do that if we think of a world of projects you know we don't think that you know Marvin Gaye or Van Morrison should scale what they do and just sing Moon dance over and over and over and over again because then they're a lounge singer right that the idea is to live in the liminal space on the frontier that's why people are interested so yes we see businesses scale and sometimes they scale in a way that produces value when a t scaled and started Bell Labs Bell Labs invented the transistor Bell Labs invented the Touchstone phone Bell Labs did all sorts of extraordinary things but there were also people mil hundreds of thousands who just put the cable into the wall over and over and over again that culture has to be different than the culture of bell labs so you should think about how you want to spend your day you should think about who you want to spend your day with because the purpose of your company is not to make the maximum profit the purpose of your company is to create the conditions for the people who are enrolled in the journey to be glad they did and the byproduct is a fair profit and what's wrong with The Fair profit when I think back to starting my business and really focusing on just who we were what we were doing what we were creating and who we were creating it for that's what I'm I'm having the most fun when there's moments when I start focusing on scale and growth and things that are going to drive scale on growth that's why I'm not having fun that's what I'm not enjoying in you know something that you've talked about historically that's really resonated is focusing on the smallest viable audience and going really deep with that audience and you know you made a comment on the podcast in the interview you did with um Tim Ferriss and you mentioned that 99 of the world hasn't ever read one of your books right but the books you've created I mean for me at least and the people that read your books Seth Godin is is huge he is he is an entrepreneur he's an author like very very powerful so do you still believe in going very deep in deep in these roots with a smaller viable audience as opposed to going too wide too quickly and just staying very very focused so I wasn't exaggerating it really is 99 it's not about it's 99 of the people in this country have never bought one of my books fine with me and the thing is that in the era of mass you have to have math Tide detergent only works because they sell 70 million boxes that mash the last episode reached 70 million people compare that to whatever's hot on Netflix right now as we're talking two million three million people but the people who made those shows have just as much creative freedom and income as the people who made Mash so scale comes with its own requirements but it's not the point so I don't agree with the people who say you have to Niche down that's not what I'm saying I'm saying you have to get on the hook you have to find the people you seek to serve and make an audacious promise to them this is for you if you don't get it if it's not something you like I understand but in my mind I made this for you and so I'll just pick an example Hershey's sells a lot of mediocre chocolate to millions and millions of people if Hershey's disappeared they would just buy Nestle's instead but this race for scale has led to child labor and slavery among some of the poorest farmers in the world who grow the cacao beans that go into your Hershey bar it has led to a chocolate bar that doesn't taste anything like a real chocolate bar if I look at my friend Sean eskenosi in Missouri Sean makes a chocolate bar where he meets the farmers pays them five times a fair wage puts their kids through private school has open book management and sends kids around the world to do field projects and he still makes plenty of money Sean's chocolate bars are off the charts for someone who appreciates chocolate but the average person who wants a Hershey bar would never buy one because it costs twelve dollars fine it's not for you but I'm proud of it and that lets us do work that we can point to and say I sacrificed for this and it was worth it whereas if you say well I'm really really big I will point out to you particularly on the internet that everybody who gets really really big doesn't stay there I'd love to talk about surveillance and Trust and you talk about the intersection of trust and essential work what happens when the stakes get high in an organization will they decide on surveillance or trust and your team sent over it was this uh this block with four quadrants and it was the intersection of low high trust low high stakes that's it right there that you're showing yes that opened up my eyes to so much and a lot of self-reflection honestly and it made me I mean after I I've hadn't read the book yet because the book's not out or public but just reading the notes that your team sent over I went to our leadership team and says as soon as this comes out we're all reading this because it it for me it it's it's spot on I would love for you to talk about the difference between surveillance and Trust And how that is projected in an organization for healthy culture well first thanks for the kind words and if you have your team send me your address I'll mail you a book as soon as I get one well thank you we do high-stakes things all the time if you're gonna get on an airplane and fly to Seattle if it doesn't work out you're in really big trouble right you're like at the bottom of the ocean somewhere so we want Pilots to be under surveillance we want air traffic controllers to follow the exact steps we want the mechanics who work on the planes to have a checklist we don't want them to make stuff up as they go along this is high stakes low trust work because I didn't get to meet or work with any of those people in advance I don't trust them it's a system and lots of things in our life are like that if you need blood from a transfusion you want to make sure that entire supply chain was under surveillance you're not trusting anybody on the other hand if the day blueback quartet is going to be on stage at Carnegie Hall this is high stakes for them if it goes well and the record album they're producing that night goes well they're made forever but it's only going to work if there's High trust because he doesn't say to Paul Desmond play those notes exactly the way I wrote them down he says we are here trading with each other in front of people it's high stakes and high Trust in the other corner there's low stakes and high trust if you go past two Starbucks to your favorite Barista Coffee Shop you want that person to treat you like a person not like she's an automaton you want her to ask about how the weightlifting competition over the weekend was because that is why you passed two Starbucks because even though it's low stakes the coffee you probably can't tell the difference but the trust matters a great deal to you and in that last corner so much what happens on the internet low stakes low trust right I need something done I need five pictures uh retouched in Photoshop I just go to upwork I pay the cheapest person if it doesn't work out I'll pay somebody else no big deal and our lives are either best lived in low Trust sorry best lived in High trust low stakes work where we get to show up for humans where if it doesn't work it doesn't work and I find my blog is like that I get to write a blog from my heart if it doesn't resonate with you you can have your money back but my blog is free or high stakes High trust work and I get to do that sometimes I'm giving a speech next week and they don't get to hear my speech before I give it the client is trusting me if it doesn't go well there's gonna be you know a few thousand people who are really pissed off if they paid to go to something and it wasn't good so in that moment I have to rise up because they're trusting me and so what I'm arguing for is as AI as robots as Outsourcing are going to take over so much of their surveillance work what's left for us is to find the human work and human work requires trust and a lot of this is driven through the leaders in a business and organization correct right leaders are not managers and managers are not leaders those words mean different things managers use power and authority to tell us what to do we need them but leaders are doing something voluntary they're saying the future is over there I think I know how to get there who wants to come and that shift is really hard because managers think they have to be leaders they don't and leaders think they need to have authority and they don't so we should be really clear if we're going to lead that our job is to create the conditions for people to find significance do you think leaders can also be good managers and managers can also be good leaders or is there a clear distinction between the two sometimes they can I'm not I'm bad manager I just don't have the heart for it or the patience for it but I know people who have worked their way up to very senior levels of significant companies and smaller ones who can switch hats they can manage where they need to manage they can lead when they need to lead but they are clear about which job they are doing when when I am managing a project I've done 140 books or something I've never missed a deadline I have never gone over budget because I know how to do project management I don't really like it but I can't find someone to do it for me so I do that when I have to but on my best days I'm not managing I'm leading I fought that battle internally for a long time or naturally I believe I'm a strong leader and I have tried to be that manager as well and I found that I enjoy being the leader I'm a better leader than I am manager and for a long time I I fought that because I thought I had to be both and um that was that was difficult for me to kind of learn and experience that process which I would assume that many other people also do that as well yes exactly right and you know when I was building yogodine I had 65 people and 40 of them reported directly to me which is insane because I wasn't managing I was leading and then I hired Barbara Johnson to be uh my CEO and then president and I said Barbara you're in charge of managing people you need to move me out of the room anytime management needs to be done and in the last five months that before we sold the company we became profitable because Barbara understood that we needed to create systems for management in addition to doing projects that need leaders yeah it's past January I stepped down from the CEO role in in my business and put a true operator uh in place her name's Kat Thomas phenomenal leader and manager and it is only done remarkable things for our business which reinforced it was the right decision for me to make and the trajectory for the business to kind of lean into well done I would love to talk about being a teacher and you know spending time on your website first off I love the blog on your site and that you you email out like these small Snippets of just very powerful information is is something I constantly send down to our team to just chew on I think it's a remarkable resource but on there you kind of position yourself as a as an entrepreneur as a author and as a teacher and when I first read that I I saw a teacher but I didn't really think too much about it and I heard you talking about in an interview about being a teacher and how much being a leader in a business is about being a teacher through tension and that for me just it clicked things just made so much sense and in terms of what teaching actually is and it's guiding people through tension to not necessarily give them the answers but help them find the answers themselves can you like really lean into what that tension looks and feels like a little bit so there's a great word I didn't know what it meant for a long time Auto Didact Sonos Auto didactic is someone who teaches themselves but I've come to the conclusion that everyone is an auto-didact that when a teacher shows up they can say things they can have you read things but you will not learn anything until you teach it to yourself through experience through figuring it out and the reason this is hard is because once you understand there is something you don't know and you know that you are about to go through the process of learning it you feel incompetent you feel incompetent the first time you try to ride a bike or juggle you know it can be done but you also know you don't know how to do it and in that moment there's tension the tension of will I make a fool of myself the tension of maybe I won't be able to get to the other side the tension of this could be out of my reach and the tension of if I do learn this will I like the person that I become and stress is bad but tension is good and you know if you think about something like weightlifting it's nothing but the tension of gravity compared to your ability to control the motion of an object through space the tension is the point attention isn't a problem it's why we are there and my friend Gabe has a great example for this which is uh I got uh two things here in this hand I have something you can't see and if this hand I have a dollar bill which one would you prefer and when a friend says that to you there's tension because you're thinking to yourself well there might be something really good in the other hand or it might not be what is this what is our relationship like and then if you take the dollar bill and say to me what's in your hand the longer I keep my hand closed the more the tension persists but if I open my head it all goes away it's like a knock knock joke and so what we do when we teach as leaders is we don't say here's a memo that describes everything that's going to happen and all the decisions are already been made what we say is I think the wizard has what we need to get me home to Kansas and he might be able to get you a heart and he might be able to get you a brain do you want to come well the entire movie from that moment forward is the tension of will they get what they want from the journey that's what teachers do so there's tension that teachers are creating there's tension that leaders are creating in business for employees to teach and guide them we also talk about these commitments that that leaders and employees both have to have in this Mutual relationship that we have in business what are these commitments what do they look like and how do they benefit both the the leader and the employee so the core of the book the reason it's a book is because I want this conversation to happen I want the boss to say these are my commitments and I want the employee to say these are our commitments let's hold each other to them and what you will notice as you hear them is they're not related to the commitments that Henry Ford made or Ray Kroc made or you know pick your big company uh boss so here we go we're here to make change happen it's not the status quo we are acting with intention we're doing it on purpose dignity is worth investing in not free tension is not the same as stress mistakes are the way forward take responsibility give credit this one I could talk about for six hours criticize the work not the worker a lot of managers have trouble with this one turnover is okay mutual respect is expected and there's like six or seven others but when you think about these they all seem obvious they all seem real and yet it's very hard to find an organization that's willing to live by them I saw a quote years ago and it kind of it broke down conversations that business owners leaders need to have with employees and it explains how it needs to be a dialogue rather than a monologue instead of we're not talking to you we're not telling you what to do it's this open conversation do you believe that some of the best cultures and organizations in the world have this dialogue as opposed to this monologue is that is that the Hidden Gem that most organizations that are failing or missing I think that an organization fails for a whole bunch of reasons it usually succeeds for one um so I'm not sure exactly why any organization is failing but let me tell you about our event eye hospitals we start to wrap this up because they capture so many of the things that I'm talking about if we look at the population of New York Chicago and La add them all up that's fewer people than aravind Eye Hospital has restored eyesight too that's how big an impact this group has had if you go to aravin for corneal surgery in India they will say Well it costs 130 or costs zero you get to pick and you'll get exactly the same surgery regardless of what you pay and they are really strict and high surveillance when it comes to what happens in that operating room their infection rate is less than the infection rate at a similar Hospital in London did they have that buttoned down completely and so ophthalmologists from the US regularly go to aravind to do eye surgery because it makes them better eye surgeons on the other hand the vast majority of people who work at our event aren't surgeons they have a framework for what it's like around here but is their job to make the patient feel welcome it's their job to help it the person who paid zero not feel like a pauper it's their job to understand how to use emotional labor to create a connection that helps people heal and when we look at an institution of that size where a lot is on the line if they screw up we can see that it is possible to organize these cultures in a way that makes things better by working with people who matter so is it focusing on the people that makes is that that one thing that makes successful companies I think that What Makes Us successful is focusing on the work to be done the change we seek to make can we make that change in a way that also enables us to relentlessly raise our standards to criticize the work and not the worker but also and treat people with the dignity and respect that they deserve and what happens is if you buy into that Milton Friedman nonsense and think that you just have to make the maximum profit you're just going to race to the bottom you're gonna treat people like a machine and when the machine isn't working well throw it out get another one and that worked for a long time made us rich it's not working anymore so it's the significance that matters that's right well Seth thank you so much for the time today I am looking forward to reading the song of significance and and sharing with my team and hopefully more than one percent of the world will read and learn from this book especially coming off you know these last two to three years but I appreciate your time your work and everything that you have done and continue to do wow thank you Nick keep making a Ruckus it really matters [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Nick Bare Podcast

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Keywords: seth godin, seth godin marketing, how to be a leader, leadership training, public speaking, purple cow, behind the brand, the dip, seth godin interview, seth godin audiobook, seth godin leadership vs management, how to be a leader in life, seth godin tribes, seth godin purple cow, seth godin linchpin, seth godin how to get ideas to spread, seth godin the practice, seth godin branding, seth godin ted talks

Id: oAXD7oH9vcI

Length: 42min 52sec (2572 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2023