Seth Godin – How to Get Your Ideas to Spread – Nordic Business Forum

Golf as a Spectator Sport

Thank you, thank you, you’re awesome. What an extraordinarily non-finished welcome. Thank you, that was fabulous. So, something else that they don’t have a lot in Finland is Golf, which is a fine thing because Golf is a really lousy spectator sport. We can acknowledge that there are two things that make golf such a bad spectator sport. The first one is nothing good ever happens, and the second one is that in golf, if something good does happen, you’re not allowed to wildly applaud. So, if you could help me out here, give me the worst, measly, asterisk applause you can muster, go ahead. That was terrible. Thank you. Can you double it, double it again, and one more time? Fabulous. Thank you. That, thank you, that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we do for a living. Now, that’s what we do for a living. We cannot possibly cause interest to occur, but what we can do is find small threads of interest and amplify it. What we can do is find the disconnected and connect them. That is our mission as marketers, as people who care.

Learning to See Differently

But before we can unfold and unpack all that, we need to learn to see what’s going on around us because when the world changes, sometimes we become blind. So let me tell you what I mean by that. Here’s a bat. I grew up, maybe you did too, with bats and dinosaurs. When I was five years old, and if you take a picture of a bat, it turns out, turn him upside down, he turns into a total badass. Here are three bats getting ready for bed, except actually, they’re at a cocktail party, and my expectation is that from now on, you will never look at bats quite the same way. And so, my job today is to help you learn to see, to see the world differently in a way that makes it so you can’t unsee it because we’re living in a revolutionary time. This can be very expensive to get wrong.

Expensive Mistakes

On my desk back in New York, I keep this box as a reminder of how expensive it is to not know how to see. In this box is something I made. It turns out in 1991 and 92, I had something you didn’t have then: access to the World Wide Web. There was no, I had access the internet. There was no World Wide Web then. I saw it, and I said, I know what I’ll do. I’ll make a book about this internet thing. And so, I got a publisher. They gave me $60,000. I hired five people. I spent all the money. I made a book. Inside the box is the t-shirt I made for the Salesforce to promote the book. That book went on to sell 1848 copies. It was a total failure. No one bought the book. During that same period of time, two guys in California named David and Jerry saw what I saw. They had fewer resources than I had. They didn’t make a book about the Internet. They built a website called Yahoo. And at one point, my half would have been worth 80 billion dollars, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And the reason is simple because they saw what was possible. I had a cloudy vision because I saw what I knew how to do. They had a blank slate, and they said, what should we do? I said, what do I already know how to make? I didn’t see. And the reason I didn’t see, the reason you don’t see, the reason our companies don’t see is because we’ve been blinded by success.

Yuri Gagarin and Industrialism

Does anyone know who this is? Right, Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. What a heroic story. Basically, they wrapped the guy, the Soviets wrapped the guy in tinfoil, shot him into the orbit, he came back alive. It was a miracle. But the astonishing thing about Yuri Gagarin is he grew up here in a mud hut with no electricity, no running water, and no lights. In 125 years, human beings went from living underground in a hut to circling the Earth. That’ll spoil you for industrialism. Henry Ford made us all rich. Henry Ford pioneered and perfected productivity and scientific management. Henry Ford went to the workers in Detroit, and he said, “Men, if you’re used to making 50 cents a day, I will pay you $5.00 a day to come work for me.” How could he possibly pull that off? How could he afford to give people a 10X raise in one day? The answer is simple: the assembly line. Do your job faster than you did it yesterday. So, we took the idea, the assembly line, and we spread it everywhere we possibly could in every industry. The idea was, do what you did yesterday, do it faster, do it cheaper, go, go, go. And so, to defend the factory, we created…

The Industrialization of Work

Policies and ways of being, gatekeepers, and we made the factories ever bigger. Henry Ford had Ford shepherds that raised Ford sheep to be turned into Ford wool to make Ford fabric so that they could be put into Ford cars. Because the bigger the factory, the more money you make, the more control you have. Henry Ford said you can have any color car you want as long as it’s black. He didn’t say that because he liked black; he said it because black paint dries four hours faster than any other color. And if you can make a car four hours faster, you can make a car a little cheaper. And so, the system, but the system was built on mass. How many people can we get to all buy the same thing? I’m slightly ashamed to say that the two most popular products in American refrigerators were American cheese, we basically named the worst possible flavor of cheese after my country, and Heinz ketchup. Both products made an enormous quantity, both products marketed to everyone. That’s what industrialists need: sell it to everyone. And that led to this whole idea of marketing.

Marketing and Mass Production

You know, this is Fancy Feast gourmet cat food, a very popular product in the U.S. Let’s be clear: cat food is not for cats because if it was, it would come in mouse flavor. Cat food is for the people who buy it that we tell a story to people that makes them happy to serve it to their cat. So, I’m going to talk about marketing today, consumer marketing like this, not cat marketing, and business to business marketing, which if you do a Google search means you have to shake the hands of a lot of men wearing suits. Apparently, in B2B marketing, we spend a lot of time shaking heads, but the story is still the same. And the story revolves around industrialism, polishing off the edges, figuring out how to do it again and again, make it more reliable, make it a system, do it the way you always do it.

The Evolution of Jobs into Assembly Lines

So here’s the question, delivered with as much pathos as my Finnish will allow me to: when did they industrialize your job? When did they turn what you do from a craft into an assembly-line process? Because we’ve been doing it for a really long time. It turns out what Henry Ford understood is that mass production makes productivity happen. But you know what happens once you get mass production working? That’s right, you need mass distribution because you need everyone to be able to buy what you make. Mass distribution requires mass merchants, stores, and distributors that sell it in bulk. And you know what mass merchants require from us? Mass marketing. That’s why we invented it: to keep the factory happy. How can we reach everyone? How can we get everyone to buy what we make? Let me tell you the answer: babies. Whenever possible, run ads with babies in them. No matter what you’re selling, it works. And if babies don’t work, wrap the baby in saran wrap. It even works with triplets. But sometimes babies aren’t the answer. So when advertisers realize this, you should use doctors, fake doctors, real doctors, celebrity doctors, doctors of any kind. It doesn’t matter. Whether you have unfortunate juxtapositions now and then, what matters is this: the person you work for, the shareholders you work for, the people around you, keep saying the same four-letter word again and again, and that four-letter word is “more.” Get me more market share, get me more customers, get me more shelf space. We’ve got a factory; it knows how to do its job. It knows how to make insurance policies. It knows how to make electronic devices. It knows how to make whatever it is we make. It doesn’t matter what people want; we want them to want what we have. So you, marketer, take this money and go get me more.

Challenges of Modern Marketing

Which leads to this: average products for average people, except maybe Pop-Tarts, but the rest of these products are deliberately built to appeal to the masses because you know what mass is, by definition? Average. If you’re going to advertise something to everyone, you better make something everyone wants to buy. If you’re going to market something to everyone, the good thinking goes, better market something everyone wants to buy. And this worked beautifully for 70 years. And I’m here with like a whole string of bad news ready. Problem number one, this picture is fuzzy. I had a bad cold when I took it. But here’s the deal: the blue box in the middle center, that brand manager spent a hundred million U.S. dollars interrupting me and my country mates, a hundred million dollars on coupons and shoving allowances and TV ads and magazine ads and radio ads. Why? Because that brand manager figured that after seeing all those ads, I’d go buy the product, and once I started taking that ibuprofen, I’d keep taking that ibuprofen. And she’d turn back her 100 million dollars. Well, you know what I did to those 100 million dollars with the ads? The same thing everyone else did: I ignored them. And the reason is simple: I don’t have a pain reliever problem. I solved my pain reliever problem 20 years ago by buying the generic or the yellow box or the cheap one. Well, this is your challenge. You are busy trying to sell something that solves a problem people don’t think they have. And if you’re showing up trying to sell something that people don’t think they need, they’re not going to listen to you. That’s a challenge.

Changing Marketing Landscape

Problem number two, if any of you have been listening to all this nonsense and noise and everything else about digital marketing, what you’ve been told is that consumers now have the attention span of a goldfish and then what you have to do is in less than eight seconds, get your banner point across, get your video point across, noise and noise and noise and noise. Here’s the thing: your customers aren’t goldfish. And the idea that we need to make ever more noise in front of ever more people isn’t working.

Conclusion

Next problem was the picture I took at the Holiday Inn last night. No, I didn’t take this last night. I think this I took this at a Hyatt. I don’t know. It’s dark.

The Changing Landscape of Hotel Booking

It’s three o’clock in the morning in a hotel room. That’s what it looks like. All hotel rooms look like this at three o’clock in the morning. They’re supposed to be dark, which makes perfect sense, except that hotels have been telling us for all these years that they’re all offering us a dark, quiet room. And when the internet doesn’t exist, it’s no big deal; you go to the brand you know. But now we’ve got this thing called “sort by price.” You put in your neighborhood, sort by price, here’s 20 hotels. They’re all the same. Take the cheap one. That sentence, “They’re all the same, take the cheap one,” is a real threat to you and the work you do.

Overwhelming Choices and Marketing Saturation

So, this mindset that we have to find some poor schmo and assault him over and over, over again until one day he buys from us is now officially broken. That people aren’t listening; they are choosing not to listen. They have a remote control, and they are not afraid to use it. Ladies and gentlemen, we have branded ourselves to death, and we have no one to blame but us. We ran too many ads, we took too much attention, we made too many promises, and then we invented the internet and gave everyone a remote control, and they are using it. More bad news: In New York City, on Fifth Avenue at 20th Street, I can stand in one spot, and in that spot, I am less than 350 feet away from six different stores where I could buy yoga pants. The dreaded yoga pant shortage is finally over. And the thing is, whatever you make, the same thing is true. Just down the street is a camera store that will sell me more than 600 different kinds of cameras. And right next door to that is a place where there are thousands of cell phones to choose from. And if I go online, this is how many financial instruments and insurance companies; that’s just the beginning of the alphabet. The fact is too many choices, an infinite number of replaceable choices, which leads to a piece of news that’s good news and bad news all rolled into one: Finland is now the center of the universe.

The Power of Being Click Away

It is the center of the universe because, instead of being way up north, far away from everywhere, it’s one click away from anything. It used to be that all you had to do was be the best in Helsinki because people couldn’t travel very far. But then bit by bit, the range that we could reach out to keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And now, for anybody, anywhere, if they want you, they’ll find you. And if you’re the best in the world, they’ll buy from you. So that’s the good news and the bad news. The good news is everyone is a click away; the bad news is everyone is a click away. So you’ve got to make the decision about whether you’re worth reaching, whether you’re worth contacting, whether you’re worth buying from.

Transition to Good News

So, I just gave you a whole slew of bad news with some little good news thrown in. And you can say, “This isn’t fair. Who thought this up? I worked really hard to get to where I am right now, and here you are giving me all of this bad news. Who designed this stuff you’re talking about? This future is not one where I read the manual for.” And I will agree with you that if you want to, you can look at it in a very negative way. But now, one quarter of the way through, I am done with the bad news. We can take one more deep breath because from here on in, it’s all good news.

Embracing Customer Leadership and Revolution

Some people say the answer to this question is big data. Track more people, get more information, understand where everyone is at all times, track and track and track. Here’s the problem with big data: big data is in the rearview mirror. Big data tells me what people did yesterday. I am way more interested in customer leadership, not customer management. Customers don’t want to be managed; they want to be led. And we can’t lead by sneaking around looking at everyone’s data. We’re gonna lead by doing something braver than that. And it begins by understanding right here, right now, we are having a revolution. So let me explain what I mean by revolutions. We had the Industrial Revolution. No one was alive for that. Then in the ’50s, we had the TV mass media revolution. But right now, we got another one. This is a vinyl record. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these, but I show it to you as an example of what I mean. In 1972, the record industry was perfect. You couldn’t help but make money if you were in the record business in 1972. Couple reasons: if I had a record and I liked it a lot, I’d play it enough to wear it out. I’d

The Internet Revolution and Its Implications

So, I just gave you a whole slew of bad news with some little good news thrown in. And you can say, “This isn’t fair. Who thought this up? I worked really hard to get to where I am right now, and here you are giving me all of this bad news. Who designed this stuff you’re talking about? This future is not one where I read the manual for.” And I will agree with you that if you want to, you can look at it in a very negative way. But now, one quarter of the way through, I am done with the bad news. We can take one more deep breath because from here on in, it’s all good news.

The Power of the Internet Revolution

Some people say the answer to this question is big data. Track more people, get more information, understand where everyone is at all times, track and track and track. Here’s the problem with big data: big data is in the rearview mirror. Big data tells me what people did yesterday. I am way more interested in customer leadership, not customer management. Customers don’t want to be managed; they want to be led. And we can’t lead by sneaking around looking at everyone’s data. We’re gonna lead by doing something braver than that. And it begins by understanding right here, right now, we are having a revolution.

The Melting Bell Curve and the Rise of Permission Marketing

So, let’s talk about revolutions. We had the Industrial Revolution. No one was alive for that. Then in the ’50s, we had the TV mass media revolution. But right now, we got another one. This is a vinyl record. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these, but I show it to you as an example of what I mean. In 1972, the record industry was perfect. You couldn’t help but make money if you were in the record business in 1972. Couple reasons: if I had a record and I liked it a lot, I’d play it enough to wear it out. I’d have to buy another one or I’d loan it to Bruce, then I wouldn’t have it anymore; I’d have to buy another one. Where would I get another record? I know there were buildings called record stores filled with things called records. I would drive there and I’d buy hundreds of different items or dozens because the industry was present in that building. Not only that, on my way there, I would turn on the radio in the car; cars had radios. And what the radio did was do nothing but promote the product I was gonna go buy. And there was MTV and Rolling Stone magazine; you get the idea. It was perfect. We all know what happened. In less than five years, it went from perfect to impossible. Every record ever recorded available to every human with a smartphone anywhere on earth anytime they want for free. More music available to more people than ever before in history. But the music industry is toast. Gone. Same thing happened to travel agents. Same thing happened to brokers of all kinds. So go down the list. The internet destroys the perfect and then it enables things that are impossible to occur. That’s what revolutions do; they turn things upside down.

Embracing Change and Innovation

So the question is not, is this happening? Clearly, this is happening. If you’re a radiologist, you should be really nervous because a couple years ago, they figured out radiologists don’t have to stand next to the x-ray machine. So they would send your x-ray digitally to somewhere who would, for less, read it. And now you should be doubly nervous because it turns out if a computer sees your x-ray, it can read it more accurately than a human. Bad time to be a radiologist. In fact, just about everything we did is going to be done differently. What a chance of a lifetime, what an opportunity to reinvent, to make a difference.

Permission Marketing and Personalization

So how do you do that? First idea is this: there are two ways to get married, right? The first way to get married is to go on Tinder and swipe right over and over and over again, proposing marriage to every single person you swipe. This is a stupid way to get married. The other way to get married is to go on a date. If it goes well, go on another date with that person. Then on the third date, you meet their parents, they meet your parents, you get engaged. Right? You wait till the seventh date before you tell them you’re out on parole. This method of dating, it worked for me, maybe it worked for you. It’s a smart way to get married. So why aren’t you dating your prospects? Permission marketing is this idea of connecting to people who want to be connected to, marketing to people who want to be marketed to, delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

Catering to the Edges

Next big idea: for the first time in history at scale, we can treat different people differently. Treating different people differently is an extraordinary lynchpin that has never existed. You grew up knowing what the bell curve was. You went to school; you studied stats, normal distribution. You know why they call it the normal distribution? Because with 92 percent significance, people are normal. Couple standard deviations and weirdness out there, you can ignore the weird people, sell to the normal people, average stuff for average people. It’s the only smart solution. Except the curve is melting bit by bit, day by day. If you give people a chance, they take a chance. If you give them a choice, they make a choice. There are now more weird

people than normal people because the only ones who are listening to you are the ones who care. The only ones who are listening to you are the ones who know they have a problem. It’s the weird people that are gonna raise their hand, that are gonna pay the money, that are gonna talk about you, that are going to show up. So instead of worry about the middle where they can’t stand you, it’s at the edges where we get a chance to make a difference.

Conclusion: Embracing Innovation and Change

You don’t get to tell people what they’re interested in. You don’t get to change people’s narrative. If someone thinks this dress is the wrong color, it’s the wrong color, and all the yelling you’re gonna do isn’t going to change what they say. So look at this list of brands, every one of which is about 10 years old, every one of which is building something worth billions of dollars, and every one of which is for weird people. Now, one of these brands set out to say everybody, this is for you. Not one of them. All of them started at the edges. And it’s at the edges where we’re going to earn the privilege of having people want to talk to us. This is hard news to hear in an engineering-centric culture where the whole mindset has been how do we do it right, not how do we do it interesting.

Changing Perspectives

Turns out that doing it interesting is what makes the weird people show up. You cannot any longer say you can choose anyone and where anyone because the fact is there’s another anyone that’s a little cheaper than you, there’s another anyone that’s only one click away. What we must do instead is talk to people differently because they hear us differently. One size fits all is gone forever.

Challenging Myths

The next myth we have to undo is the idea that we are all following the leader, that what we are supposed to do is do what we are told to fit in. One of the things that is feared almost everywhere is someone coming up to you and saying, “you know what, you’re not as good as you think you are.” Then we don’t want to hear that, so we fit in. So we don’t bring our true selves to the table, so we don’t raise our hand, so we keep our voice low. We are afraid of being called uppity, of standing out too much.

The Connection Economy

But we live in a new economy now, in a connection economy, and in a connection economy, only uniqueness is rewarded. Only people

Changing Perspectives

Turns out that doing it interesting is what makes the weird people show up. You cannot any longer say you can choose anyone and where anyone because the fact is there’s another anyone that’s a little cheaper than you, there’s another anyone that’s only one click away. What we must do instead is talk to people differently because they hear us differently. One size fits all is gone forever.

Challenging Myths

The next myth we have to undo is the idea that we are all following the leader, that what we are supposed to do is do what we are told to fit in. One of the things that is feared almost everywhere is someone coming up to you and saying, “you know what, you’re not as good as you think you are.” Then we don’t want to hear that, so we fit in. So we don’t bring our true selves to the table, so we don’t raise our hand, so we keep our voice low. We are afraid of being called uppity, of standing out too much.

The Connection Economy

But we live in a new economy now, in a connection economy, and in a connection economy, only uniqueness is rewarded. Only people who say over here because connection is where value is, not now, not industrialization. Here’s a map of the London subway where’s the valuable stations, it’s obvious where all the lines cross. Here’s a map of the Internet where are the valuable stations, it’s obvious where all the lines cross, where value is created. Matt Ridley famously said no one on earth knows how to make a computer mouse. There is nobody who understands plastics and hardware and software and supply chain and manufacturing and import-export who can make a mouse. We must do it as a team, and it’s when teams work together that we create value.

Principles of the Connection Economy

So, this new economy, this connection economy, what’s it based on? Here are some basic principles. The first thing is coordination. You’re all here today, none of you were in this room a week ago, none of you will be here next week. Value was created by coordinating our efforts. Number two is trust. There’s someone sitting behind you or in front of you and you trust them enough to talk to them. You trust them enough to be in the room. You don’t even know them, but you know that they’re fellow travelers.

The next idea is permission, which we just talked about, the privilege of delivering messages to people who want to get them. And the fourth element of this economy is sharing ideas. All of us are smarter than any of us. So if you think about what you do all day, how many of these four elements are at the heart of what you do? Because the institutions that are growing and the organizations that are profiting are right in the center of that. But here’s the surprising part. The surprising part is these four principles are based on two words, two concepts, two principles: generosity and art.

Generosity because no one wants to connect to a selfish person. No one wants to connect to an organization that’s just taking. And art, art is what we call it when a human being does something that connects us, when a human being does something that might not work, when a human being says, “here, I made this.” Art begs for connection, and that’s what we seek out. Not the reliable sameness of perfection six-sigma, but the art of knowing someone touched it.

So before I started ranting, you may have thought what marketing meant is things like lights and clicks and how many people are following you in hype. No, actually marketing is more like what does it cost and what’s the store, and actually marketing is what you support and your use. Actually, marketing is not what you make it, is as far from advertising as it can be. What marketing is, is what is this thing? What is the experience of this service? What are the side effects it leaves behind? What does it mean to be associated with this?

Let me crystallize this in the simplest way I can. Here’s the question. The first person with a fax machine, what exactly did he do with it? I’ll let you think about that for a second. You can’t use a fax machine by yourself. Built into the fax machine is the engine of the marketing of the fax machine. As soon as you got one, you know what you did? You told everyone else you knew to go get one so your fax machine would work better, right? That’s built into Twitter and Facebook and everything else that’s based on community.

Bob Metcalfe, he’s not shy. Coined Metcalfe’s law and Metcalfe’s law says the value of any network is the square of the power of the people on the network. So we are now in the business of building networks, not in the business of building widgets because widgets are cheap and easy to make. Networks last a long time and they’re hard to build.

Transportation Narcolepsy

Next big idea, my wife has transportation narcolepsy, which is a fictional disease she got shortly after we got married. This disease causes her to fall asleep on any moving vehicle unless there’s a good movie on the plane. That’s how I know it’s fictional. Anyway, 15 years ago we planned a trip to France and we missed a flight and we missed another flight in a connection and it ended up taking about 17 hours. And for 17 hours my kids have been making a ruckus and for 17 hours my wife has been asleep. So we’re driving through this pasture in…

Purple Cow Encounter

France, it’s a beautiful sunny day and it’s, you know, cows and all that other stuff, and I noticed in the backseat it’s finally quiet and I go, “The kids are asleep.” And then I look at the rear-view mirror, they’re not asleep, they’re staring out the window at this perfect specimen of a cow for about three seconds and then they went back to making a ruckus. You know why? Because cows are boring. Even in Finland, cows are boring. See one cow, five cows, ten cows, they’re all the same. We don’t need to see more cows. But what if it had been a purple cow? That was a special effect. I’ll do it slowly, what if it had been a purple cow? If it had been a purple cow, tell you what would have happened. I would have pulled over, my wife would have woken up, “What’s going on?” “Shoot, we got to call people back home.” Told me she was looking at a purple cow. I would have taken pictures to prove that I’d seen a purple cow. And my kids, my kids would have ignored me as usual, opened the door, run across the street, jumped over the fence, and rubbed the cat. So that when they went to show-and-tell in two weeks, they could tell people they’d seen and touched a purple cow. You know, a purple cow is only one thing: remarkable. And remarkable means worth making a remark about. It is not up to you, it’s up to us about whether we’re gonna remark about what you made. And if we remark about what you made, you know what happens? The spam filters all go away, the remote controls don’t matter, the word spreads, the network builds, you gain trust and connection. So how much time you’re spending making something worth talking about as opposed to meeting spec?

Pricing Strategy

You have been to this meeting where the sales guy says, “Whoa, we just need to lower our price because if we’re the cheapest, we’ll be able to grow.” Fortunately, the CFO speaks up and she says, “Don’t do that, that’s a race to the bottom. And the problem with a race to the bottom is we might win, worse, we might come in second. That doesn’t help.” So some wise guy says, “Alright, let’s raise the price a few bucks because if we raise the price a few bucks, our margins will go up.” But then marketing says, “Can’t do that. Our customers aren’t stupid, they’re not gonna pay extra for the same thing.” The only option is to be the only one. When you are the only one, people will cross the street, people will wait in line, people will proudly talk about what they bought from you. The price isn’t the point. But how can you possibly be the only one?

The Legend of Icarus

The answer is, we must go back to understand how the legend of Icarus, the myth of Icarus got under our skin. You may have heard it. Daedalus and Icarus banished to an island. Daedalus makes a bunch of wings out of feathers he finds on the island. He fixes them to Icarus’s back and he says, “My son, fly away, but don’t fly too high because the sun will melt the wax and you will die.” Icarus disobeys his father, flies too high, he dies. What is this myth about? It is about obeying your father, it is about doing what you are told, it is about not getting uppity, it’s about the opposite of hubris. The astonishing thing about the story is they changed it in 1850. If you look in the library and look in the old books, that’s not what the myth used to say. What it used to say is all of what I just told you, plus the following sentence: “More important, my son, do not fly too low, because if you fly too low, the mist and the waves will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish.” They took that part out. And the reason they took it out is because they want us to obey, they want us to fit in, they want us to do what we’re told because that’s what makes the industrial economy work. We live in a culture where this is a real sign. Whose risk are you supposed to play at? Exactly that.

Leadership and Grit

What we need to do as leaders is bring grit to our job, the grit to say no, we’re not going to do that, the grit to say no, that’s not good enough, the grit to be willing to fall and skin our knee and get up and do it again. That is the hard part of our job. A bunch of scientists averaged a bunch of JPEGs and they said, “This is what the average person in each country looks like.” What they didn’t say is this average isn’t beautiful. Average is merely average. We don’t need average. We need beautiful. We need alive, bubbling.

Unpredictable Growth

Real viral, something worth discussing. The Japanese have a wonderful term, “kamiwaza.” Kamiwaza means godlike, myth like the way that gods would do it. Ironically enough, what it actually means is fully human, fully present. That cheetah was running through the jungle, he’s not saying, “I wonder if I left the oven on and I don’t know if I’m prepared for my meeting on Tuesday.” No, he’s full cheetah, fully present. When George Nakashima designed new kinds of furniture that changed the way some people thought, he didn’t have a focus group. He just showed up, full Nakashima, totally present. Frank Lloyd Wright, the most famous architect of all time, designed this building in 15 minutes on the back of a paper bag. And then he went to the client, he said, “Here, I will build this for you if you wish.” He didn’t say, “Let’s have a bunch of meetings and I can figure out what your needs are and we can average out the house and maybe we’ll come to some compromises.” Frank Lloyd Wright was fully present. He said, “Here, if you wish, I will make this for you.”

Embracing Adjustment

So if you’re afraid of flying, please don’t look at this. These are 747s coming in for landing in London, and what you’ll see is they’re dangerously and dramatically off course. So they fly back to Paris and start over. Actually, that’s not what happens. What happens is they adjust. Then every plane you have ever been on has been off course from the moment it took off, and the pilot adjusts the whole way. The pilot adjusts, and I’m telling you today, the cost of adjusting is lower than it has ever been before. That’s what we can do now, this side wins. What we can do now is put things into the world and adjust, encounter people and adjust. That is what is being demanded of us. So if you visit Kenya, one phrase you might hear is the word “sawabona.” And “sawabona” means “I see you.” It means, “I know you are here. I know who you are. I respect you. I am willing to engage with you.” Is there anything our customers want more than “sawabona”? To be seen, to be known, to be people. If we are willing to extend ourselves this way, we get the chance for enrollment. Enrollment means, “Yes, I want to go on this journey with you.” Enrollment means, “I will follow your lead.” Enrollment means, “You’re not doing marketing to me, it means you’re doing it with me.”

Overcoming Creative Barriers

I was at a restaurant in Indiana, they had this sign on the menu, it was so unique, I had to take a picture of it. Can you imagine a typical institution saying something like this? Saying, “You’re human, we are humans, let us deal with it.” So why is this so hard? Something’s gone on, they made it so hard for us to be human, to stand out, to be creative, to have a new idea. Well, here’s the deal. Mary Shelley wrote a book called “Frankenstein,” it was a seminal work in the history of science fiction horror stories. I don’t want to talk about Frankenstein, I want to talk about Mary Shelley’s husband who was a hack named Percy Shelley. He was a hack poet and he wrote an essay about poetry, how it’s reserved for the genius, that if the muse shows up, you can write poetry, and if it doesn’t, you’re out of luck. Don’t bother working hard at it, don’t bother being a workingman poet, it’s not gonna happen. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it. He invented writer’s block. Writer’s block did not exist before Percy Shelley wrote about it. There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Writer’s block is an invention where we say, “I don’t have the right idea, I can’t be creative, it’s somebody else’s job to lead, I don’t know what to say, I don’t have a question.” We made all that stuff up. All writer’s block is, is bad habits plus an inability to dance with our fear. The bad habit of waiting for the right answer, the bad habit of asking what kind of pencil do you use, the bad habit of saying, “I’m not in the right emotional moment right now.” And instead, we want the fear to go away. The fear is not going to go away, but we can learn to dance with it. First with mise en place, that’s what a chef calls it when they lay out all the ingredients, all chopped and prepared before the orders come in. Then when we understand that it’s our job to be creative, it’s our job to speak a truth, it’s our job to lead, we can organize to do it. The Finns are really good at doing their work, and now this is their work. The next thing is…

Anchoring Up

Anchors are often associated with something thrown overboard that sinks us, but we can anchor up. We can promise ourselves and the people around us, “You will get something big from me tomorrow at noon. Not at 12:05, but at noon.” We can say to our team, “We will brainstorm our way out of this, and we’re not leaving till we’re done because we are each capable of doing it.” There is no such thing as a genius. If Einstein is a genius and I’m a genius and you’re a genius too, everybody is capable of this. But that’s the last time I’m gonna reassure you because reassurance doesn’t work. You will probably fail, you will probably be ridiculed, you will probably bring things into the world that don’t work. You will probably bring more things into the world that don’t work. That’s just true, the same way if you run a marathon, you will get tired. And anyone who reassures you, “Oh no, just run for 26 miles, you won’t get tired,” they’re lying. Well, the same thing is true of our desire to make a difference. So if you say to me, “I’d like to do this, but I don’t have enough good ideas,” I’m gonna say back to you, then you need more bad ideas. Because if you show me your list of bad ideas, I’m betting some good ones will have snuck in that are a problem. Your problem is you don’t have enough bad ideas. You’re waiting for perfect and it’s getting in the way of you being extraordinary.

Embracing Abundance

We used to live in an economy based on scarcity. There’s still too much scarcity: scarce respect, scarce water, scarce resources. I’m not talking about that. But in terms of choices, we’ve now entered an economy based on abundance. An unlimited number of people to follow, an unlimited number of people to connect with. And if you’re walking around with a scarcity mindset, we’re gonna ignore you. If you show up and say, “I don’t have that much in my box, and if I give it to you I won’t have it anymore,” we’re gonna ignore you. But if you show up and say, “I don’t have that much in this box, but if I give it to you, we’ll both have it,” that’s a homerun. Because then the ideas spread.

The Power of Tribes

Which leads to this next big idea, invented by Charlton Heston 5000 years ago: the idea of tribes. A tribe is a group of people connected by a culture, an idea, a costume, a leader, a goal. These tribes are everywhere around us. But they’re only used to be three in our lives: a spiritual tribe, a work tribe, and a community tribe. But now you’ve got the Red Hat ladies getting together in five hundred cities around the world over lunch, having some martinis, and getting up at tea. You got the Red Hat guys who pay fifteen thousand dollars to go to Hawaii to compete in the Ironman Triathlon, a race they know they’re going to lose. So why do they go? They don’t have water in Finland, they don’t have bicycles. They go because the other Red Hat guys are there, and that’s worth it. Or these Red Hat guys, they train all year round in Portland for the big day. The training is what makes them satisfied. Or these fans in their white hats, or these fans with their special greetings. The fact is for 50 years, people have been part of a tribe that now has its own language, not because you’re getting paid to do it, but because it’s part of who they are, it’s something they want to do.

Synchronization and Connection

Alright, I know you’re not a competitive group, but let’s time you doing this, go ahead. Okay, stop. It took this side of the room six seconds, took you guys about eight seconds, you guys are killing it here is the question: How did you know which rhythm to clap? You guys have a fast cadence, you guys have a slow cadence, but you figured it out. One group, I won’t say in which country, took 29 seconds to do this. I was sweating bullets. But every group I’ve ever asked to do this experiment has pulled it off. I made no eye contact, I didn’t say, “Everybody follow me,” and yet you figured it out in less than 10 seconds. How? It turns out we like doing what other people are doing. That’s why humanity works, that’s why culture works. Look around, is anyone in a prom dress? Anyone in a tuxedo? How did you know what to wear today? Was there a memo? Some people wish there was a memo, but you spend time thinking, “I wonder what people will be wearing today, that’s what I’m gonna wear.” We like doing what other people are doing, not all people, just our people. We want to be in sync with our tribe. So here’s the question: Whose job is it to tell everybody how to be in sync? Yours. It’s your job to connect.

People and Culture

“People who want to be connected to invent a culture on purpose to challenge people to go to the next level to communicate and commit and be clear about how you do it. That is the job of the future. That is what people want. They want to be seen, so abana they want to be connected. This is our culture, this is our economy. You don’t have to invent these people. The Beatles did not invent teenagers; they just showed up to lead them. Bob Marley did not invent the Rastafarians; he just showed up to lead them.”

Marketing Talk

“So, if you came for a marketing talk, I’m about to give you a marketing talk. At least one slide, here we go. Marketing today is this: ‘people like us do things like this.’ We gotta figure out who the people like us are, are they people I want to be like? And we have to figure out what ‘do things like this’ means. People like us do things like this, and we get to invent the product, and we get to invent the culture, and we get to invent the movement, and we get to invent or lead the tribe.”

Commercial Application

“So, how does this work commercially? Here you go. Almost nobody gets a Suzuki tattoo. This is not an accident. This was done on purpose. They made a motorcycle that made a movement, that made a tribe, that allowed people who wanted to express something to express it. Is a Harley the most efficient way to get from here to there? No. Is it the best way for a certain group of you’ll say this is who I am? Of course. Or consider a walkathon, which nonprofits in the U.S. run all the time. Walkathon don’t raise that much money, but that’s okay, because I look to my left and I look to my right and I say these are people like me. And then I become a dedicated volunteer and then I give more money. People like us do things like this.”

Overcoming Limitations

“But in the face of this, if you’re being honest, you’re saying to yourself, ‘I could never do this. I’m not in charge. I don’t have a budget. I don’t have the authority. My boss won’t let me.’ Well, I want to tell you a tragic story with an interesting ending. In the United States until recently, four million dogs and cats were killed every year by the SPCA and the Humane Society. These institutions collected stray dogs and cats and killed them, usually within 24 hours. Four million a year. My friend Nathan Winograd went to work at the San Francisco SPCA. He saw this happening. He could not abide it. He went to the City Council; they said, ‘We’re not going to change the law.’ So he went to the people of San Francisco and asked for help. Not all the people, just the weird ones. Not all the weird ones, just a subset. People who could be enrolled in this journey. He earned permission to talk to them. In less than 100 days, Nathan Winograd had enough money, but more important, enough volunteers that not one healthy dog or cat has been killed in San Francisco since that day.”

Leadership vs. Industrialism

“And you say, ‘Well, that’s easy. It’s San Francisco.’ Well, he left there and he went to Tompkins County, New York, where again he had no budget and no authority, and he did it again. And then he went to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, with no budget, no authority, and he did it again. And went to Reno, Nevada, and he did it again. One person started a movement that spread around the world. No fancy factory, not with hundreds of employees, because one person was able to model behavior and say to the weird people, ‘Follow me.’ But of course, you went to school, and at school they said, ‘Uh-uh, do what you’re told.'”

Industrialism and Art

“Quick little experiment. Please raise your right hand as high as you can raise it higher. What’s that about? The instructions were really clear, but everyone held back. They always do. Why? I hold back because you learned from a young age that your teacher and your coach and your parents and your tiger mom and your boss are all gonna ask you for more. They’re gonna keep asking him for more. Industrialists always ask for more. So you better hold a little bit back, right? You pissed the sight; you better hold a little bit back because that’s the bargain of industrialism. You know who doesn’t hold anything back? Artists don’t hold anything back. When Beckett was writing Waiting for Godot, he didn’t say, ‘Oh, I’ve got some good lines; I’m gonna save them for the next play.'”

School and Leadership

“When we go to school, we are taught to fit in. When we go to school, we are pushed to be normal. The reason they want us to fit in is so they can ignore us because that’s what industrialists wanted: replaceable cogs. Managers just want us to do what we did yesterday. Leaders don’t know what’s coming next. I’m here to tell you, Finland needs no more managers. We don’t have a manager shortage; we need leaders here. People, yes, and you are in this room, and that is what this is actually to talk about. It’s not to talk about marketing because marketing and leadership are now intricately related. For a million years, the way humans fed ourselves was by hunting. Only 10,000 years ago was farming invented. That’s how new it is, and only 300 years ago did we invent jobs. The idea that you would go to someone and say, ‘Tell me what to do and give me money,’ brand-new. In Helsinki in 1700, the unemployment rate was zero because there were no jobs. And I’m betting we’re going really fast to a new place where the stuff we think of jobs is gonna go away again, and the good ones are gonna become art. So give me a couple of minutes to explain what I mean by art. Yes, nerds descending a staircase: art. Pablo Picasso: art. Jackson Pollock: art. These are paintings, but they are art. But to understand the distinction, realize that Jackson Pollock had a brother you never heard of him, Charles Pollock. He was a painter, not an artist. He copied Thomas Hart Benton, his teacher, over and over.”

The Nature of Art

“Again, no one needed a copy. What we needed was art. Art has nothing to do with painting. Joseph Beuys in Germany made art with felt. William Shakespeare in England made art with words. But to put a really fine point on it, in 1917 Marcel Duchamp put this upside down urinal in an art exhibit, and he caused a riot. This was art. The second person to install a urinal in an art museum was a plumber, and that’s the decision. Do you want to sign up for plumbing? In November, I went to China, right outside Shenzhen where they make all the smartphones. Now, I visited a village called Dauphin. In Dauphin, they make all the oil paintings. One-third of all the oil paintings in the world painted over and over and over again as fast as they can. You can buy the Mona Lisa in Dauphin for $29, but it’s not the Mona Lisa. It’s not worth $29. It’s a copy. Why would anyone buy it? It’s not worth it. This idea of merely copying, that’s not what we do.”

Making Change Happen

“If I asked you at the end of your best day at work last month, ‘What was your best day about? Your best work, what’s it for?’ I hope we can agree that what you actually do for a living is make change happen. You change people’s minds. You change processes. You change designs. That making change happen is our job. And change has an ugly brother, his name is tension. The tension of it might not work. The tension if I might get in trouble. The tension of I might be wrong. You can’t have change without tension. And this works all over the world.”

Lucy’s Story

“This is a friend of mine, a woman named Lucy. Lucy has an acre and a half in the fertile valley of Kenya. Her neighbors on every side have an acre and a half of land. You can barely make a living on an acre and a half of land. You’re a subsistence farmer. One crop, and people are gonna go hungry if it goes wrong. Lucy doesn’t use farm-saved seed. She buys for 30 bucks hybrid seed from Western seed. And as a result, she can grow so much more corn she can sell for $3,000. She used that money to buy two cows from Djibouti Colima on credit, which made her enough money to start a tree farm, which made her enough money to start a taxi company. And Lucy has under her bed 1 million Kenyan shillings in a cigar box and has paid for all nine of her kids to go to private school. And on her left and on her right, her neighbors are subsistence farmers.”

Making Something Better

“Hey Lucy, I say, what’s this about? She says, ‘I’m thirsty.’ It’s that simple. I’m thirsty. I’m not gonna take what’s on offer. I’m gonna figure out how to make something better. People say to me after one of my rants, ‘All right, I got my notebook out. I’m ready to write down the bullet points. Give me the map. How do I go from here to there?’ I can’t give you a map. I can’t even give you a fictional map because if I gave you a fictional map, you’d be a plumber. But that’s not gonna work because we need you to make art instead.”

Competence vs. Confidence

“Again, hard to do because this is a real book. People pay money to learn how to raise invisible sheep without making any mistakes. That in Finland, like many places, competence is prized, confidence is overrated. We no longer have a competence shortage. If I can write down what I need you to do, there’s certainly someone somewhere in the world who’s cheaper than you. And so the internet comes along. You’ve seen the Free Hugs video. It went viral. It’s funny. This guy hates the Free Hugs video because he worked really hard to pay his dues. These guys don’t care. They’re still happy to sell free hugs all day long. So the same thing happens to everybody who makes a commodity. The bottled water guys, they’ve told us it’s all the same. So give me the close one or the cheap one. I’m not gonna pay extra. I mean, they tried. This guy, give him credit. But it didn’t work.”

Embracing Uncertainty

“No folks, the answer is simple. It’s kryptonite. The reason Superman works, the reason Superman is interesting is because it might not work. Because kryptonite might show up. Because it’s not perfect. Because it’s real. As Kurt Vonnegut said, we got to go right to the edge, grow wings on the way down. It’s the only way we’re gonna be able to learn to fly. Yes, if you want to sing, sing. If you want to dance, dance. The internet gives you a microphone. Everyone can use it, right? Every one of you is blogging every day. Of course, sharing what you know, spreading the ideas, earning our trust, connecting with people. You’re all innovating. But you work for people who say, ‘I’d love to innovate, but what we do is so important. Failure is not an option.’ But if they say that, you must say back, ‘Then neither is success.’ Because all innovation is, is failing again and again and again until you figure out how it works. That’s all we’ve got. It’s all we can do.”

Salt Immortality

“An easy way to remember it: the guy who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck. It’s up to you to decide to get on the boat or not. So, the last foreign phrase of the day is ‘salt immortality.’ I think it might be batteries, you guys. It’s also ‘more tali’ – the leap into the void. What does it feel like in that moment where we’re between here and there, when the Überroth is at its maximum, when we’re not sure? One way it feels is, ‘I better not do that because it’s just a little too soon. Let me let someone else go first.’ You know what? It’s always too soon.”

Ready vs. Prepared

“When Gutenberg launched the printing press, 93% of the people in Europe didn’t know how to read. This is a stupid time to launch the book. Not only that, 15% of the people needed reading glasses in order to read, and they hadn’t been invented yet. And there were no bookstores. He should have waited for the Kindle. Or when Karl Benz launched the car, it was against the law to drive in Germany. He needed a letter from the king. There were no roads, a real impediment there. No gas stations and there were no all-night drive-through liquor stores. He should have waited. So, there’s a big difference between being ready and prepared. All of you are prepared because that’s what Finns are. But none of you are ready. It’s impossible to be ready because to be ready means to be sure.”

Creativity and Fear

“And when you look on the Internet, you know, Google a video for riding a bike, all the videos show you what it looks like to ride a bike, which is nothing but people falling off the bike. Because we can’t possibly be interested if people can successfully ride a bike. Instead, we just talk about all the bad things that are gonna happen. We have a voice in the back of our head that says, ‘Don’t do that. You’ll fail. An alligator will eat you. You will fall off a cliff. A shark will land on your house. Do not fly too close to the Sun.’ Here’s the thing, Helsinki. Every three years, there’s a conference of physicists called the Solvay conference. This is the photo from 1927. You may recognize there’s Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr. It’s said that Heisenberg was there, but it’s uncertain. The key thing about this picture is there are 29 people in it and 17 of them won the Nobel Prize in Physics. And almost all of them won it after the photo was taken. You didn’t get invited to Solvay because you won the Nobel Prize. You won the Nobel Prize because you got invited to Solvay.”

The Point of Vulnerability

“So, here you are again at the Nordic Business Forum. Someone here is gonna change everything. Someone right there and someone right there. Maybe more than that. It’s just about choosing to understand that it is always too soon, that more hubris is better than less hubris, that the resistance, that voice in our head, isn’t the point. That fear isn’t the opposite of creativity. Creativity is the opposite of fear. Then we don’t have to act like sheep if we don’t want to. So, you may remember the great movie ‘Singing in the Rain.’ And in the epic scene, Gene Kelly is singing and dancing up a storm with his whole heart. But until this moment, you probably didn’t realize he had an umbrella the whole time. But it’s not called singing with an umbrella. It’s called singing in the rain. The rain is the point. The uncertainty is the point. The vulnerability is the point. What I am begging you to understand is our willingness to say, ‘Here, I made this,’ is universal. It’s universal. There’s no border around Finland that says we can’t do this. Yes, you can do this. If you care. If you care enough.”

Choosing to Matter

“The fact is, some people, you give them a mile, they will take an inch. But that doesn’t have to be you. It doesn’t have to be us. What we have now is the privilege. It is a privilege to bring a different kind of passion to our work. A passion of connecting and of doing it because we can and because we want to. There are people out there, disconnected people, lonely people, people who are disrespected, people who need you and need something. And they are saying to you as clearly as they can, ‘Please, we need you to lead us.’ My friend Celine gave me the line that I like to finish with, which is simple: everybody here is already successful. There’s no doubt about it. That’s not the question. The question is, will you choose to matter? I hope you will. Thank you very much.”