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Lessons - Why Your Team Doesn't Give a Damn | Seth Godin - 20x Bestselling Author · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore why outdated leadership models limit creativity
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  and how modern organizations unlock human potential. Discover how purpose-driven cultures outperform
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  rigid hierarchies, understand why treating employees as people, rather than resources,
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  drives innovation, and uncover how meaningful work leads to stronger teams and better results.
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  You mentioned in the book that this is a catch-22 and everyone's hesitating to go first in this
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  conversation, and I would, so we're trying to solve for this by getting a conversation going,
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  but I would also argue that many people don't think they're mistreating their employees.
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  Many people are stuck in a legacy mindset and they may not even be aware that this is not the
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  way that you should be leading. So what does good look like? What does an ideal organization look
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  like so that we can sort of frame it? Why is the, it sounds silly to say this, but why is the
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  the assembly line mode of leading an organization not ideal? Okay, so there are very few villains here.
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  Most people who are working hard, whether they are managers, bosses, or employees,
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  are not seeking to do the wrong thing. I will leave several billionaires out of that discussion,
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  but in general, they're just doing their job, but their job was invented 110 years ago. That
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  industrialism is a very specific way of being in the world that was inconceivable before the 1800s,
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  and return on machines, return on time, figuring out how to use a stopwatch,
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  measuring everything. Well, it made us all rich. It gets you a certain kind of productivity,
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  but it's running out of steam. It's running out of steam because now every car is really high quality,
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  and now every car is made in pretty much the most efficient possible way.
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  It's being replaced by a creation of value that works a different way. So the project I did
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  before this one, I was a volunteer for over a year, coordinating the work full-time of more than
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  300 people in 40 countries to build the Carbon Almanac. Every one of us was a volunteer. We produced a
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  book that's been translated into Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Czech, and many other languages
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  that want a worldwide award for design. It's 97,000 words. It's footnoted. When it came out,
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  there wasn't one significant error in the whole thing. How did 300 people produce in less than
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  five months a book like this with nobody in charge and nobody being told what to do? Well,
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  that kind of leap is possible when you get good people who are enrolled in a journey and get out
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  of their way when you have standards instead of obedience. So yeah, we still need managers. I want
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  the people at the pacemaker factory and the people who are doing surgery to be extremely structured
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  in their management style. But if our job is to invent the future, we have to get beyond being
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  mediocre because GPT is better at being mediocre than we are. Now, when you mention that example,
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  I think of Wikipedia as an example of that too. I think of Wikipedia and all the contributors and
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  them checking themselves and then the output is quite good. But there's a vision associated with
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  Wikipedia. There's a higher calling for the people that contribute and spend their free time,
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  very much similar to what you just did. So I want to I want to understand your thoughts.
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  An organization has to have that higher calling and that vision that permeates the people that
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  work there. But simultaneously, you're running up against the issue of people being very transient
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  in their careers and moving. So the organization wants to have a vision, wants to be able to buy into
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  it, but that person is only spending two years at that organization. How do you solve for that?
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  Well, what's the vision of the Hillside Elementary School? That one of the most common jobs in the
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  United States is schoolteacher. Lenny Levine, who was the kindergarten teacher at Hillside until he
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  passed away, every year started over from scratch. And the mission for a lot of teachers is
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  follow the curriculum, earn tenure, do your job because that's what principals push them to do
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  because that's what boards push principals to do. And Lenny said, let's get real or let's not play.
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  He said, in my kindergarten class, the rules are going to be different and I'm going to change
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  these kids forever. And 25 years later, my kids still remember because you can choose to do that.
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  And the receptionist at the doctor's office isn't a person who's going to be sticking a scope up
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  somebody's nose, but she has a lot to do with whether someone's going to get better or not.
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  And so the question is, how does she manage the office, that's her title, office manager,
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  to create the conditions for possibility, not just for the patients, but for the people who work
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  so that it's not a day's work for a day's pay. It's a human being showing up not as a resource,
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  but as the point because that's what work is for. Once we figured out how to grow in a food and
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  other resources to survive, what exactly is the point of going to work?
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  I'm just thinking about another point that you brought up was balancing the needs of the
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  business versus the needs of the individual. So let's talk, because I think, if we look back
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  at your body of work, a lot of the work that you've done on marketing is to shift the focus
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  from focusing on the organization to focusing on the customer. And then a point that you bring up
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  in this book is, as an organization, you're focusing on the not the needs of the organization,
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  any more the needs of the employee. And you sort of mentioned this a few times. So I think this
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  all comes down to how do we, how do we champion the needs of the individual or the employee? And
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  again, look at them like not just a piece of a company, but an actual human being. So what are the
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  needs of the individual? Once they have their pay and they have their food and they have their shelter
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  of satisfied Maslow's hierarchy of needs, what is a person need in an organization?
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  Well, I need to highlight one thing, which is I am not saying companies need to give
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  some sort of economic value to their employees because it's the right thing to do. What I am
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  saying is creating the conditions for growth and significance actually helps the company achieve
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  what it sought to accomplish in the first book. So if we can use Google as an example and then
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  I'll try to be more specific in your question. Early on when I was at Yahoo, Google was doing
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  some really interesting things. It was a pretty small company and then they were going to have to shut
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  down. And the reason they were going to have to shut down is not because they weren't making any
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  money. They had plenty of money in the bank. It's because the amount of data they were trying to
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  store was so large that it was crashing their search engine. It was taking forever to get results.
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  And the laws of physics were involved here. You can't just say let's everybody work harder
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  because the fact is the speed of light is the speed of light. And two engineers put in emotional
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  labor and effort and figured out that if they just stored certain kinds of data on the outside
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  of the hard drive instead of on the inside ring of the hard drive, it spins faster on the outside
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  and they could get the data fast enough to keep Google from going out of business.
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  Now that sort of change doesn't happen because some manager is offering people a bonus.
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  Nor does it happen because you're yelling at them. It happens because the human being is enrolled
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  in the journey of trying to make a change happen. And what human beings want, and I surveyed 10,000
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  people in 90 countries, they want to be treated with respect. They want to exceed their own expectations
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  for what they thought was possible. And they want to work with people that they like in respect.
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  They want those three things way more than they want a promotion or title or salary. They don't
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  want to travel or get paid a lot compared to being able to shop as a human to do work that matters
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  with people who care. And I don't care if you run a sandwich shop, that's still going to pay off for
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  you. One example that you brought up, I thought was interesting to that point. And I think this is
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  the right context, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Harry Brighthouse example where it's basically
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  based on the movie, the paper chase, and the professor's cold calling on students. But
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  everybody wants to be in this class. And it's interesting because cold calling on students,
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  it's uncomfortable. It's not something that you think people would want to subject themselves to.
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  But this is the most wanted class that everybody wants to be in. So it shows that people
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  when given the opportunity to excel and be in a group of peers that are also excelling,
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  they're going to take that opportunity. Well, it's important to note that not everybody wants to be
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  in the class. In fact, almost nobody wants to be in the class, but that's enough that if you've
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  been indoctrinated from first grade to ask, will this be on the test to do the minimum amount of work
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  and to get by? Why would you want to be in a class where you get called on? The goal is to take an
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  easy class. But if you are thinking smart about this, college is costing you 50, 60, 70, 80,
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  thousand dollars a year that you're going to be in debt for for decades or more. Why wouldn't you
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  want to go to a classroom where everybody else wants to be there too? And that's the magic of
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  the Brighthouse approach, which is some people want to be in a room with people who want to be in the
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  group. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button
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  so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the
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  links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.