Venkat

I may write a blog post in response to yours. I found myself agreeing with you a lot at first, but after further review and reflection I think that I agree less with the failings that you note above, but I need to put it into long form.

@kbex, IMO, the danger of rhetorical negative views of managers is that they can too easily be taken seriously. Short-term acceleration at the expense of longer-term damage.

@jeremy, I agree with your object/person distinction, but the book puts most of its emphasis on persons, especially around exhorting people to become the sort of leader whose portrait Seth paints.

@seth, thanks for reading…

If you go back to Godin’s original article, the point that he makes is that a person who continues to deliver value, interesting content on a continual basis (whether each piece was big or small, profound and simple) via a service like Twitter, or a blog, or in a message board, or Amazon.com recommendations, or… whatever medium, builds up trust and reputation over time by consistently sharing useful stuff with other people. Twitter is one of several media that allow you to do that. Also, Godin was writing from the perspective of the follower or friend who watches that information stream over time and makes a judgment based on the value to them.

I think he definitely gets the value of Twitter from the perspective of the viewer and anyone can make that assessment.

So what am I missing?

On the other hand, I tried to get something positive out of it: If that’s really everything, it’s easy to give it a try

And with managers: well, depends on which business you’re looking and what you want to sell them. And sometimes this black-and-white stuff (all managers are idiots) helps to get yourself going: it makes me talk more directly, louder and with more power behind my ideas, because I act like talking to pumpkins…

Their particular beef w/him is that he doesn’t actually roll up his sleeves.

I really try to put his stuff into practice as I believe in it, but the execution is a lot messier. Clients don’t necessarily understand it and you can’t exactly tell them 10 years worth of Godin (plus others) in a 20 minute chat…though I try. Plus, there are existing organizational structures which exist…

There’s so much here, it’s late, and I’m tired, but I’ll hone in one one point…I don’t think a tribe is necessarily around a person. It’s better to be around an idea or, as Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid.com) might say, “a social object.”

Take how we met…Dan PInk/Johnny Bunko. It’s not a tribe around Dan, it’s a tribe around people who like the story of Bunko.

People are passionate about all types of things that aren’t other people (harley davidson is one of them).

Anyway, there are some very good points here…the best one being that I am a “frontline experimenter.” That’s going in my sales collateral!!!

Sorry you hated it so much. Thanks for giving it a try.

Seth