Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (2008) is a motivational book based on two key ideas: First, tribe formation is part of human nature; second, thanks to the power of the Internet, anyone can spearhead this tribe formation and change the world. All you need, says the author, is the desire to cause change, the ability to connect people, and the openness to a true leadership role. From boisterous rock band members to taciturn marketing VPs, the author presents numerous portraits of leadership to examine how these individuals steer their tribes—and how they do it well.

Godin, an American author and entrepreneur, is best known for his innovative approaches to the workplace, the marketplace, and the Internet’s impact on these spheres.

This guide uses the 2008 Penguin ebook edition.

Summary

While it wanders through different instructive stories, the book still centers around key concepts—like groups, belief, innovation, initiative, and leadership—and the author continually returns to these. Based on research into technology, marketing, sociology, and his experience working at tech companies, Godin quickly establishes his working definition of a tribe: a group of people joined to one another, to a leader, and to an idea.

Godin’s informal, motivational tone fosters a conversational rapport with the reader. The work’s format is highly episodic, digressive, and fast-paced, consistently using anecdotes and calls to action to create excitement about the real-world relevance of each topic. Throughout, Godin explores various industries to show how individual leaders, however seemingly disparate, share traits and tools that fuel their leadership. Among the most significant of these tools is the Internet, which leaders use to facilitate group communication. And it is this element—the power of the Internet—that plays into one of the author’s overarching theses: Anyone can be a leader, not just those in positions of orthodox authority.

Godin infuses the work with a strong sense of ethics, underscoring his unyielding optimism and humanism. The author explicitly articulates this worldview in other sources, especially a 2013 interview with fellow author Kristin Tippit, in which he frames leadership as a status of unique power—not power to control others but to unify and help them. Leadership is therefore partly a humanitarian enterprise drawing from one’s duty to their fellow humans. Though Godin’s philosophy emphasizes the communal aspect of leadership, Tribes also champions a vision of happiness that involves self-determination, actualization, and purpose. To galvanize readers, Godin lauds numerous figures for their risk-taking and envelope-pushing. Overall, he urges readers to eschew “sheepwalking”—unthinking obedience and lack of free will—in favor of trailblazing and a carpe diem mindset.

The book’s historical context shows its visionary quality. In 2008, the year of the book’s publication, America experienced a housing-market crash and stock-market recession, and uncertainty surrounded many people’s financial futures. The year also saw the rise of Google, eBay, Amazon, and Wikipedia, while the year prior saw the first Apple iPhone; before this, there were the tech startups of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. Thus, Tribes makes prescient observations surrounding the 2000-2010 sea change that accelerated access to information, mass communication, digital grassroots movements, and the assimilation of computer technology into everyday life.