In this pickup from my Remarkable Retail #podcast with Steve Dennis, America's No.1 retail industry podcast, renowned author, entrepreneur, and leadership teacher, Seth Godin returns to the podcast to discuss his incredibly timely and urgent new book:The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
In this pickup from my Remarkable Retail #podcast with Steve Dennis, America's No.1 retail industry podcast, renowned author, entrepreneur, and leadership teacher, Seth Godin returns to the podcast to discuss his incredibly timely and urgent new book:The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
In a wide-ranging interview Seth challenges us to re-think the nature of work, asking are we going to engage in a race to the bottom, or a race to the top where the work we do is rich with meaning and purpose? In unpacking Seth's most personal work yet, we go deep on some big, important questions including: Why do bosses care where we work, why do we get so attached to false proxies, and what should meetings actually be for? Ultimately, we explore what leaders must do to re-imagine work for an entirely new era.
About Seth Godin
Seth Godin is the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work. His books have been translated into 38 languages. Godin writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, and two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the altMBA, the social media pioneer Squidoo, and Yoyodyne, one of the first internet companies. Find out more at seths.blog.
About Michael
Michael is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc. and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada and the Bank of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, Today's Shopping Choice and Pandora Jewellery.
Michael has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. He has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions with C-level executives and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. ReThink Retail has added Michael to their prestigious Top Global Retail Influencers list for 2023 for the third year in a row.
Michael is also the president of Maven Media, producing a network of leading trade podcasts, including Canada's top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail. He produces and co-hosts Remarkable Retail with best-selling author Steve Dennis, now ranked one of the top retail podcasts in the world.
Based in San Francisco, Global eCommerce Leaders podcast explores global cross-border issues and opportunities for eCommerce brands and retailers.
Last but not least, Michael is the producer and host of the "Last Request Barbeque" channel on YouTube, where he cooks meals to die for - and collaborates with top brands as a food and product influencer across North America.
Michael LeBlanc 00:04
Welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. My name is Michael LeBlanc, and I am your host. This podcast is produced in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
In this pickup from my Remarkable Retail podcast with Steve Dennis, America's number one retail industry podcast, renowned author, entrepreneur and leadership teacher Seth Godin returns to the podcast to discuss this incredibly timely and urgent new book, ‘The Song of Significance: a New Manifesto for Teams’.
Let's listen in now.
Steve Dennis 00:33
All right. Well, Seth Godin, welcome back to the Remarkable Retail podcast, we're gonna have to get you one of those. Those five timer jackets like they have on Saturday Night Live, I think. I think this might be your fifth time. Does that sound about right to you?
Seth Godin 00:45
It's always amazing that you have me back. So, thanks for giving me another chance to get it right.
Steve Dennis 00:50
All right, well, we're gonna keep doing this until we get it right, but it's great to have you back. Now, there's always plenty to talk about, but the particular thing we're talking about is your new book, The Song of Significance, which actually is going to come out the day that we're releasing this episode. So that's very nice timing but tell us about this book. What was the motivation, how did you come about this idea amongst all the other books you've written?
Seth Godin 01:19
There's so many different ways into it, but as often we should probably start with Amazon. Half of all the warehouse injuries in the entire country happened at Amazon last year. In 2021 an internal memo at Amazon said that in some cities, they have had so much turnover, that they believe they have run out of people in the entire city who are willing to come work for them. What I learned from watching Amazon's race to the bottom combined with watching brutal billionaires, subjecting their employees to ridiculous public humiliation, combined with AI and outsourcing is there's a fork in the road and sometimes when you see a fork in the road, you should take it and one side of the fork is are we going to race to the bottom and maximize convenience and low price at all costs or are we gonna race to the top and bring humanity back to work and I felt this time in particular, like it was personal and I basically was lucky enough that my editor, let me rant, and it has resonated with the people who've read it so far, they moved it up six months, which they never do, because it's timely, and it's urgent.
Steve Dennis 02:38
I think one of the statements you make right at the beginning is that work isn't working and what do you mean by that? And I think that resonates with a lot of people. But what in particular do you mean?
Seth Godin 02:48
Well, so here's the first question is the purpose of culture to enable capitalism or is the purpose of capitalism to enable us to have the lives we want to live and when industrialism and department stores and everything else came hand in hand, with mass media, we create an enormous amount of productivity and wealth and people say, yeah, it's worth it. It's worth it for me to go to the factory every day because of what I can do for my family, but in the last 10 or 15 years, as so many organizations have struggled to become ever more hyper efficient to honor Milton Friedman's edict to make more money for the CEO, they haven't created a place where people feel like people, I think what it means to say 'work isn't working' is it's working for the boss, it might be working for some shareholders, but it's not working for the people who are sacrificing 90,000 hours of their life and we can do better than that.
Michael LeBlanc 03:48
What, what strikes me as, as interesting is, I'm in the same situation that Steve is, that you are I you know, I don't in some ways, have a dog in the fight or dog in the hunt around working in offices because I haven't worked in an office in a long time. So it's interesting that it catches your attention because there is a bit, there's a lot of energy around the dialogue of where and how people work right now, did that also get you thinking about that, because there's what we call the work from home or work anywhere hybrid work, and it seems to be sticking and there's a big push and pull and, you know, between threatening employees to come back versus cajoling them versus enticing them to come back to this all kind of swirl around your thinking around, at least the corporate work.
Seth Godin 04:31
Well, what a profound shift in the environment of the industrialized world to in a four-week period of time, without the economy missing much of a beat. Suddenly, millions and millions and millions and millions of people aren't getting their dry cleaning done, have established an office that isn't where their offices. Well, it was inevitable once we had zoom and the internet, but the real interesting question is why do bosses care so much and I think the reason they care is similar to the reason that open hiring has had such a difficult time getting adopted.
Seth Godin 05:07
So, I'll talk about open hiring first. If you've ever had Ben and Jerry's ice cream, you may have had the brownie flavor, they make all of the brownies for Ben and Jerry's brownie ice cream, four miles from my house at the Greyston Bakery, which was founded by a Buddhist monk named Bernie Glassman and one of the things that they do is they have a clipboard at the front desk, and anyone who wants you can put their name on the clipboard and when a job opens up, the next person on the list gets hired. Doesn't matter if you were previously incarcerated, doesn't matter if you've had a drug problem, doesn't matter if you've never had a job, the next person gets hired this is called open hiring and it is an extraordinarily important way to build resilience and redemption into our communities.
Seth Godin 05:57
But not that many companies have adopted it, even though they work very hard to share the technique the Body Shop did. The Body Shop was having a lot of trouble filling jobs and a lot of trouble with turnover. They adopted open hiring, and they discovered turnover went down 60% and productivity on all of their measures went up 15%. This is in the retail environment and yet, even in the face of that most organizations don't do it because the boss wants to think that they have some sort of special instinct about who would be good at this job and the boss also finds peace of mind in surveilling their employees, making sure quote, they're really working, calling Zoom meetings to make sure that people who are remote or in their chairs, paying attention.
Michael LeBlanc 06:48
Turn your camera on.
Seth Godin 06:50
And all of those things are false proxies. They're false proxies for what actually makes a difference, now that we are getting so much smarter at what creates value, we're finding it's painful, but urgent that we get rid of the false proxies.
Steve Dennis 07:07
I think it's a really interesting point. But there, there seems to be like there's a lot of things where the evidence is overwhelmingly in support of taking a particular set of actions, yet people still don't do it. And so I'm wondering, would you agree, I think you would agree with that, right? It's not a matter of the data supporting a particular set of actions.
Seth Godin 07:28
Exactly.
Steve Dennis 07:29
It's a matter of people's mindset, and their fear, or their need for, you know, this illusion of control, and so forth. How would you suggest get-, and I know you go into this in the book, but can you give our audience a little bit of a sense of how you would suggest making this change towards providing or creating more significance in the work that teams and their organizations do?
Seth Godin 07:52
Because you're a Steve, I can tell you just how audacious I am seeking to be here. Most people who hear about this say, oh, sure, let's create things that make people feel significant at work. They're just lying to themselves, because making people feel significant at work is not the same as making people actually significant at work and you can't, the same way, when the internet came along, there were a lot of skeuomorph, there was a lot of 'this is just like the real world except click on the picture of a book as opposed to touch the book'. That's not what you could do, if you wanted to do what was best for the internet. That it's not just the real world, but with a mouse, it's different. Email is not just a postal letter, but faster.
Seth Godin 08:41
The postindustrial workforce is not just like the industrial workforce, except with better snacks and a feeling of significance. It's different, because what we now know is that mediocre work and any work that can be written down in a spec can either be done by an AI, or outsourced really cheap, you don't need to go out of your way to pay people to do that work the way you used to. So, what's left, what's left is this human work of making a change happen. You can't just say, well, I'm going to let a little bit of light into this place, because it's still a dank basement. What you have to do is say, we're going to create value for people by raising our standards, and making a change, a change for the customer, a change in the side effects, a change for the employees, a significant change because when a change happens, we find meaning in that work.
Seth Godin 09:39
And people will, yes, pay $80 for an $8 t-shirt if it comes with meaning. The retailers who are trying to out Amazon, Amazon are just going to keep failing and it was interesting, David Risher, who used who was one of the architects of Amazon, left there to do some stuff, and now he's back as the CEO of Uber and he just ordered, and I use that word carefully. He just ordered all employees back to headquarters at least three days a week, he came up with this nonsense about magic can happen when you have a whiteboard in front of people, but what he's really saying is, he's too lazy, and too scared to reimagine a different sort of work, a distributed sort of work, the work that powers automatic, the work that creates movements, that work doesn't require people to go to the office, it simply requires people to find meaning.
Michael LeBlanc 10:33
Let's, let's unpack a couple of things I hear a lot when speaking to retail, other CEOs, they talk about the productivity, being fantastic from work from home or work from wherever or hybrid. What they worry about is the, a couple things. One is, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this. One is that the younger employees don't have mentors or mentorship and attachment to the culture and the second is just, you know what you were just saying, and I think there's no demonstrable proof that it happens, this water cooler talk doesn't happen, the inspiration in the parking lot kind of stuff where we're not generating new ideas, innovation is hard, or can't happen to take on both of those one at a time, the whole thing that there is a deficit of your young person sitting at home. Maybe you're just sitting at home alone and a little concrete box, not that fun. You're not meeting people; a lot of people meet their partners and workplaces. How do we square this circle and get the best of both worlds?
Seth Godin 11:31
Oh, I remember visiting our erstwhile colleague Steve in Chicago and walking the halls of Sears and noting just how many people were in the hall having substantial conversations, honest interactions with each other, mentoring and teaching. Oh, no, that was a different building. The fact this is just because there's cubicles doesn't mean that there are interactions happening when I was at Yahoo. The back room where I was, was a cube farm with more than 1000 people on one floor and there was none of that because you have to do it on purpose and it's easier to do it on purpose online. That, you know, no matter how hard Elon Musk has tried for the last six months, he just can't kill Twitter, people just are having trouble leaving. Why is that the whole place is online and yet, people get hooked, they get hooked on their circle, they get hooked on the interactions, they get hooked on what they can say and what they can hear. And if you do it on purpose, you can do it online and I just think it's so dramatically overrated. This sort of random bumping into people at the water cooler, the water cooler is not that busy of a place.
Steve Dennis 12:46
I guess I'm curious. I mean, it's hard to separate exactly what you said in the book versus things I've heard you say over the years, or you've, you've written about in your blog, taking on kind of meeting culture and meetings in general, do you have any, any thoughts on, on what meetings should be for how to make the best of them and how they really kind of contribute to this, this malaise that we're seeing in a lot of corporate cultures.
Seth Godin 13:14
And this is a great topic for this particular podcast, because what do retailers actually make because they don't make the stuff they sell, generally, what they make is decisions. Meetings are often misnamed, a meeting, a real meeting, is a conversation in which lots of people who are in it, more than 80%. So, if there's two people, that means both are talking and listening, moving toward a decision. This is different than a mandatory group lecture, in which one person who was too lazy to write a good memo or edit a good five-minute video calls everyone together, so they can share their thoughts out loud as they think of them and this is very common, and it's done as an exercise in status and in taking attendance. It's an artifact similar to going to fourth grade fractions class, but that doesn't help us make better decisions and we have lots of ways to have actual meetings, but first, the person who's calling the meeting has to be willing to have one, as opposed to just be taking attendance.
Michael LeBlanc 14:25
Seth, have you familiar with the concept of holacracy, I had the opportunity to interview I can't say he was the CEO, but because he described his role differently from FREITAG, which is a great company that makes bags out of recycled truck tarps in Europe, but then he described the holacracy is this is this closer to the pan about how you envision the workplace being successful?
Seth Godin 14:48
Tony Shea, what a tragic story, RIP. He was the loudest proponent of it in the US. I think it's extraordinarily difficult to do it at all and certainly to retrofit into an existing organization. I think it could be argued that Zappos left billions of dollars in value on the table, as they tried to shift into that. What I learned from building the carbon almanac with 300 other people, all volunteers, including me, is it is possible to relentlessly raise standards, it is possible to be unbelievably productive. Especially if you spend very little time talking about the process of the process, that when you show people the board, they can play the board game, but if you're going to have to spend half your time arguing about the rules is really challenging. So are there holacracies in the world, for sure, but I don't think it matches with the power dynamic that customers require of you. You made me a promise, I expect you to keep it and exceed it.
Steve Dennis 15:59
You know, a lot of times when I read your, your stuff, I'm certainly very inspired, but I'm also I guess, colored, by my time either working at or working for very large corporations. In many cases, these are publicly traded companies and I'm just wondering your thoughts on how hard it is to get started on some of these things. When you're part of a much bigger organization, particularly if you're at the top of that organization, and you perceive any way that you have to kowtow to quarterly earnings and expectations of you know, driving top line sales, ever increasing productivity, those sort of things which tend to be much more short term oriented and it feels to me like some of the things you're suggesting here. While you can make some small starts, to really make a big change might take quite a lot of effort over quite a long period of time.
Seth Godin 16:58
This is almost precisely what they said at Western Union when they had the chance to buy AT&T. It's also what Toyota said, when the electric car showed up and everything in between that you are absolutely correct in everything that you said, but, and your competition, perhaps more adroit, perhaps differently funded is going to do it. So, then what are you going to do?
Steve Dennis 17:23
Right.
Seth Godin 17:24
And the what we have seen from Sears and Macy's and Lord & Taylor and all the others is, you can do what the stock market wants tomorrow, but you might not be here next year to tell us about it or you can take a deep breath and realize that if what we make is decisions, and a different approach to making decisions, and then implementing them is going to satisfy a new marketplace faster, better, more profitably, either you're going to do it or somebody else is. So, I'm not asking anybody who runs an organization to settle for less. What I'm saying is, humans are not a resource. Humans are the point and shifting fundamentally away from Peter Drucker to a different set of expectations and interactions is happening right here right now and if you want the kind of people who have a choice about where to work, this is the only way you're going to be able to dance with them.
Steve Dennis 18:29
Yeah, I think it's something I'm working on, as you and I have talked about in my new book, is that I think there's a fundamental misperception of a lot of companies about what the riskiest thing is, right. Like the, the, it's really the opposite of what they often think that that is riskiest, right, it's the failure to make these bold changes or to get started now, as opposed to when they get forced into reactivity. That is really, really the most risky decision.
Seth Godin 18:54
Also, if this is a fine time, first of all, can't wait to read the new book, but this is a fine time to invoke Schumpeter, which is, it's okay. If companies go out of business, and are replaced by the next thing when the airlines were whining, during COVID for a bailout, you know what, we shouldn't let them go out of business because the planes weren't going to go away, and the airports weren't going to go away and we could have re factored how they were organized and kept flying and if you are really stuck, because you made the mistake of selling ownership in your company to short term thinking people who are under informed then maybe you should go work somewhere else and do something important instead.
Michael LeBlanc 19:34
Seth, this is a fantastic discussion. I mean, it's a lot to get your arms around and I'm thinking of our listeners who are somewhere in an organization, perhaps in a leadership role, what are the kinds of one, two or three steps that you talk about in the book, and that you have, think yourself to get started on this journey to really rethink and, you know, become the brownie supplier type company, you know, to just change from what you do today. I mean, if we took it all the way back to the beginning, Amazon's purposeful, very purposeful, they like turnover, it's in their policy. So, go all the way to where you think we should be and what are the kind of couple practical steps you can begin with?
Seth Godin 20:14
There's one practical step that has to be before any of them and it's a simple sentence and Menard Koestler put it on the title of his book, let's get real, or let's not play. What Jeff Bezos did in the first three years of Amazon is extraordinary. He made a clear statement to every employee, every investor, every senior leader, let's get real, or let's not play, we're going to have a different way we do meetings, we're gonna have a different way we track growth, we're gonna have a different way.
Seth Godin 20:47
This is what we are building here, a thing, a better thing, a new thing, a different thing, having the conversation about what would it be like, if we made a commitment to each other, I promise to pay attention in your meeting, if you promise not to call a meeting that could be replaced by a memo, let's get real, or let's not play, we can go down the list of the kinds of interactions. Let's agree that we will relentlessly criticize the work and raise our standards and we will never criticize the worker. Let's embrace the fact that turnover is a good thing if it means that the people here are enrolled in where we are going, not simply here because they can't find a better job. There's, in the book, I outline about 15 of these and I also asked 150 different questions throughout the book. Let's talk about it, because pretending that we're going to get to the other side of this and go back to normal is extraordinarily naive. This is the new normal, and this is as stable as the world is ever going to be again.
Michael LeBlanc 21:54
And last question from my side and I'll pass the mic back to Steve to wrap up, but you've written a lot of books, you write constantly. How do you, how do you get excited, are you excited about this book more than the others or is that like asking people about, which is their favorite kid, like, how do you, how do you think of that when your latest book comes out?
Seth Godin 22:14
Steve has heard me say it before that I'm done with publishing and-
Steve Dennis 22:19
I was gonna bring that up, the number of times you've told me that this is my last book, I'm never writing another one again, then l like I got a new book coming out next week.
Seth Godin 22:28
It's a silly thing to do because you can spread an idea, certain kinds of idea to more people faster in other ways, but this one is personal. This is the one that has moved me to tears while I was writing it and even sometimes when I talk about it on the podcast, this is the one that I feel like, I have been getting ready to write for a long time, I don't wake up in the morning, saying to myself, I need to write a book. Now, I used to, that's what I do for a living. I don't anymore. Now it's a sacrifice, but when I brought this book to my editor, and Nikki said, we need to move this up, that this is urgent. I felt something inside of me that I hadn't felt in a long time. This is something I need to say, and I feel very different about this one.
Steve Dennis 23:20
Well, that's probably a good place to end it. I'm not sure what I could really add to that, but I would, or you were nice enough to share an early version of the book with me, I really loved it and I would very much encourage people to go check it out and I think I didn't know there were 150 questions, but I thought, or I found so many of those questions to be really, really provocative and really challenging and if you want an inspiring read, but also something that really causes you to question, how we got here what we're doing, I think this is the book for you. So, thanks, Seth, again for joining us. We'll send you your five-timer jacket in the mail shortly. I'm sure you'll wear it proudly in future appearances. Thanks so much, Seth.
Seth Godin 24:02
Thanks, Michael. Thank you, Steve. Always a pleasure.
Michael LeBlanc 24:05
Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Voice of Retail. If you haven't already, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platforms so new episodes will land automatically each week. And be sure to check out my other retail industry media properties Remarkable Retail podcast with Steve Dennis, and the Global E-commerce Leaders podcast. Last but not least, if you're into barbecue, check out my YouTube barbecue show, Last Request Barbecue with new episodes each and every week.
I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, consumer growth consultant, president of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, Maven Media and keynote speaker.
If you're looking for more content or want to chat, follow me on LinkedIn or visit my website at meleblanc.co.
Safe travels everyone.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
book, people, podcast, organization, steve, employees, turnover, amazon, happen, retail, company, decisions, productivity, talk, write, interesting, real, urgent, meeting, LeBlanc