Seth Godin

Welcome to ‘Seth-urday’!

The day for a weekly piece from Seth Godin here. Seth has featured on these pages many times in both the Leadership/Management as well as Embracing Failure areas. He is on my ‘Thought Leaders Roll’ at the right hand side. I was first inspired by his insights into Marketing (if there is one book marketeers should read, it is ‘Purple Cow’…everything else is window dressing), but he is a constant and eloquent voice for embracing failure. Recently, especially with his book ‘Tribes’, he has been delving into the area of ‘Leadership’ more frequently as well. Aside from his nasty habit as dismissing ‘Management’ as a foil to his points about great Leadership, he nonetheless has plenty of insights to offer here too. So many in total that my backlog of pieces that I want to feature just keeps growing. As a result, I have decided to simply dedicate my weekly Saturday posts to stuff by Seth. “Seth-urday.”

Today’s piece is taken from the most recent of my pile, Thursday’s “It’s Always Been This Way” …

  • “The only standard is impermanence.
    It’s very easy to believe that the world we live in has always been this way.
    Your ethnic group has always had a similar standing.
    Technology has always permitted certain kinds of interactions and is always improving.
    Real estate values always rise from decade to decade. (Until it didn’t).
    A job has always been the standard way to make a living.
    Your chosen religion has always been practiced the way you practice it.
    People in positions of authority and leverage have always had degrees from famous colleges.
    Information has always been widely available.
    As soon as you accept that just about everything in our created world is only a few generations old, it makes it a lot easier to deal with the fact that the assumptions we make about the future are generally wrong, and that the stress we have over change is completely wasted.’”

Embrace the failure of the past as the future moves into the present.

Leadership and Management, Turning Adversity to Advantage

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December 31, 2011

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