Transcript for “This Is Strategy” with Seth Godin
In his new book, This Is Strategy, Seth Godin reminds readers that “the future comes one day at a time” and “today is your best chance to improve tomorrow.” Despite the speed with which the world is changing, Seth believes prioritizing long-term thinking over quick fixes is the best way to make “smart, purposeful choices that shape a better tomorrow - personally and professionally.
In this interview, Seth shares his definition of what strategy is, what people are getting right about strategy, and the systems he sees that are shaping the world. Seth goes on to discuss how leaders need to be thinking about strategy in a fast-changing, A.I. (tech-centric) world. He finishes the discussion by talking about the mistakes we are making in 2024 that the people of 2074 will look back at in disbelief and he shares what fills him with a sense of optimism.
For more than thirty years, Seth Godin has been trying to “turn on lights, inspire people and teach them how to level up.” He is the author of more than 20 best-selling books, including his latest book This Is Strategy. He is an entrepreneur who, after selling one of his companies to Yahoo, became Yahoo’s vice president of direct marketing. Seth’s blog is one of the most popular in the world with more than 8,000 posts and a million readers. He is a member of the Marketing Hall of Fame.
Don MacPherson: Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. Today’s guest on the podcast is Seth Godin. Seth is an entrepreneur, author, and speaker who has one of the world’s most popular blogs. He has written more than 20 bestselling books, and his new book is called This Is Strategy. Seth and I discussed why he wrote This Is Strategy, and we focus most of our conversation on how leaders should be thinking about strategy in a fast-changing AI world. In addition to answering how people can make smart, purposeful choices that shape a better tomorrow, Seth shares what fills him with optimism and what he believes we are getting wrong today that people 50 years from now will look back at in disbelief.
Seth, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Seth Godin: Well, thank you for having me. It’s good to talk to you.
Don: I’m delighted to have this conversation. You have a new book coming out. You’ve written 21 bestselling books. Why did you write this one?
Seth: You know, you would think that there’s a lot of books on strategy that are actually useful, but not really. Most of them are for MBAs or generals, and a lot of people think strategy is for someone else. We’ve conflated strategy and tactics. We think we have a marketing problem when we actually have a strategy problem. In short, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re going in the wrong direction. And what I’m trying to do is help people realize we have more leverage and ability than ever before, but we’re forgetting to ask the question — “What should I do next?” And this is here to help start that conversation.
Don: Okay. And how is this different from some of the other books that you’ve written now? Nearly two dozen books. That’s a very, very impressive list of books. Congratulations.
Seth: Actually, writing a book isn’t very hard. Publishing a book is a lot of work. The idea of outlining a philosophy is challenging. That if you say, here are 26 ways to fix a dripping faucet, that is a how-to book. But a book about a philosophy of becoming about learning to see things we don’t see until we see them, that’s thrilling, and it was a worthwhile challenge.
Don: Okay. You touched on a couple of ways in which we are getting strategy wrong. Can you maybe provide a list for what we’re doing wrong regarding strategy?
Seth: I’d rather focus on what’s possible to do right. And it’s pretty simple. If you’re going to put the effort in, you’re here to make a change happen. If you’re not here to make a change, then why are you wasting my time? Just do what you did yesterday, put the widget in the boxes. If we’re going to make a change happen, we’re making it for someone — not for everyone. We can’t change everyone. And what we have is the chance to realize that systems are either going to work with us or against us. And if we can find a system that amplifies our work, suddenly everything gets easier. It’s like having the wind at your back. But if you can’t see the system, then you don’t know what to do.
Don: And you’ve written a lot about systems in the book. How do you define systems, and what are the key systems that we need to use and harness in order for us to execute on our strategies?
Seth: Much smarter people than I have written about systems, but most people don’t read it. Systems are best understood by analogy. Let’s begin with the most famous system of all, which is the solar system. Leaving Pluto out of the conversation, the solar system has the earth rotating around the sun. It doesn’t matter what you think is happening; that’s what’s happening, right? And the earth doesn’t rotate around the sun because it wants to. It does it because there’s an invisible force called gravity that keeps pushing it to do so. And if an asteroid shows up in our solar system and doesn’t get the joke, it’s going to either blow through the solar system and we’ll never see it again, or it’s going to go to the sun and burn up. These are non-negotiables. This is just how the system works.
Now, over time, one could imagine changing a system, but let’s acknowledge that there’s gravity. So, what kind of systems are we talking about? Well, there’s the wedding-industrial complex. How much did you spend for a wedding? You should spend exactly as much as your best friend and a little bit more. And that’s how we got to where we got. That there is an ancient system of patrimony and misogyny that allowed De Beers to invent the diamond engagement ring and turned it into a billion-dollar industry. They didn’t do that from scratch. They did it because the system already existed, and they simply altered it. So what we seek to do is try to assert what a system has wanted all along and help it get that thing it wants by doing something differently.
Don: One of the promises of your book is that it’s going to help us see our systems or the systems shaping the world in a different way. What are some of these systems that we should be looking at with a greater amount of scrutiny?
Seth: Well, I guess it depends on what you do for a living. Neither you nor I are wearing a tie. The system of costumes at work was around for a very long time, and then Levi Strauss changed it on purpose. And they didn’t change it by issuing a press release. They changed it by finding a few organizations that wanted to have casual Friday. And by persistently planting the seeds for what that could become, undid a century of how people dressed at work, right? If we’re thinking about the climate, we need to take a hard look at why people eat meat. 25% of the climate problem, 25% is cows.
But if you say to someone, “Don’t eat meat anymore,” they say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” Well, why? Well, meat represents status, convenience, affiliation, efficiency. It is subsidized. And you’re not going to get someone to radically change how they live their life. However, you probably could organize 20 people and get the local school district to have meatless Mondays at the cafeteria. And that begins to normalize certain behaviors. It begins to create the conditions for status, to be associated with something other than a steak or convenience, something other than a hamburger at that one school on Mondays. And once that works, selling Wednesday isn’t that hard. And suddenly, we have planted the seeds to begin changing a system that still wants status and convenience and affiliation but isn’t going to get it by eating meat.
Don: I talked with a lot of futurists, and AI keeps coming up. And I’m assuming you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about AI. But I’m curious to know how should leaders be thinking about strategy in this fast-changing AI world?
Seth: I believe AI is the biggest shift in our culture since electricity. If you think about businesses that were around before electricity, some of them said, “We’re going to embrace electricity.” And some of them said no. The ones who said no were clearly in a different group than the ones who said yes. And there’s an entire world that got built beyond that. I think the same thing is happening with AI. So, if you embrace AI and say, this is a great way to cost-reduce, this is a great way for me to, for example, never have to talk to a customer again, just drive them through an AI machine and reduce the cost of this and re-toss to this, you’re now racing to the bottom. And the problem with the race to the bottom is you might win.
The alternative is to say, “I now have an infinite number of unpaid employees who will do tasks for me that I can define. How do I put those to use to bring humanity back into what I’m doing as an advantage?” the same way when electricity came along, you got machines to do what people used to do, but you ended up hiring more people with the money you made from the machines. That is what a lot of leaders are missing. You have to figure out, how are you going to put more humanity into what you do? Not less.
Don: Yeah. That’s the conversation that I had with Mike Bechtel — I’m not sure if you know who he is. He’s a futurist at Deloitte. And he said there’s two ways that companies are looking at AI. He said, there’s the one who say, “Oh, we’ve got AI, we can eliminate this job.” And there are those who say, “Oh, we’ve got AI. We can amplify what this person can do or these people can do.” And those are different strategies. And I guess my question is long-term, strategy is often equated to long-term thinking, but there are so many changes, so many disruptions that are happening as a result of AI. And so how do we stay on course or navigate when we need to as a result of AI disruption?
Seth: Roger Martin has pointed out that companies really like strategic planning, but it has nothing to do with strategy. Strategic planning is coming up with a list of things managers can do, and if they do them, you succeed. Well, yeah, managers love that. But that’s not strategic planning. Strategy is about finding the currents, finding where systems are driving us. So, for more than a hundred years, if you had the strategy of we’re going to make things more convenient for busy upper-income people, you would need to change your strategy. Minneapolis, where you are, is based on General Foods and General Mills, and whichever other generals are there figuring out how to make a cake mix instead of having a cake.
Once you have a strategy like that, the tactics keep presenting themselves. Go-Gurt, right? Go-Gurt is a tactic which is for people who don’t have enough time to get a spoon, here’s a way to eat yogurt. Well, AI shows up and, on one hand, it gives you new tactics for the old strategies to be able to say — what we always believed as a company is X; AI is one of those tactics. But it’s also a change agent. Entire systems are going to be undone. Let’s think about the educational industrial complex. We spend a trillion dollars educating people. I have no doubt that AI can do it more effectively and significantly cheaper. It’s going to change entire industries from the top down, and from the bottom up and sideways.
So, if we start with that, now what are you going to build? And the best moment to step out in front is when a change agent is hitting its stride and most people deny it’s important. So right here, right now, AI is just this tiny little spec compared to what it’s going to be in five years. But it’s not that hard to imagine how it’s going to turn an industry upside down.
Don: Yeah, I agree with you, and I’ve had other people on the show talking about AI and comparing it with the electricity. And I like to think back to when people first experienced electricity, so 100, 150 years ago, and how magical it was. That magic is going to disappear. So, my children are six and eight, they’re very young. And they’re just going to accept AI for it’s a tool, where you and I see this magic. And I can’t believe what ChatGPT is able to do just from a very quick summary perspective. And that’s just scratching the surface in terms of what it will be. And so I think about the 1880s or 1900 when electricity was just starting to be used.
People couldn’t have imagined how fundamentally, like we’re going to charge our cars, we’re going to be able to drive hundreds of miles. We’ll actually be able to drive across the country with these charged cars. They couldn’t have imagined that. And so I’m just wondering, what are some of the ways that we’re going to be able to harness this while being able to preserve what it means to be human? And I know that’s a big topic and it’s off the topic of your book, but you’ve thought about this.
Seth: It’s all involved in this change of system. So, Jeff Bezos told me about washing machines. Now, the washing machine transforms the lives, particularly of women, because it’s hours and hours a day that don’t have to be spent. When electricity first arrived in homes, there were no electrical outlets. There were just light bulbs. So, if you wanted to use the washing machine, you unscrewed a light bulb and you screwed in this thing that fit into the light bulb that powered it. But washing machines are hard to balance. And so it would move around the room. And not a few, dozens, maybe hundreds of people were killed because it would move around the room and the wire would go around someone’s neck and… right? This is the level of transition that we’re talking about when electricity shows up. You mentioned electric cars. I don’t think electric cars from an electrical point of view are a big deal.
You know what’s a big deal? The big deal, if you’ve ever been in a village that has no electricity, to see what happens at six o’clock at night, that what electricity did for… And now the average person in the United States needs to work for less than 10 seconds to earn a day’s worth of electricity for light. What it does is it creates five hours a day of awake time for every single person. That is so spectacular, a systems shift that people didn’t realize what it meant when it happened. And so when we think about AI, its ability to do what looks like the work people like you and I do is a fun side effect. But what it’s actually going to do that’s going to change things is it’s going to talk to other AIs, talk to us, predict and execute more and more and more and more and more.
So, humans are going to have to figure out something to do to create value. And it’s not going to be what we expect. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s not going to be what we expect.
Don: Well, I’ll even add to that. And I was involved in the addiction field for a while. I was on the board of a treatment facility out in Estes Park, Colorado. And we’ve recently merged so I’m off the board now as of this summer. And one of the things, one of the very, very surprising things is that research has found that people are more open to being candid to an AI bot than they are to a physician. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the physician’s ability to connect. It’s the physician’s time. And so I’m thinking about, from an intake perspective, how AI can be used to maybe eliminate two hours of possible interviewing of somebody coming into a facility and really making those physicians far more efficient and effective in doing their job. So, it’s not seven minutes of you telling me what’s going on. We can have two hours of data that’s summarized for us and then enable us in a much more…
Seth: Right. And let’s go even further and realize that AI has infinite patience. So, it should be collecting my health stuff 24 hours a day. And so a day before the doctor’s appointment, it comes to me and says, “I’ve noticed in the last month these things. Is there anything here that you don’t want to talk about?" Because now it’s taken a month’s worth of data and turned it into six paragraphs. I mean, if you think about cognitive behavioral therapy, it doesn’t make sense to go to a therapist for an hour a week. Makes sense to go to a therapist a minute at a time. And this is all doable as we go forward.
Don: I worry about our abilities to change and our mental health. The reason why I started 12 Geniuses and started to have these really interesting conversations is because I worked with a guy who was in his 50s, and I asked him what he wanted to do. And he said exactly what I did the last 20 years but for the next 10 years. And I said, “That doesn’t work. That’s just not going to happen.” And he wasn’t willing to change. And I just saw how that really impacted his ability to continue his career. And that was very unfortunate. Now, he was really close to me. And so that’s my concern for humanity.
Seth: Oh, I mean, future shock is a real thing. And it’s going to be so much worse this time because the boomers are so self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and stuck in their ways. So, this entire generation, my age, five years younger, 10 years older, all of us are going to fight this and it’s going to be messy. Because status changes, affiliation changes. Talking about it the way you and I are talking about it helps. But what is really going to help is if we build the scaffolding and the on-ramps and the steps. The same way we saw when the internet made newspapers irrelevant, it took a decade for news to shift, but the people who cared about news at least knew what they needed to do next. And right now, because the change agent is so fast and so sudden, the scaffolding isn’t built yet. And that’s a great opportunity for someone who wants to contribute.
Don: And I think from a leadership perspective, in my opinion, a moral leader thinks about his people are her people three years in advance. So, where do you want to go three years from now? Where do you want to be three years from now? And let’s make the changes for you to stay relevant. So, you have to be paying attention to these trends. If you’re thinking about it three months in advance, all you’re writing is a pink slip. That’s really all you’re doing. And so, a moral leader is looking three years in advance for their people. Do you agree with that?
Seth: That’s brilliant. I love that.
Don: I just want to share one story with you. And I think it’ll illuminate the changes that are about to come for our audience. I read a biography of Helen Keller to my daughters, and the year before she was born, the light bulb was invented. And the year after she died, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. And so I like to share that story because that shows the progress that was made in just one human lifetime when change was slow. And so if you think about our lifetime, so you’re about a decade older than I am, but my children and your children, what they’re going to experience in their lifetime because of this acceleration of technology, because of virtual reality and AI and biotech advances and maybe quantum and maybe fusion. So, I think that’s really, really exciting from a human progress perspective, but very frightening from just a management of life perspective.
Seth: That’s a great story. I was lucky enough to know Neil a little bit before he passed/
Don: Really?
Seth: Yuri Gagarin grew up in a mud hut that was half underground with no electricity.
Don: And he’s the first person in space, right? In the ’50s, is that right? Or is that later? ’60s.
Seth: Yeah, the late ’50s, early ’60s. He was the first person to orbit the Earth.
Don: Oh my gosh. That’s absolutely amazing. And so I get really excited about these changes and what the future can bring but also concerned at the same time. Are we able to adapt? And so that leads me to, let’s get back to the book, that leads me to the question, one of the things your book promises is that it will help people make smart, purposeful choices that shape a better tomorrow — what’s your vision for a better tomorrow?
Seth: What happens when everybody makes things better as opposed to what happens when everyone takes what they can take? I’m not in charge. I’m not even close to in charge. All I know is vibrant communities, tribes of resilient, caring people who relentlessly make things better, build things that matter. And part of it, which you hinted at, at your question, is we need to make decisions. And I spent a lot of time in the book talking about how to make a decision. My friend Annie Duke has written so brilliantly about this, which is think about the best decision you made. No, try again. Think about a really good decision you made in the last nine months. Okay? Can you think of one?
Don: Sure
Seth: Got it?
Don: Yeah.
Seth: Did it work out? Did it have a good outcome?
Don: Very much so.
Seth: Yeah. Everyone always picks something that had a good outcome. But having a good outcome doesn’t mean it was a good decision. That’s not the same thing. You could buy a lottery ticket and win the lottery. It was a bad decision to buy a lottery ticket. Buying a lottery ticket is always a bad decision, even if you win. So, you could make a good decision and have it fail, but it was still a good decision. So, what we need to think about as we decide how we’re going to dance with the future is, are we insisting that all of our good decisions have good outcomes? Because if we are, then we’re paralyzed, then we can’t make any decisions at all.
Don: It’s so interesting you say that because I have been really, really working with my kids on the fact that they don’t have to be perfect. They don’t want to try things because they might fail. And I’m just trying to help them understand that failure is a part of improving and getting better.
Seth: Right. And that’s why this is the perfect moment to, I’m just going to throw a little bit of parenting advice, to bring useful board games into their life. Because board games, the good ones, not shoots, and ladders, which is stupid, but the good ones are about, I made a decision, I didn’t win the game, but I’m not a bad person. I just didn’t make the right decision. And once we learn to separate those two things, we can play again tomorrow and do better.
Don: Yeah. They’re learning chess. And I think that’s-
Seth: There you go. That’s good enough for me.
Don: I think that’s just a fabulous, fabulous game. And I didn’t learn until I was maybe 10 or 12. That’s all about consequences in the decisions you make, and refining it and getting better and improving. One of the things that I realized about your book is that it seems like it’s a business book, or that’s your typical audience, but it’s not a business book in my mind.
Seth: Correct.
Don: So maybe you could talk about that because I think what you have put in the book really can be used for living our lives.
Seth: Yeah. Thank you for discovering that. What is business? Ever since Adam Smith, business has been bring assets and machines to bear, to pay off your investors and grow; avoid change and figure out how to win in very simple competitive environments. That is almost all business. If you have a job, your job is, do what your boss says. Do as little as you can get away with, but do what your boss says. Those are the two business/job things. And the agent of change of the internet means that neither one of those rules is relevant anymore. Let’s think about one of the worst CEOs in memory — Steve Ballmer. Steve tried to run Microsoft like a business, and he failed at almost everything he tried. And Satya Nadella understands that Microsoft is an opportunity, it’s a chance to dance with possibility. It is a series of projects.
And he’s, I don’t know, doubled the value of the company since he got there, something like that. That’s one of the biggest companies in the world. It certainly works at a company with 25 people. It certainly works at the local pizza place. So if you’re just going to show up to do your job, I can’t help you. My job here, my work is to help people whether they’re running a nursery school or trying to help with the climate, to realize we have to make choices about what to do tomorrow. And we can do better if we have a strategy.
Don: I just wonder what your book can contribute to politics. And one of the things that really disappoints me is I don’t see a strategy among many of our politicians and the way they talk about things. So I just am curious if you have a perspective on that.
Seth: Well, I would say this. Sports became a great industry. It’s very easy to get people around the world happed up, spending money and time on rivalries in sports. And in my lifetime, we have turned politics into a sport because that’s how the consultants get paid. Number two, governance isn’t about a figurehead or a singular event. Governance is a continual cycle of engagement, decision-making output. It has almost nothing to do with politics. So here we have the media-industrial complex, which is profiting with the consultant class on turning this division into a sport. And politicians, who I don’t spend a lot of time with but I’ve definitely given advice to some fairly well-known ones, tend to avoid strategy because they’re playing the cable TV who-won-today game. And that’s to their own detriment, right? That you don’t have to be a fan of Ronald Reagan or JFK to realize that both of them had a strategy.
And once you have a strategy, each day becomes easier because you know what you’re trying to do. Whereas if you’re in a boxing ring and you’re just trying to win today with tactics, it’s easy to just get all tied up. And so I guess what I would encourage as many people as possible to do is to try to think hard about governance and what things are like around here and the kind of world we’d like to live in. I have a relative who cheats at Scrabble, and so I don’t play Scrabble with him because it’s just not worth it. And I think, personally, should refuse to engage with people who cheat even if they’re winning for us. Because once you normalize cheating, it’s very hard to stop cheating, right?
So, as someone who hopes to have descendants, and as someone who has been around for a while, governance and civil society matter a lot. I’ve been to places that have no governance. I’ve spent time in places that don’t have a civil society. You wouldn’t want to live there.
Don: The absence of trust is not a great place to be in the workplace, in a country, in a city, etcetera. That’s a great response. And I’ve had people talking about Ohio State and Michigan, or Red Sox and Yankees, and Republicans and Democrats in the same breath. It’s remarkable. And also this concept of conflict entrepreneurs. I’d never heard the term before, but Amanda Ripley talked about this when we talked. She talked about these conflict entrepreneurs, and these are the people who are making their livings, who are getting a lot of attention and power by stoking our division. And I realized, and I have a political leaning and political idea, and I realized that the networks that get me riled up, even though they align with me, I don’t want to deal with them anymore. All their job is to get me upset. I don’t want to be upset.
Seth: Yeah.
Don: So Seth, what is the most important lesson you want people to learn from This Is Strategy?
Seth: So why bother writing a book? I got to tell you, I’ve injured my vocal chords reading the audiobook. I’m exhausted. If I write a blog post, I’ll reach 10 times as many people in one day. Like, why not just do that? And the answer is a book demands a response. That if you take two copies of this book and give one to your boss or your coworker, you got to talk about it tomorrow. That’s all I want people to take away. We need to talk about this. That’s why I’m doing conversations like this with you. Because if we don’t talk about it, it’s not going to be something we deal with. We’re just going to go right back into mining coal out of the coal mine. And the world is changing too much and too fast for that to be a good answer.
Don: Seth, I’m assuming you’re an optimist. And I want to ask you, what fills you with a sense of optimism?
Seth: I think being an optimist is a practical tool because it makes it more likely that I will lean into possibility. What fills me with optimism every single day are the people who aren’t famous and who might not be super rich, who are showing up and doing the work. And I have a community called Purple Space. I was just on a call with a bunch of them, and they’re all around the world. And they’re doing something with light and care and delight and generosity. And there’s 8 billion of us on this planet. We’ve invented 7 billion jobs since the day I was born. Human beings have figured out how to make things better. And, like you said, we maybe should listen a little bit less to the people who want to divide us and bring us down.
Don: Well, optimism certainly is a state of mind and it’s a discipline. Now, that’s what I’ve learned. And I wasn’t always. I was like glass half-empty guy. And then I learned, oh, I don’t have to be this way. I actually can see… I read Steven Pinker’s book a few years ago, Enlightenment Now, and that changed my life. I’m like, oh yeah. 1800 — you wouldn’t want to be born any other time or any other period than right now. Full stop. Come on. 90% of humanity was living in abject poverty 200 years ago.
Seth: Yeah, exactly.
Don: It’s pretty good right now. So that leads me to this next question — I’m curious to know, what mistakes are we making today that the people of 2074 will look back at in disbelief?
Seth: It’s super easy for me to answer. I don’t know what I would say to a slave owner from 1850, and I don’t know what your grandchildren would say to us about, you burned what? For why? And the things that people… I know the woman who invented bottled water in the U.S. And why do we even have bottled water? Do we understand the scale, the inhumanity, the laziness, the side effects of that one single product? We’ve built this weird normal. And then, on top of it, we’ve decided our hobby will be hating our neighbors. And I’m just like, none of this makes sense to me.
Don: Seth, where can people learn more about you and buy This Is Strategy?
Seth: So there’s 9,000 posts at seths.blog, and if you go to seths.blog/tis, you will find the book and a lot of bonuses too.
Don: Fantastic. Seth, thank you for the conversation. I’ll put that in the show page notes. Thank you for your time, and thank you for being a genius.
Seth: What a treat. Thanks for having me. Keep making a ruckus.
Don: Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. We will be back next week with another episode exploring the trends shaping the way we live and work and the leadership required to help us navigate these trends. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.