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Q & A WITH SETH GODIN: Why you need bad ideas and how to overcome your ‘lizard brain’ | By Mara Dresner | Q. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in business?
A. The biggest change is the goal of business. One hundred and fifty years ago, even though I’m not that old, the goal of business was average stuff. Average people could read a “Dummy” book, or they’d copy someone from another town, and they were guaranteed a fair share, whether they were in real estate or had a spa. You just needed to deliver average and have lots of masses to pay you.
The Internet changed that. People will no longer go out of their way for average. And if all you offer is that I want it to be cheap. That’s a problem, because it leads to a race to the bottom. That’s no fun. You want the opportunity to race to the top. Then, people will happily pay extra and drive across town and talk about it.
Q. How do entrepreneurs need to re-think their approach to business?
A. The first thing to do is to ignore people pushing you to be average, whether it’s your mother-in-law or the bank. Strip malls are filled with struggling fast food joints. You have the opportunity to push to the edge and do what scares you. Find the few customers who care enough and cater to them, and ignore the people who want you to be easily replaceable.
Q. Your new book is Linchpin. What’s a Linchpin?
A. A linchpin is a tiny part on the wheel on car. You can’t live without it. If it falls off, you’re stuck. In the book it’s the thing we can’t live without; it’s the person who does the work that matters.
An entrepreneur has the opportunity to hire replaceable people to follow the manual and pay them little, or to hire extraordinary people and give them the freedom to make mistakes. … If you fill your company with cogs, you better be cheap.
Q. How does a business owner help his or her employees become linchpins?
A. Most business owners are not serious about it. They say they are, but they demand compliance. The exception is to fire people who are average, to fire people who don’t take risks. Embrace and celebrate people who break rules. This is a very scary path to go down. …
Tony Hsieh [CEO, Zappos.com] built Zappos just that way. … Management demands people act like human beings not like little computers.
Q. Talk to me about idea-generation and the fear of failure.
A. The reason all this is hard is because we’re afraid. We don’t want people to laugh at us. That’s one of the deepest feelings people have. It’s the lizard brain, the prehistoric part, when fighting the saber tooth tiger meant to the death, when you’d be shunned from the village. That’s precisely the opposite of what we should do.
Apple has been in the news a lot. The product, the name, to the price and the way it’s laid out, most organizations would have killed that with one more focus group or study. It would have been a compromise, which would have been boring.
People love to ask authors where do you get your ideas. People are always saying to me, “I’d love to have more ideas.” The way you get good ideas is by having bad ideas. If you have 10 ideas a day, you’ll get one good one. The mistake people make is to censor the ideas they think are bad, and, along the way, they kill all of them.
Q. What do you mean when you talk about shipping?
A. What the lizard brain wants is that I think about it, study it and decide it’s not ready, it’s not qualified. And the way we overcome that is by shipping out the door, saying it’s done. Our obligation is to complete it. It’s not acceptable to you or anyone on your team to say, “That’s interesting,” and move on.
Q. What’s a meatball sundae?
A. It’s an unfortunate combination of two perfectly good items. Meatballs are average stuff that average people pay a perfectly good price for. Spas and salons are in the meatball business.
A sundae is what the Internet is like. It’s remarkable. It’s innovative.
The problem is you take the average meatball business and you put it on the Internet. You tell people to visit the web site, you talk Twitter, you’re going to fail. The reason you’ll fail is no one cares about you. They’re going to move on. …
Internet is not like TV. If you put boring, spammy ads on the Internet, we don’t have to look at them, so we won’t.
Q. Is Permission marketing still relevant?
A. Do you want people spamming you or spraying you with perfume in a department store, or calling you at dinner? It’s more relevant than ever. Pay attention, put this in capital letters and underlined: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOU.
You don’t have the right to bother me just because you worked hard on something. You don’t have the right to spam me just because your business is at stake. I don’t care about you. You need to care about me. That’s hard for an entrepreneur who put his or her heart and soul into something. You care, but no one else does unless you change it into a business I do care about.
Q. What do you watch on television?
A. I haven’t watched television since “Seinfeld” went off the air, not once.
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Who is Seth Godin?
Seth Godin writes the most popular marketing blog in the world and is the founder of Squidoo.com, a fast-growing recommendation web site.
Godin is the author of 10 books that have been best-sellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and his e-books are among the most popular ever published. He is responsible for many words in the marketer's vocabulary, including permission marketing, ideaviruses, purple cows, the dip and sneezers.
His latest book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? hit the “top ten” on Amazon the first day it was released in January 2010.
He is the author of Tribes, which appeared on the Amazon, New York Times, BusinessWeek and Wall Street Journal best-seller lists. The Miami Herald listed it among the best business books of 2008.
Godin’s Meatball Sundae is a Wall Street Journal best-seller. The Dip, is his fastest-selling book to date. All Marketers are Liars made the Amazon Top 100 and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Free Prize Inside, was an Amazon Top 50 bestseller and a New York Times business best-seller. Purple Cow, was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller.
The Big Red Fez, Godin's take on web design, was the #1 e-book (worldwide) on Amazon for almost a year before it was published in paperback in 2002.
Godin was chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings. He is a contributing editor of Fast Company.
Godin was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry's leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998. He worked as VP Direct Marketing at Yahoo before leaving to become a full-time speaker, writer and blogger.
He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week.
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