Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Explore 1.5M+ audiobooks & ebooks free for 30 days

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams
    The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams
    The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams
    Ebook232 pages2 hours

    The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams

    By Seth Godin

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A soulful re-envisioning of what work and leadership can be, from the visionary mind of renowned author and thought leader, Seth Godin

    The Song of Significance is a rousing contemplation on work: why it is the way it is, why it’s gotten so bad, what all of us–especially leaders–can do to make it better.

    Economic instability and the rise of remote work have left us disconnected and disengaged. Alarmed managers are responding with harsh top-down edicts, layoffs, surveillance and mandatory meetings. Workers are responding by quiet quitting and working their wage. But it doesn't have to be this way.

    Through 144 provocative stanzas, legendary business author Seth Godin gets to the heart of what ails us; he shows what’s really at the root of these trends, and challenges us to do better in ways that matter.

    The choice is simple. We can endure the hangover of industrial capitalism, keep treating people as disposable, and join in the AI-fueled race to the bottom. Or we come together to build a significant organization that enrolls, empowers, and trusts everyone to deliver their best work, no matter where they are.

    This is a book to share with bosses and co-workers, to discuss and put to action. No matter what our role, it’s within our power to change. Because, as Godin writes, “Humans aren’t a resource. They are the point.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 30, 2023
    ISBN9780593715550
    Read preview
    Author

    Seth Godin

    Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, speaker, and the bestselling author of a number of business books, including E-Marketing—the first book ever published on how to do business online—as well as Permission Marketing, This is Marketing, The Practice, and The Song of Significance.

    Read more from Seth Godin

    Related to The Song of Significance

    Related ebooks

    Leadership For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Song of Significance

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Song of Significance - Seth Godin

      Cover for The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams, Author, Seth GodinBook Title, The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams, Author, Seth Godin, Imprint, Portfolio

      Portfolio / Penguin

      An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

      penguinrandomhouse.com

      Copyright © 2023 by Do You Zoom, Inc.

      Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Godin, Seth, author.

      Title: The song of significance: a new manifesto for teams / Seth Godin.

      Description: New York: Portfolio/Penguin, [2023]

      Identifiers: LCCN 2023001871 (print) | LCCN 2023001872 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593715543 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593715550 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Employee motivation. | Organizational behavior.

      Classification: LCC HD57.7 .G6323 2023 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092—dc23/eng/20230113

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001871

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001872

      Cover design: Brian Lemus

      Cover image: IADA / Shutterstock

      book design by meighan cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by estelle malmed

      pid_prh_6.0_148340210_c0_r0

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Epigraph

      1. You Don’t Need Me to Tell You This

      2. We Can Do Work Better

      3. The Best Job You Ever Had

      Three Songs

      4. The Song of Increase

      5. The Song of Safety

      6. The Song of Significance

      Toward Significance

      7. What Do People Want?

      8. What Do Companies Need?

      9. When You See a Fork in the Road

      10. McDonald’s Is Safe

      11. The Challenge of Having It Both Ways

      12. Learning from the Edges

      13. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play

      14. Kinds of Work

      15. Which Kind of Work Do We Actually Value?

      16. Significant Organizations Create an Impact

      17. Toward Better

      18. The Song of Safety (Chorus)

      19. Where Are the Leaders?

      20. Blame All the Way Down

      21. The Impartial Conversation

      22. Questions Worth Asking

      23. Before We Begin

      24. Together toward Significance

      25. A Compass before We Draw the Map

      What Happened to Management?

      26. The End of Industrialism and the Sputtering of Productivity

      27. Where Did the Productivity Go?

      28. Stakes and Trust

      29. The Race to the Bottom

      30. Prizes for Standing on the Red Dot

      31. Searching for an Even Better Stopwatch

      32. The Half-Life of a Great Organization

      33. Return on Assets

      34. The Free-Market Exchange of Labor

      35. Kinko and Sleepy

      This Time, with Meaning

      36. When We Sing the Song Together

      37. Loose/Tight Properties

      38. Carpets Are a Dirty Business

      39. Compliance and Change

      40. Trick or Treat

      41. The Problem with Human Resources

      42. Two Years That Changed the World

      43. Simplified into Jerks

      44. How Do I Get People to Do What I Want?

      45. Opening the Door to Possibility

      46. The Generous Audacity of Significance

      47. Searching for Kokoro

      48. Washing a Car Is Significant If You Do It Right

      49. Focusing on the Extreme User

      50. Beware False Proxies

      51. Becoming Resilient

      52. Fear Is Easy

      53. Impacts on the Future

      54. Labor, Work, and Action

      55. Relocating the Center

      56. Go Back and Get It

      57. Creating the Conditions

      58. The Opportunity to Contribute

      59. What People Want

      60. Innovation Is a Form of Resilience

      61. The Places In Between

      62. And We Linger

      63. Golf or Surfing?

      64. Beware the Trickster

      65. The Lintel and the Limen

      66. Significant Work Is Project Work

      67. The Work to Be Done

      68. Kathrin Jansen Saved the World

      69. My Stomach Doesn’t Know That My Pocket Is Empty

      70. James Daunt Saved the Bookstore

      71. Where Does the Water Go?

      72. Filling In the Blanks

      The Commitments

      73. The New Way of Work Is Mutual

      74. The Significance Commitments

      75. We’re Here to Make Change Happen

      76. We Are Acting with Intention

      77. Dignity Is Worth Investing In

      78. Tension Is Not the Same as Stress

      79. Mistakes Are the Way Forward

      AN ASIDE ABOUT THE SCOUT BEES

      80. Take Responsibility, Give Credit

      81. Criticize the Work, Not the Worker

      82. Turnover Is Okay

      83. Mutual Respect Is Expected

      84. Get to vs. Have to

      85. Standards Instead of Obedience

      86. Do the Reading

      87. Show Your Work

      88. Make It Better

      89. Celebrate Real Skills

      Let’s Get Real: New Skills for a New Way of Work

      90. Real Skills Are a Way Forward

      91. What Can We Teach?

      92. Work to Be Done

      93. The Power of a Confident Coach

      94. Harry Brighouse Is Calling on You

      95. Autocratic Bullying Is Not Enrollment

      96. Leadership and Dissent

      97. Professionals Say No

      98. The Risk of Listening

      99. Clarity and the Words Unsaid

      100. Aunt Helen Was Tough

      What We Make and How We Talk About It

      101. What We Produce Is Change

      102. You Can’t Make Me Stop Caring

      103. The Federation

      104. The Challenges of the Journey (Starting and Stopping)

      105. Hurt People Hurt People

      106. How Am I Doing?

      107. Thin-Slicing

      108. What Time Does the Gym Open?

      109. Work Worth Doing

      110. A Word List

      Pathfinding

      111. Don’t Bring a Stopwatch to a Poetry Slam

      112. Who Decides What’s Next?

      113. If We Make Decisions . . .

      114. Pivots and New Paths

      Meetings Are a Symptom

      115. Meetings Are a Problem and a Symptom

      116. Before the Digital Age, We Came Together In Person

      117. Zoom, Wasted

      118. Honeybee Democracy

      119. A Week without Meetings

      120. What Are Meetings For?

      121. A Significant Meeting Is Different

      122. Toward a Zoom Agreement

      123. The Modern Meetings Challenge

      Creating a Significant Organization

      124. Mileposts on the Road to Significance

      125. Important Organizations Make Change Happen

      126. Humans Are Not a Resource

      127. Management Is Not the Same as Leadership

      128. Enrollment Is More Powerful Than Coercion

      129. Culture Can Amplify Enrollment

      130. Seek Out Useful Impostors

      131. Leaders Create the Conditions for Culture

      132. Page 19 Opens the Door

      133. It’s the Work, Not the Worker

      134. Embrace Uncertainty

      135. Seek Out the Benefit of the Doubt

      136. Withhold Definition

      137. Avoid False Proxies

      138. Rigorous Standards

      139. Scale Is Not the Point

      140. Hiring Is Not Dating

      141. Find Positive Uses of Tension

      The Broomstick

      142. Management vs. Leadership

      143. Perhaps the Yellow Brick Road Is the Point

      144. The Wonder of the Swarm

      Acknowledged

      Appendix

      About the Author

      _148340210_

      When you dance on the edge of infinity,

      there’s always enough . . .

      because you aren’t taking opportunity

      from anyone else, you’re creating it.

      1. You Don’t Need Me to Tell You This

      If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you already know: work isn’t working.

      If you’re a boss, you’re probably frustrated, confused, and under a lot of pressure. You see missed opportunities and broken promises.

      And if you’re working for a boss, my guess is that you’re feeling the very same thing.

      The problem lies with us.

      It’s due to decisions we unknowingly made years ago, to the indoctrination we force on each other, and to our terrible reflex to double down when things get hard. We’re getting better and better at making it worse.

      This is a short book about a fork in the road, about a decision we all get to make. Each of us can show up in our own way, but the choice is the same: to lead, to create work that matters, and to find the magic that happens when we are lucky enough to cocreate with people who care.

      We can do well and do better at the same time. In fact, it’s the only useful way forward. We can create the best job someone ever had, the best experience any customer can imagine—and build organizations that are regenerative, resilient, and powerful.

      We’ve lived with the grind for so long that it’s easy to imagine that we’re stuck with it, but better is within our reach.

      2. We Can Do Work Better

      We’re letting our employees and bosses down. They’re letting us down too.

      They need more from us, and we need more from this job.

      We go to work with dreams and energy and drive but leave each day a bit more depleted. We bring trust and enthusiasm, but it feels wasted.

      Our team can do better. Our effort can matter. If we want to do work better, we’ll need to understand what’s possible. Let’s get real. We can choose to lead.

      3. The Best Job You Ever Had

      What would today be like if you could honestly describe your job that way? And what if all your coworkers felt the same way? Imagine being an investor, a customer, a participant in that sort of organization.

      I asked ten thousand people in ninety countries to describe the conditions at the best job they ever had. Here are the characteristics they chose most often:

      The top four items (people could choose more than one answer) overwhelmingly came out ahead:

      I surprised myself with what I could accomplish

      I could work independently

      The team built something important

      People treated me with respect

      Nothing else compares.

      Yes, we need to make a living.

      But how do we make a life?

      It might not be simply about the money.

      When the world is in turmoil, when our health is at risk and the future seems murky, perhaps paychecks and productivity simply aren’t enough.

      Perhaps we can’t manage our way into the future.

      What if we created the best job someone ever had?

      What if we built an organization people would genuinely miss if it were gone?

      How much better would our work be if we could simply talk about the work without hesitation?

      What if the work we did made things better?

      Mozart, not Muzak.

      Three Songs

      If you’re not drowning,

      you’re a lifeguard.

      4. The Song of Increase

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 19