To Build That Future You’re Yearning For, Think Strategy

One might wonder if Seth Godin, one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, ever sleeps.

He’s the author of 21 bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and other important issues. Those books have been translated into 38 languages.

He’s given five TED talks and writes one of the most popular daily blogs in the world. He’s the former vice president of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! and the founder of the altMBA, Squidoo, Yoyodyne, and the Akimbo workshops. He volunteers with non-profits and start-up entrepreneurs around the globe.

Like I say, one might wonder if Seth ever sleeps.

His latest book is This is Strategy: Make Better Plans.

Do you like quick doses of paradigm-stretching thoughts on managing your work? This book is for you. Do you need help understanding and influencing the systems that shape your world? This book is for you. Do you want fresh ideas on making smart decisions and prioritizing long-term thinking over instant gratification? Ditto.

This book is gratifyingly easy to read, so much so that it doesn’t even have page numbers. It consists of nearly 300 of Godin’s thought-provoking brainstorms that challenge you to think about strategy in fresh ways. (You don’t need to count them. They’re numbered.)

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How does he differentiate between strategy and tactics, and why is it so common for people to confuse the two?

“Strategy is about the future, it’s a philosophy of becoming. Tactics are a plan, sure to work if we do them right,” Godin says. “The problem with tactics is that when the world changes, they cease to work. Western Union used tactics to win the telegraph wars, but was destroyed by AT&T when the world responded to their innovation.”

Godin says that if you need a guarantee that you’ll be right, you’re unlikely to innovate. “But when you find an elegant strategy, the systems around you work in your favor, and you can lead instead of follow.”

In Godin’s view, what exactly are “systems,” and what role do they play in a strategy?

“One way to identify a good surfer is that they find the best waves,” he says. “Systems are the invisible waves, the forces that either work for us or against us. The TV system rewarded advertisers for a generation—you didn’t have to make a great product, you merely needed to advertise it a lot. Office culture is a system, and so is the hierarchy of attention and media. Once you see a system, you can’t unsee it. And if you have a strategy that helps the system get what it wants, it’s far more likely to support you and your goals.”

How does clear strategy help an entrepreneur build and execute a successful business model?

“Tactics fail when we hit a speed bump, or when our competition surprises us,” Godin says. “But if you have a clear and resilient strategy, you can share it—with your team, with your investors, and even with your customers. Now they can help you create tactics and do the work that supports your strategy.”

As an example, he says Microsoft’s time-tested strategy is to be the IBM of software. “Anything they can do to add reassurance, sales teams, support—and, yes, bureaucratic resilience—pays off for them.”

When managing a change initiative, how can leaders best persuade team members to “get on board” with the strategy?

Management isn’t the same as leadership, Godin underscores. “Managers use power and authority to tell people what to do. Managers are good at plans and tactics. But leaders need voluntary enrollment. Leaders persuade. They sell the strategy and the assertions and their vision for the future and gain the eager support of those that want to participate in the work.”

What are the keys to creating the conditions for successful change?

Godin says strategy weaves together four threads: Systems, Games, Time, and

Empathy. “When all four are present, change is more likely to occur and our strategy becomes more powerful.”

He elaborates:

• Systems, as we’ve seen, take our awareness of the invisible cultural and organizational forces around us and put those forces to work to amplify the change we’re making. For example, we see that the internet’s insatiable desire for more connection, more bandwidth and more convenience (too long, didn’t read!) is hard to fight, but easy to amplify.
• Games aren’t just for fun. Games are any situation where there are players, rules, constraints and outcomes. When we realize we’re playing a game, we can see the options that are available to us and learn from the moves that don’t work.
• Time happens to everyone, every day. How will you invest your tomorrow? What are you doing right now that the you of next year will thank you for? Your podcast isn’t going to begin with a million listeners, but it might get there. What would have to happen to get from 100 to 200? And then 200 to 1000?
• And finally, Empathy. You might want to be in charge of everyone, but you’re not. Others have agency. Others can make choices. Someone will need to say “yes” for you to move forward. We can’t insist. But perhaps we can understand those we seek to serve and help them get to where they seek to go. We have a chance to be of service, to realize that no one know what we know or wants what we want.

Godin writes about “nostalgia for the future.” He explains what that is and the role that strategy can play in creating it.

“A strategy is the most reliable way to get to a future we’d like to live in,” he says. “Originally, ‘nostalgia’ referred to homesickness, a desire to get back to a place we miss. However, that desire can be addressed simply by getting on a bus. It evolved to the nostalgia we’re familiar with today. A nostalgia for a past—one that’s predictable, safe, and completely unattainable, because time machines don’t go in that direction.”

He says we can choose to enjoy nostalgia (the popular kind, nostalgia for the past). “We gladly suffer from that bittersweet feeling we get about events that we loved but can’t relive. The unattainability of the past is part of its attractiveness. We’d love to do it again, but we can’t.”

Godin explains that nostalgia for the future is that very same feeling about things that haven’t happened yet. “We’re prepared for them to happen, but if something comes along to change our future, those things won’t happen, and we’ll be disappointed. We’re good at visualizing this future, though if we think it’s not going to happen, we get nostalgic for it, giving up before we’ve had a chance to make it real. This isn’t positive visualization. It’s attachment of the worst sort. We’re attached to an outcome, often one we can’t control.”

This big thinker says that instead of attachment and a relentless addiction to one and only one outcome, “we can develop a resilient strategy that helps us build the future we seek to live in.”

In other words, we can choose to get on the bus—to go build that future we’re yearning for.