Building "tribes" and today's leadership

by Missy Schmidt, Communication Manager, Webmaster and Blogmaster for the Hampton Roads Partnership. Contact her at Missy@HRP.org.

Included in this video are good, thoughtful questions for the leaders in Hampton Roads as we often seem to ask "who speaks for Hampton Roads?"

TED conferences gather the world's leading thinkers and doers to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). In just four days of rapid-fire stimulation, unexpected connections are made, extraordinary insights and powerful inspiration abound. TED is about riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world, about ideas worth spreading.

Featured speakers have included Al Gore on 15 ways to avert a climate crisis, Nicholas Negroponte on his One Laptop per Child project, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Sir Kenneth Robinson on whether schools kill creativity, Robin Chase on the world’s biggest car-sharing business and road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts.

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This TEDTalk is by Seth Godin, a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. In it, Godin argues that the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant (50,000 years) past: "tribes." Founded on shared ideas and values, "tribes" give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. Change derived in the new way ideas are created and spread and implemented. He describes today's new model of leadership; power is no longer in the hands of those who buy the most ads to convince the masses of something.

Thanks to the internet, we have ever more diverse "tribes." Rather than the homogenized social strata that was thought to be the outcome of the internet, we have more and smaller niches of interest. You can find anyone for whom you're looking and connect with them, via the Web.

Godin puts forth that today's leadership is about one simple premise: finding something worth changing, challenging the status quo, and assembling "tribes" that assemble other "tribes" until the change becomes far bigger than ourselves; it becomes a movement.

You need only a few people, perhaps 1,000 true fans, true believers, true evangelists, who will build a culture and organize others around your great ideas.

Godin asks important questions and so do we: Who are we connecting with? Who are we leading?

Good, thoughtful questions for the leaders in Hampton Roads as we seem to often ask "who speaks for Hampton Roads?"