THIS IS STRATEGY

0:00Hey, it's Seth, and this is Akimbo.

0:09Actually, this, after 250 episodes, is Seth Godin coming to you at the end of 2024 to talk about my new book, This is Strategy. What you're hearing are excerpts from the new audio book out at the end of October about building an elegant strategy. an elegant strategy, how to make the change you seek to make in the world for the people who care in an efficient, resilient way that makes a difference, that makes things better. I'm back on the podcast, not with a shameless pitch that you should go buy my book. I didn't write the book so you would buy it, but so we can start talking about it, talking about strategy, talking about the change we seek to make, about the systems that are around us, having conversations with our team about games, about empathy, about time.

1:14This is akimbo, and this is strategy. Thanks for being here.

1:43Charles Wilson has a problem. He's one of the great pianists of his generation, inspiring people as he performs around the world. As the sole artist, composer, impresario, fan manager, COO and entrepreneur behind the persona of BlackBock, he has too many options and not enough time. Being dedicated and skilled isn't enough. He needs to figure out how to increase his impact, build a sustainable career, and not burn out along the way. The Secretary of State has a problem as well. The U.S. State Department is one of the largest organizations in the world with countless staff and a huge budget. how to put them to work to make the desired impact in more than 150 countries.

2:34Kristen Hatcher is doing essential work to deal with sexual violence, particularly on college campuses. While the urgency of her cause is clear, finding the traction to raise money and put it to work is an ongoing challenge, far more difficult than it should be. Jesse Cole, founder and owner of the Savannah Bananas, had a problem. His remarkable idea was constrained by an existing system. Now, he is finding ever more success in bringing his wacky baseball jamboree to stadiums across the country. He recently made important decisions that freed the team from where they were stuck, and the options in front of them are multiplying.

3:23When organizations large and small ask me about marketing problems, I often respond by saying, you probably need a strategy first. But what's that? Strategy is difficult to see and not easy to talk about, because it happens over time. To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one we've defaulted into. When technology shifted, Nintendo stopped making playing cards and built a video game company. And yet, when the telephone arrived, Western Union decided to simply make better telegrams. The world is shifting faster than ever, creating opportunities and problems every day.

4:13This is our chance to make a better plan and to create a bigger impact with our work. This is strategy. This is Seth Godin, the author.

4:30Most books on strategy are for corporate MBAs or West Point generals. This is for you, for someone who wants to make things better. My narrative here is recursive and elliptical, circling back on itself as it seeks to help you see how time, games, systems, and empathy dance together to make our world. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. About 500 years ago, Albrecht Durer made a poster of a rhinoceros, a creature that almost no one in Europe had ever seen in person. Each detail is finely rendered, but not quite right. But if you look at it for a while, the essence of a rhino comes through.

5:20Strategy is often an unseen option, apparently too sophisticated, expensive, or elitist for most of us. But once we see it, our next steps become clear. We have what we need to make better plans. strategy is the soil, the seed, and the gardener working together over time. Strategy is our chance to make an impact. As you work through this manifesto, it's okay to skip the parts that don't resonate yet. Jump ahead, then loop back. Stick with it. Discuss the parts that don't match what you're doing right now, and more importantly, the parts you don't want to be true. Thanks for doing the work. How to use this program?

6:14Find the others and ask the questions. I've workshopped the ideas in this audiobook with people around the world, and we've discovered two simple ways to transform your relationship with strategy. The first, find three or four other people and start a group in person or in Zoom. meet once a week, and make assertions, highlighting your fears and sharing your path. Surprisingly quickly, you'll notice that you're shifting your strategy. The second, use the questions, lists, and challenges in this program as prompts for Claude.ai. Claude is a powerful AI that can take your prompt and personalize it for your project, challenging you to think about strategy in new ways.

7:06Every riff here is numbered to make it easy to refer to sections worth discussing, regardless of what format your colleagues are using to engage with the book. The system is always changing. It's up to us to change it for the better. One, strategy is a philosophy of becoming. Who will we become? Who will we be of service to? And who will they help others to become? This is strategy. A strategy isn't a map, it's a compass. Strategy is a better plan. It's the hard work of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better. This is the point. This is at the heart of our work and the challenge of our days.

8:04Toward better. Two, four threads woven together. Time, games, empathy, and systems. They're everywhere we look and easy to ignore. Each supports and is supported by the other three. Throughout this project, we'll be shifting from one to the other, building up to a fuller, actionable understanding of how strategy works. Time, because strategy plays out over time in the way a garden grows. Games, because there are multiple players and different possible outcomes. Trees compete for light, and only one grows to be the tallest, but all of them are part of the forest. Empathy, because people don't see what you see or even want what you want.

9:03Plant your seeds in places where the conditions are right. And systems, because whenever we work together, a system is created, and that system often lasts far longer than we expect. The swamp isn't the same as the plains, but each is a complex web of interactions. Each builds on the next in a never-ending braid. Three, what do people want? Once our basic needs for food, shelter, and health are met, most people dance with three conflicting desires. Affiliation, status, and freedom from fear. We can probably add joy, wonder, thrills, satisfaction, and other internal narratives, but for now, let's focus on these three.

9:59Affiliation is community. Fitting in, being liked. Affiliation is wearing the right fashion, using the correct salad fork, and knowing the words to the song around the campfire. Status is always relative. Who eats lunch first? Who's up and who's down? And freedom from fear is an internal construct. Fear can be used as fuel, but it's more likely to be avoided. Marketing works on these three principles, and systems all use them to maintain their structure. If you want to understand why someone makes a choice, look for what people actually want, not only the proxies and substitutes they say they want.

10:51Four, the non-strategy of take what you can get. You can pick anyone. I'm anyone. Hustle for attention. Do a very good job. Play it safe and follow the leader. This is a non-strategy. The non-strategy of doing what we were told, of fitting in and settling. This is the non-strategy that comes from not thinking about strategy. The number on the car's speedometer isn't always an indication of how fast you're getting to where you're going. You might, after all, be driving in circles really quickly. We can do better. I can't tell you what your strategy should be, but I know that you need one. 5. Awaiting instructions What happens next is a different question from What will I do now?

11:53The easy out is to simply react to events and follow the checklist. Our freedom and agency demand. We take a different path, though. Our work begins by finding a strategy and creating a different future. There are choices to be made. Stay put or move to another town. Stick around the firm to make partner or start your own practice. List your work on Upwork or Etsy or build your own store. Put your music on vinyl or Spotify. Raise your prices or lower them. Open a new store or close the wholesale division. Go to a famous college at great expense or get a great education at a state school, have a traditional wedding or a lope, start a blog or a podcast, merge with a competitor or sell the business.

12:47Too many choices, too many options. Confronted with so much choice, it's tempting to simply do your job, to pretend that it's up to someone else, and to put your head down and follow instructions. Don't surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better. Six, the elegant path is the most useful way forward. My neighbor is a barefoot runner. He glides without apparent effort. He's certainly not trying harder than anyone else out there on the track, but he's going faster with less discomfort. Ten miles later, and he's still fresh. Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

13:42It's not only a solution that gets a result. It's arguably a better solution, the least complex and clearest way forward. An elegant strategy offers leverage in service of the change we seek. While it might seem effortless in execution, creating the method requires insight and care. Elegant paths often seem roundabout at first, but they put systems to work for us instead of against us. They require intent and discipline and reward us with resilience and efficiency. Our elegant strategy reduces waste. We avoid dead ends and save energy, time, and materials as well. and an elegant strategy is beautiful.

14:30We know in our bones that we're aligned with the systems and resources around us, doing the right thing in the right way. Pretending we don't need a strategy isn't nearly as useful as digging deep to find an elegant one. Elegant strategies use systems. Even when they set out to change the system, they don't fight it directly, but use the system as a tool to change the system. This approach only gets better over time. The word spreads horizontally. Trust grows. Engagements lead to more engagements. Each node in the system we engage with will make a choice about how to allocate attention and effort.

15:17Our project needs to be accepted by people who have the power to choose, and our job is to create the conditions for that to happen. Seven, not all elegant strategies are the same, but many of them fall into similar buckets. Systems respond to strategies, and elegant strategies give us leverage. Three things to focus on. One, the strategy gets better as you grow. Anyone can sprint, but elegant strategies are something that you can maintain. Two, systemic advantage defeats heroic effort. Heroic effort is thrilling, but long-term elegant strategies rarely require miracles on a daily basis. And three, they're simple to explain and difficult to stick to.

16:14Over time, the pressures to vary from the elegant strategy increase, a thousand little compromises that eventually lead to mediocrity. Eight, systems are unseen and persistent. Strategy builds systems, but it depends on them as well. Every successful system serves a purpose. It might the purpose it says it serves, and it might not seem to make sense. But if the system sticks around, that's because the system is delivering on a promise. It's difficult to strategize and make a difference if you don't understand the systems that are working to keep things as they are. 9. We live in the solar system.

17:08It may be worth taking a moment to think about a system where there is clearly no one in charge. Earth, Jupiter, moons, and a million asteroids and meteors, they're all in a system with a star at the center of it. It's held together by gravity, an invisible force that quietly and relentlessly controls the path of the planets. At the same time, the planets influence each other, and in a small way, the sun. When a foreign interstellar object intrudes on our solar system, it either passes through or is captured by our system and becomes part of it. If parts of the system are unseen, that doesn't mean they don't exist.

17:55As they say, gravity isn't just a good idea. It's the law. Ten, systems deliver value. How did our culture evolve to have systems at the center of so much of what we do? There are three reasons. Coordinated human effort creates productivity and value. When we work together, we get far more done. A doctor without drugs, hospitals, or a team isn't very effective. And a farmer can't feed anyone without tools, markets, and seeds. People are rarely rational. Even when we want the same things, we don't always agree about how to get them. Systems adjudicate these disagreements and allow us to move forward even if we're not in sync.

18:47And three, consistency is worthwhile and slack and persistence of information permit this. If someone doesn't show up for their shift or isn't operating at full speed, the system acts as a bridge. The power and leverage that systems create can also cause them to create undesirable side effects and impede useful innovation. 11. The buildings or the roads? Stuart Brand points out that if you look at a map of Boston from 1924 and compare it to one from 2024, almost every building has changed over the last century. And yet, few of the major roadways have. It's far easier to renovate or replace a building than it is to reroute a road.

19:43Systems have nodes, the buildings, and connections, the roads. Those roads have conventions that we all need to understand to stay safe. Buildings and people get replaced all the time. Roadways and the rules of systems fight like crazy to stay the way they are. Twelve, the unseen assistant and the mysterious vandal. Better waves make better surfers. A useful skill in surfing is picking the right place and time to go surfing. The systems in our lives are like waves, making our work easier or more difficult. Working with a system is like having an assistant, eager and skilled, always making your work better.

20:33But working against a system can feel like someone is intentionally harming your project. When Michelin rolled out the puncture-proof tire, they were sure they had a billion-dollar innovation. It was better for drivers, car manufacturers, and the industry. A few years later, the project was dead. Ron Adner explains that because the local tire shops, garages, and repair depots would need arduous training and new equipment, They hadn't eagerly participated in the early days of the project, and Michelin had largely ignored them. As a result of this missing link, customers discovered that they had a great deal of trouble getting their tires serviced and were often pushed to buy normal tires to replace their worn or damaged no-flat tires.

21:30Frustrated customers complained, and some even sued the car companies. While it's easy to point the finger at the selfish car mechanics, the truth is that the vandal was the system, the resilient automobile industrial complex that would rather not change quickly. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to pre-order the book or find out more about it, please visit seths.blog slash T-I-S. That stands for This Is Strategy. And I'll see you next week with another excerpt from the audiobook.