There’re a few moments in history when one great age gives way to another. As the industrial age gives way to the digital one, Seth Godin’s Linchpin may quite possibly be a book that marks the crossroads and becomes a crucial link in the chain of business development.
Quoting Doug Rushkoff, Seth Godin mentioned in his opening address about Linchpin that the Dark Ages were an under-appreciated chapter in history, the impetus for a renaissance , a blossoming of art and cultural expression. In a similar way in this depressed economy, Linchpin may be a turning point for the human being, the industrial cog in the factory machine.
In the globally connected world, Linchpin can be viewed as an important call for our evolution.
Since Seth Godin wrote Tribes last year, a book that turned accepted norms about brands and organisations upside down, the social media revolution that’s happened since has been in many ways a well-meaning banner in need of a business case. Linchpin is the book that seeks to address that.
The economics of Adam Smith and the industrial age decreed that wealth is created by the division of human labour. This has charted our commercial course for the last two hundred years and is described by Seth today as being a ‘race to the bottom’. The digital age, he argues, in my view absolutely correctly, will generate wealth through the creation of sustainable social benefit, by solving interesting problems and leading, all of which requires new skills and capabilities.
Welcome to the contribution economy as a route to wealth generation. Whilst established organizations can find it difficult and slow to change, this is the place where the seismic shift of being digital and the implications and possibilities for businesses that social connectivity creates are carrying on regardless.
Linchpin focuses on the granularity of where future excellence will come from, the individual people and catalysts who are making a difference, as a complex, connected, global society creates new value for unique and differentiated DNA. Seth set this point out in ‘Small is the New Big’ and ‘Linchpin’ is another step in the same direction.
The essential point is that, as we start to make sense of a new commercial matrix of transactions and relationships, the crossroads that marks the real start of the digital age has two pathways.
One is for businesses built on interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. They’re likely to be consigned the fate of the wage slave, both separately and collectively.
The other is for those that generate value through making visceral connections and actions that move people. They will ‘create art that changes the nature of the recipient’. They will engage in activity in which ‘the best that can be done is not already known’ and they’ll encourage the talent of the best people around them, the Linchpins, to do it. They will be the safer bets for investment.
Digital transparency means personal reputation increasingly supplements corporate reputation and it’s the people behind the business that are its equity more now than ever. Linchpin is a manifesto for those that want to play that kind of part in business and how it develops from here on in.
There’s a catch of course, in that the greatest challenge we have to tame doesn’t come from the ecosystem around us but from within ourselves, from the lizard brain, the resistance, that’s an incarcerating force and a limiter of potential.
Linchpin is a dare to dream big, personally, professionally, collectively. If the factory approach now is a ‘system to take in the ordinary’, then the Linchpin philosophy is a call to awaken the genius within. It encapsulates the challenge of being social, which is to inspire others and it does it with great style. The marketing alone for Linchpin is a masterclass all by itself.
As is usually the case with Seth, the message is a deceptively simple one whilst being, at the same time, hugely significant. It’s his prescience and crystal clear insight that makes Linchpin such a gift in itself, brave, raw and challenging.
Seth Godin launched Linchpin in New York City last week on a cold January morning and it was a thrill to be there. He is a master of making people feel special, of inspiring others and, as Jacqueline Novogratz said at the time, of telling it how it is.
A hat-tip to Shawn McCormick for the picture.
