Seth Godin keeps writing books, and they keep getting better. He keeps giving talks, and they keep mesmerizing his audiences. He’s in constant motion (he even switched phones 4 times during our interview!) but somehow channels his electric energy into making icky business issues clear and calmly solvable. And guess what? The business issues he tackles have tons to do with user and customer experience. He’s introduced lots of great new words into the marketing vocabulary, and yet, despite the fact that his books are best-sellers, I bet he’s probably one of the most under-read resources in the HCI community. Take a look at how his creative whirlygig mind works and I bet you’ll be ordering all of his books tomorrow.
EXCERPTS FROM THE INTERVIEW
I realized recently that I have never been satisfied with the status quo. I don’t know why. It’s probably a little bit of a curse. But the status quo isn’t enough of a reason for me to accept something. Part of being an entrepreneur is about going into a place where something isn’t happening, making it happen, and having the marketplace thank you for it.
The thing is, the stuff that’s for everybody is already sold to everybody. So you can’t win by being more average than average, because that slot’s taken.
AN INTERVIEW WITH SETH GODIN
Conducted by Tamara Adlin on August 27, 2007 09:27 AM
Seth Godin got a toy when he was a little kid–a radio that transformed into a cool spy rifle. Ever since, he’s been talking about what happens when you shoot messages out to regular people.
He is the author of seven books, and I have them all. They have been best-sellers around the world, and change the way people think about marketing, change, and about work.
Seth’s books include Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Big Red Fez, Survival Is Not Enough, Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside, All Marketers Are Liars, Small Is the New Big, and, most recently, The Dip.
Hello! Thanks for taking time to talk with me.
On the CB, there were some people who would just yell into the microphone and bother everyone until they changed the channel. Then there were other people you could rely on. There were all kinds, and they were mostly people you never met.
I remember all these people I’d been talking to on the radio for a year met at Pat’s Hot Dog Stand one Sunday, and we got to meet in person. I don’t think I ever turned my radio on again. They were all a bunch of losers.
On the radio, it didn’t really matter, but when I met them in person and they were frightening, I didn’t want to go back.
I still have this vivid memory from when I was six years old. My grandparents gave me a 007 radio, which was a radio that turned into a machine gun. I can visualize it, sitting by my bed when I woke up that morning.
My parents did not approve of this toy, but my grandparents didn’t ask first.
What did you love in high school?
At 16, I started the school ski club and brought 50 or 60 kids skiing up near my house in Buffalo every week.
Then when I got to college at Tufts, I ended up co-founding the largest student business in the country. So my entrepreneur scene goes pretty far back.
I realized recently that I have never been satisfied with the status quo. I don’t know why. It’s probably a little bit of a curse. But the status quo isn’t enough of a reason for me to accept something. Part of being an entrepreneur is about going into a place where something isn’t happening, making it happen, and having the marketplace thank you for it.
I actually took more classes than almost any one in the school. It was all you could eat for the same tuition, and my dad encouraged me, so I took six courses a semester.
My philosophy then, and my philosophy now, is that learning the first 80% of something new takes 20% of the effort. My goal in college was not to become an expert on phenomenology or civil engineering; my goal was to understand the framework of as many disciplines as I could.
By never taking the hardest course in any department, I was able to get this great overview of a bunch of stuff, but become an expert on nothing.
You just said something very interesting: you didn’t do a foreign language and you don’t feel you’re really wired to do a foreign language. Why?
That’s one of the reasons I’m able to do what I do. People enjoy hearing me talk about the connections that I can find when I look at situations or systems.
If I have to learn the lingo of CB radio, or the Internet, for example, I start with a construct I’m familiar with, and then piece-by-piece I can add stuff. I can figure out the difference between “10/20” or “10/4”, or the difference between IRC and AIM.
In Spanish, all bets are off. You don’t know anything. There’s no foundation to start with and it’s almost impossible to bootstrap it. And once you learn a bit of Spanish, like 20 words, you’re not on your way to knowing French.
Instead, you have to open yourself up to absorbing a whole new thing. I’m not good at that.
What I love about it is that you had to put the alphabet into an order, because otherwise you couldn’t remember what all the letters were. The order they picked is as good as any other. They just picked it.
That’s a critical thing that people who design systems often get hung up on. They lose the distinction between things that build on each other because they are logical, and things that are just because they are.
For example, when CD-ROMs were young, and the web was young, people tried to make the interfaces into a metaphor. There was a desk. Paper was on the desk. If you wanted to put something away you had to open the drawer.
Interface creators were struggling mightily to fill this logical construct. What was brilliant about what they did at Xerox PARC, and with the Mac was to say, “We’re going to make up a whole bunch of stuff that’s sort of like the old stuff, but we’re just going to make it this different way because we want to. We’ll build a logical construct on top of that.”
More often than not, if we don’t use the right words, we’re not going to be able to set the foundation for the rest of the conversation to follow.
There’s nothing in Purple Cow that’s earth shattering. There’s nothing in my new book, The Dip, that people didn’t already know. But giving people aword that didn’t exist before lets them have a shorthand way of talking to each other. Helping people with the shortcuts is important. Words and shortcuts help make sure everyone is on the same page when they get to the good part of the conversation.
If they didn’t want to buy what we had “in stock,” we’d invent something new for them.
If you picked the Volvo, the rest of your interactions were about Volvo, which made sense because you had decided you were interested in a Volvo.
We would then go to different car companies and say, ‘Do you want to be one of the prizes?’ We ended up building this entire suite of interaction and promotion. We’d get hundreds of thousands of people learning about cars because they wanted to win one. We would then sell slices of that promotion to different companies.
I think that’s part of what you are talking about – building experiences that are intriguing.
What’s interesting is they both are very strong-willed, but they get what they want in very different ways.
What was between college and Yoyodyne?n
I didn’t have the guts to go start my own business, so I applied to business school and got into Stanford, where I was the second youngest person in the class. I got there and I realized I was in really big trouble. The typical MBA student has spent the last two years wasting time at a bank so he could get into business school. They’re the kinds of people who really like tweaking a spreadsheet and really get into all the detail work.
The first couple of months of business school were no fun at all. Then I went to a class and, for whatever reason, I didn’t have time to prepare for it. Someone opened and said something, and I couldn’t help myself. I raised my hand. I was the only one who did. I riffed. I didn’t use any of the numbers; I just riffed. And it worked.
I discovered in every class the professor needed somebody who was willing to talk about the big picture. Then I had it made. The rest of business school, all l did was bring the class back to reality by saying, “Who cares what the numbers say? This is what the people involved care about.” I was really lucky that I got away with that, but I did.
My second year in school, I had a job in Boston working for a company calledSpinnaker Software. I commuted from California to Boston every week to do the job and the MBA at the same time.
Spinnaker was the first company that brought educational computer games to the mass market. We had Fisher-Price stuff, and we had science fiction stuff like Bradbury and Clark. We sold millions of copies of our titles.
I was a brand manager, in charge of marketing for a few of the company’s brands. I was really young at the time. It was a great laboratory for me to engage with technical people. I had about 40 engineers working for me, and I got to make sales calls on Target and Radio Shack and other big companies.
I stayed there until ’86, and then I left to become a book packager.
There’s no question that if the Internet had existed then, I would have been the kind of person who was building websites. But instead of building websites, I built books. The advantage was that you got paid up front, and you got a royalty if it worked.
I did that for five years. I started in the same office as the company that became Yoyodyne, which is where I met Mark Hurst. He came to work for me.
I ran Yoyodyne and the book business for about six years. Then the book business got too big and I got too tired, so I sold it to my employees. Then the Yoyodyne Internet business got too big and the timing was good so I sold it to Yahoo!.
It felt a lot like the book business, but it was a faster moving, more lucrative industry. I spent some time at Prodigy and discovered what they needed. It turned out they wanted sticky interactions that people would only use for a few minutes a week, so I designed a trivia game program for Prodigy calledGUTS. It was the most successful product of their entire six-year history. That gave me the momentum and incentive to build a business
At the beginning I probably wasn’t that smart. I hired people I liked, or people like me. That’s not a good way to build a balanced organization. Over time I quickly shifted gears and started focusing.
We were hiring 10 or 20 people in a good month when we were growing fast. I took out a full-page ad in the New York Times. We started having open houses. At the open house, 50 people would come, and I would give a speech for 15 minutes so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself 50 times. Then we would divide everyone into groups of five. I’d have one of my employees sit at each table and group-interview people so we could get a sense of them.
Then I would go around to each table and ask everyone exactly the same question. I would say, “As a group, I want the five of you to answer this question: How many gas stations are there in the United States?”
I always hired the fifth person.
There were two people who looked at me and said, “I don’t have a car,” and walked out. One of the people came up to me shortly after I sold the company. He would have been a millionaire. He apologized for walking out on the interview.
I really believe that hiring for talent is not nearly as important as hiring for attitude. If you get the right attitude, you can teach the talent.
Now that my kids are in school, I’m aghast at how much time is wasted teaching facts. It’s not an accident that most organizations hire the way they were hired. They hire the way they were trained in school, which is, “Show me you’ve done this job before for someone else, and I’ll hire you.”
That’s bogus.
I want to hear what you think about fear in companies.
Once again, we come back to the iPhone. There’s nothing in the iPhone that was hard or that Motorola had never thought of before.
The iPhone is merely a triumph of guts. It’s a triumph of someone forcing people to do things they were scared of, and thus completely changing the paradigm of a multibillion-dollar industry.
So back to you. You sold Yoyodyne. I don’t know if there’s something after that, but then you started to publish. Now, you write and write and write. From what you’ve just said, you write things that already exist. The ideas exist in the world, but you put them in a way that is eye opening; that makes peoples’ brains act like popcorn and fizz in a good way.
How did you choose to do that? That’s brave. If you really think what you’re doing is re-stating the obvious in a creative way, that’s a brave thing to build a career on.
As a book packager, I found that there was a lot of pressure to write in a certain way and have a certain credential to be a writer. I would have to go out and get a credentialed person to put their name on something, even though I wrote it.
What it led me to understand is that some people like reading my writing. I was OK writing like I talk. It’s sort of orderly and yet amusing.
That was good, because I was only going to write in my voice. I wasn’t going to start a career where I had to do all that work that I didn’t want to do in college about sanding David’s chin.
I said to myself, “If I’m going to write, I’m not going to have any graphs, tables, charts or proofs. I’m just going to lay out ideas that I think I can defend. If people want to run with them, I think they are smart enough to do that.”
I was very fortunate in that Permission Marketing was the perfect book to start with. It was released on the perfect day of the perfect year. It broke through.
Because it broke through, it gave me the credibility to keep writing the way I write. If it had failed, I would probably be working at a gas station.
When I started doing what I do now, I asked myself, “If I am going to make change, how am I going to do it?”
There’s a whole spectrum of ways you can do that. A book reaches lots of people, but changes only a small percentage of people who actually read it.
A book gives the people it does impact a tool to change others. I think that’s when books work the best: When someone hands you a book and says, “You gotta read this, and we have to do something about it.”
If you’re a therapist and see someone an hour a week for three years, you can have a lot of leverage on them. If you are a parent and spend a lot of time with your kid, you can have a lot of impact. If you are a consultant…at least with the tools available to me, I don’t know how to change an organization by doing consulting. There’s too much implementation challenge if you’re just an individual.
Then there’s the public speaking. What’s interesting about public speaking is that there are people who will never be moved by a book who can be moved by 50 minutes of someone jumping up and down in front of them on a podium.
From a personal point of view, the fact that I am 100% on duty for an hour and then completely done allows me to give everything I have, and then not have to worry about the chance that I am going to be overwhelmed for months afterwards.
The combination of writing books that people can share with their friends, and then 30 or 40 or 50 times a year standing in front of a group of people and adding some color to those ideas, seems like the perfect mix for me.
I end up having to spend up all my time with the other nine.
Free Prize Inside is all about how you deal with that issue. There have been plenty of times that I’ve been very disappointed because there are people who have been struggling with something for six months or a year or two years, and they think that if they can just get me to touch it, a great thing is going to happen for them.
It really bothers me for a couple of reasons.
One, I know there are other people who do what I do for a living who take advantage of that emotion and sell something in exchange for playing off that hope.
Worse, I feel badly for these people who have forced themselves to becomeDon Quixote; who are embracing a project that can never go anywhere. Because if you’re working on something that can never go anywhere, you don’t have to worry about it ever going anywhere.
That weird uncle who’s always got some board game he’s dreaming up is safe. His board game is never going to get bought by Mattel. His board game is never going to change his life. He can live under the illusion that he’s challenging the status quo, when in fact he is hiding.
It’s not about helping to redesign a product. It’s about helping people talk to each other internally.
Like you said, Motorola already had all those ideas that are in the iPhone, but they didn’t know how to use them. They couldn’t talk to each other.
I say, “Look at me, look at me! Now take that and do something great with it.” You say, “Look at you, look at you.”
For someone like you who helps to get people thinking in a new way, what makes you think in new ways? What fascinates you now, looking forward?
But if I do nothing but that all day, I won’t be digging deep enough and I won’t be pushing myself hard enough. So what my homework assignments tend to be bigger, harder, more conceptual things that I don’t even see the first five times I look at something, but instead notice the sixth time.
That’s what led to Permission Marketing, which was a success. It led toSurvival Is Not Enough, which was a failure. It’s what led to The Dip, which was a success. I am challenging myself to get out of my comfort zone, which is smaller than most peoples’ comfort zones, but still too big.
An example I give is if you’re at a really good sushi bar, you can get a great piece of tuna sashimi or a yellowtail roll that’s better than any you’ve ever had. But it’s not hard for the chef to make those after a couple of years.
What’s hard is for the chef to invent something brand new, like miso cod that makes people say, “Wow, I didn’t even come for that, and here it is.”
I’m trying to balance those two things. I think I’m pretty good at making sushi now, but I want to push myself to do something that’s a little bit outside that.
There was a book that I read when I was a kid about witches, and there was a trick the witches had. They could dance between the raindrops, and a raindrop would never hit them.
I think you are one of those witches. You see what’s going on in between the stuff that’s all over the place, and that’s a magical thing.