A Manifesto for Us Frogs

I like to think the story about frogs isn’t true but I sort of suspect it might be. It goes like this: if you put a frog in boiling water it will jump out, but if you put it in cool water which you slowly heat to boiling, the frog will keep adapting until it’s an entrée.

by Seth Godin  is for the GenX frogs. The ones who graduated into the recession of the mid-1980s, took the grunt jobs from the last of the boomers and sat in fabric-covered boxes while the water got warmer.

Some of Godin’s previous books, such as Tribes, have focused on macro trends ,  while others have stayed in the marketing world, but Linchpin grabs themes from throughout his work  and delivers a smack upside the head of everyone who still labours mightily waiting for the recognition and reward they dimly recall being promised.

He paints a grim and depressingly familiar picture of the modern workplace as a penitentiary where chain gangs of the hopeful sing the praises of the mediocre. These are the people who have been taught since kindergarten to sit up straight, play nicely, do as they’re told, follow the rules and sort their recycling. And they are rotting away in their cubicles waiting for some kind of payoff. Too afraid to take a chance, too defeated to give something away and too accustomed to being micro-managed to think for themselves, they grind out average work for average customers in average companies. Godin blames the amygdala for the angry, frightened thoughts with which we bombard ourselves. “That voice is the resistance – your lizard brain—and it wants you to be average (and safe).”

Inspired innovation, to most of us, is something that happens to lucky or exceptional people like Frank Gehry or Lady Gaga. It’s the product of external circumstances –the right private school, the right parents, the right timing — and not the result of taking chances and aiming a little higher.

He also takes a different look at what it means to be indispensable in the post-industrial age. Far from being the only one in the office who knows how to unjam the copier and organize the holiday party, he suggests that indispensable people – Linchpins – are the ones who just get stuff done.

These are the people who know which problems to solve, how to push through the corporate bullsh*t, how to connect the right people and get stuff accomplished, long before their Corporate Overlords figure it out. Godin argues that the organizations which will triumph in the 21^st Century are the ones with the most and the best Linchpins.

He doesn’t nail down the definition in a neat and tidy way, which is probably good. He pulls in the usual suspects (Jobs, Branson, Bezos) but also, and much more relevantly, cites the mundane interactions we have daily with the people who care, who do a little more, add a little polish, put something of themselves on the line.

“What about the way it makes you feel when you walk into an Anthropologie store, or unwrap a piece of Lake Champlain chocolate, or send a package using FedEx’s Web site? The experience could have been merely ordinary, merely another bit of good-enough. But it’s not. It’s magical. It was created by someone who cared, who contributed, who did more than he was told. A linchpin.”

Linchpins are not the brash, pushy people who bully their way to productivity while feeding on the souls of others; they are, he argues, artists. People who look for different problems and, as a result, find revolutionary solutions. And once found, the solutions (the art) are given freely to others to turn into more art and solutions to other problems and so on.  Think buskers, graffiti artists, some bloggers, crowd sourcing.

If you want a more sedate explanation of this archetype, Forrester guys Josh Beroff and Ted Schadler call them people Highly Empowered Resource Operatives (HEROes)  (get it?) in their book, Empowered.

This is a different kind of Seth book. First, it’s longer than most of his previous and it’s far, far denser.. If you were hoping for an uplifting little read on your flight to Vancouver, you won’t find it here.

Godin’s usual frantic, over-punctuated, shrapnel prose is tamer here. It’s still urgent and a bit pointy but, in an effort to forge greater dimension he seems to have wandered, at times, into BBB (Business Book Boring) territory. The chapter on resistance is about twice as long as it needs to be and the book is sparsely illustrated, which is too bad because Seth’s illustrations are often powerful.

This is not a book only for marketers: in fact most marketers I know will claim to be the Linchpin and move on after the second chapter. This is a book for everyone who has an employee number longer than two digits and a growing suspicion that the tidy equation our parents taught us is not just endangered but was probably a malevolent soul-sucking thing to begin with.

You should read this if:

• You cry for no reason at work
• You are very angry about the air vent over your desk
• You don’t understand the connection between your job title and your work
• You worry that other people on the subway  can hear Stevie Nicks telling you to eat paperclips
• You recently told your children that if they just play by the rules it will all work out for them

There’s no warm glow from this book, no resolution to stay the course. Depending on your mood, it may just send you home to fill a plastic soda bottle full of  marbles . Or it may remind you why you went into marketing to begin with.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
escwilliams@gmail.com
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