Seth Godin - How to Get Your Ideas to Spread - Nordic Business Forum

thank die thank you you're awesome what an extraordinarily non finished welcome thank you that was fabulous so something else that they don't have a lot in Finland is Golf which is a fine thing because Golf is a really lousy spectator sport we can acknowledge that there are two things that make golf such a bad spectator sport the first one is it nothing good ever happens and the second one is that in golf if something good does happen you're not allowed to wildly applaud so if you could help me out here give me the worst measly

astrak-- Ulf applause you can muster go ahead that was terrible thank you can you double it double it again and one more time fabulous thank you that thank you that ladies and gentlemen is what we do for a living now that what we do for a living now we cannot possibly cause interest to occur but what we can do is find small threads of interest and amplify it what we can do is find the disconnected and connect them that is our mission as marketers as people who care now but before we can unfold and unpack

all that we need to learn to ricci what's going on around us because when the world changes sometimes we become blind so let me tell you what I mean by that here's a bat I grew up maybe you did with bats and dinosaurs when I was five years old and if you take a picture of a bat it turns out turn him upside down he turns into a total badass here here are three bats getting ready for bed except actually they're at a cocktail party and my expectation is that from now on you will never

look at bats quite the same way and so my job today is to help you learn to see to see the world differently in a way that makes it so you can't unsee it because we're living in a revolutionary time this can be very expensive to get wrong on my desk back in New York I keep this box as a reminder of how expensive it is to not know how to see in this box is something I made it turns out in 1991 and 92 I had something you don't did not have then access to

the World Wide Web there was no I had access the internet there was no World Wide Web then I saw it and I said I know what I'll do I'll make a book about this internet thing and so I got a publisher they gave me $60,000 I hired five people I spent all the money I made a book inside the box is the t-shirt I made for the Salesforce to promote the book that book went on to sell 1848 copies it was a total failure no one bought the book during that same period of time

two guys in California named David and Jerry saw what I saw they had fewer resources than I had they didn't make a book about the Internet they built a website called Yahoo and at one point my half would have been worth 80 billion dollars and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and the reason is simple because they saw what was possible I had a cloudy vision cuz I saw what I knew how to do they had a blank slate and they said what should we do I said what do I already know how to

make I didn't see and the reason I didn't see the reason you don't see the reason our companies don't see is because we've been blinded by success does anyone know who this is right Yuri Gagarin first man in space what a heroic story basically they rap the guy that Soviets rapped the guy in tinfoil shot him into the orbit he came back alive it was a miracle but the astonishing thing about Yuri Gagarin is he grew up here in a mud hut with no electricity no running water and no lights in 125 year span human

beings went from living underground in a Hut to circling the Earth that'll spoil you for industrialism Henry Ford made us all rich Henry Ford pioneered and perfected productivity and scientific management Henry Ford went to the work as a Detroit and he said men if you're used to making 50 cents a day I will pay you $5.00 a day to come work for me how could he possibly pull that off how could he afford to give people a 10 X raise in one day the answer is simple the assembly line do your job faster than you

did it yesterday so we took the idea the assembly line and we spread it everywhere we possibly could in every industry the idea was do what you did yesterday do it faster do it cheaper go go go and so to defend the factory we created policies and ways of being and gatekeepers and we made the factories ever bigger Henry Ford had Ford shepherds that raised Ford sheep to be turned into Ford wool to make Ford fabric so that they could be put into Ford cars because the bigger in the factory the more money you make

the more you control you have Henry Ford said you can have any color car you want as long as it's black he didn't say that because he liked black he said it because black paint dries four hours faster than any other color and if you can make a car four hours faster you can make a car a little cheaper and so the system but the system was built on mass how many people can we get to all buy the same thing I'm slightly ashamed to say that the two most popular products in American refrigerators were

American cheese we basically named the worst possible flavor of cheese after my country and Heinz ketchup both products made an enormous quantity both products marketed everyone that's what industrialists need sell it to everyone and that led to this whole idea of marketing you know this is Fancy Feast gourmet cat food a very popular product in the u.s. let's be clear cat food is not for cats because if it was it would come in Mouse flavor cat food is for the people who buy it that we tell a story to people that makes them happy to

serve it to their cat so I'm going to talk about marketing today consumer marketing like this not cat marketing and business to business marketing which if you do a Google search means you have to shake the hands of a lot of men wearing suits apparently it b2b marketing we spend a lot of time shaking heads but the story is still the same and the story revolves around industrialism polishing off the edges figuring out how to do it again and again make it more reliable make it a system do it the way you always do it

so here's the question delivered with as much pathos as my finish will allow me to when did they industrialize your job when did they turn what you do from a craft into an assembly line process because we've been doing it for a really long time it turns out what Henry Ford understood is that mass production makes productivity happen but you know what happens once you get mass production working that's right you need mass distribution because you need everyone to be able to buy what you make mass distribution requires mass merchants stores and distributors that sell

it in bulk and you know what mass merchants require from us mass marketing that's why we invented it to keep the factory happy how can we reach everyone how can we get everyone to buy what we make let me tell you the answer babies whenever possible run ads with babies in them no matter what you're selling it works and if babies don't work wrap the baby in saran wrap it even works with triplets but sometimes babies aren't the answer so when advertisers realizes you should use doctors fake doctors real doctors celebrity doctors doctors of any

kind doctors doctors doctors it doesn't matter whether you have unfortunate juxtapositions now and then what matters is this the person you work for the shareholders you work for the people around you keep saying the same four-letter word again and again and that four-letter word is more get me more market share get me more customers get me more shelf space we've got a factory it knows how to do its job it knows how to make insurance policies it knows how to make electronic devices it knows how to make whatever it is we make it doesn't matter

what people want we want them to want what we have so you marketer take this money and go get me more which leads to this average products for average people except maybe pop-tarts but the rest of these products are deliberately built to appeal to the masses because you know what mass is by definition average if you're gonna advertise something to everyone you better make something everyone wants to buy if you're going to market someone to everyone the good thinking goes better market something everyone wants to buy and this worked beautifully for 70 years and I'm

here with like a whole string of bad news ready problem number one this picture is fuzzy I had a bad cold when I took it but here's the deal the blue box in the middle center that brand manager spent a hundred million u.s. dollars interrupting me and my country mates a hundred million dollars on coupons and shoving allowances and TV ads and magazine ads and radio ads why because that brand manager figured that after seeing all those ads I'd go buy the product and once I started taking that you leave her I keep taking that

pay me leave her and she turned back her 100 million dollars well you know what I did to those 100 million dollars with the ads the same thing everyone else did I ignored them and the reason is simple I don't have a pain reliever problem I saw my pain reliever problem 20 years ago by buying the generic or the yellow box or the cheap one well this is your challenge you are busy trying to sell something that solves a problem people don't think they have and if you're showing up trying to sell something that people

don't think they need they're not going to listen to you that's a challenge number two if any of you have been listening to all this nonsense and noise and everything else about digital marketing what you've been told is that consumers now have the attention span of a goldfish and then what you have to do is in less than eight seconds get your ban or point across get your video point across noise and noise and noise and noise here's the thing your customers aren't goldfish and the idea that we need to make ever more noise in

front of ever more people isn't working next problem was the picture I took at the Holiday Inn last night no I didn't take this last night I think this I took this at a Hyatt I don't know it's dark it's three o'clock in the morning in a hotel room that's what it looks like all hotel rooms look like this at three o'clock in the morning they're supposed to be dark which makes perfect sense except that hotels have been telling us for all these years that they're all offering us a dark quiet room and when the

Internet doesn't exist it's no big deal you go to the brand you know but now we've got this thing called sort by price you put in your neighborhood sort by price here's 20 hotels they're all the same take the cheap one that sentence they're all the same take the cheap one is a real threat to you and the work you do so I'm gonna drink this water hopefully there's nothing bad in it so this mindset then we have to find some poor Schmo and assault him over and over over again until one day he buys

from us is now officially broken that people aren't listening they are choosing not to listen they have a remote control and they are not afraid to use it ladies and gentlemen we have branded ourselves to death and we have no one to blame but us we ran too many ads we took too much attention we made too many promises and then we invented the internet and gave everyone a remote control and they are using it more bad news in New York City on Fifth Avenue at 20th Street I can stand in one spot and in

that spot I am less than 350 feet away from six different stores where I could buy yoga pants the dreaded yoga pant shortage is finally over and the thing is whatever you make the same thing is true that just down the street is a camera store that will sell me more than 600 different kinds of cameras and right next door to that is a place where there's thousands of cell phones to choose from and if I go online this is how many financial instruments and insurance companies that's just the beginning of the alphabet the fact

is too many choices an infinite number of replaceable choices which leads to a piece of news that's good news and bad news all rolled into one Finland is now the center of the universe it is the center of the universe because instead of being way up north far away from everywhere it's one click away from anything that it used to be that all you had to do was be the best in Helsinki because people couldn't travel very far but then bit by bit the range that we could reach out to keeps getting bigger and bigger

and bigger and now for anybody anywhere if they want you they'll find you and if you're the best in the world they'll buy from you so that's the good news and the bad news the good news is everyone is a click away the bad news is everyone is a click away so you've got to make the decision about whether you're worth reaching whether you're worth contacting whether you're worth buying from so I just gave you a whole skew of bad news with some little good news thrown in and you can say this isn't fair who

thought this up I worked really hard to get to where I am right now and here you are giving me all of this bad news who designed this stuff you're talking about this future is not one where I read the manual for and I will agree with you that if you want to you can look at it in a very negative way but now 1/4 of the way through I am done with the bad news we can take one more deep breath because from here on in it's all good news you ready here we go

some people say the answer to this question is big data track more people get more information understand where everyone is at all times track and track and track here's the problem with big data big data is in the rearview mirror big data tells me what people did yesterday I am way more interested in customer leadership not customer management customers don't want to be managed they want to be led and we can't lead by sneaking around looking at everyone's data we're gonna leave it by doing something braver than that and it begins by understanding right here

right now we are having a revolution so let me explain what I mean by revolutions we had the Industrial Revolution no one was alive for that then in the 50s we had the TV mass media revolution but right now we got another one this is a vinyl record I don't know if you've ever seen one of these but I show it to you as an example of what I mean in 1972 the record industry was perfect you couldn't help but make money if you were in the record business in 1972 couple reasons if I had

a record and I liked it a lot I'd played enough to wear it out I'd have to buy another one or I'd loan it to Bruce that I wouldn't have it anymore I'd have to buy another one where would I get another record I know there were buildings called record stores filled with things called records I would drive there and I'd buy hundreds of different items or dozens because the industry was present in that building not only that on my way there I would turn on the radio in the car cars had radios and what

the radio did was do nothing but promote the product I was gonna go buy and there was MTV and Rolling Stone magazine you get the idea was perfect we all know what happened in less than five years went from perfect to impossible every record ever recorded available to every human with a smartphone anywhere on earth anytime they want for free more music available to more people than ever before in history but the music industry is toast gone same thing happened to travel agents same thing happened to brokers of all kind st. go down the list

the Internet destroys the perfect and then it enables things that are impossible to occur that's what revolutions do they turn things upside down so the question is not is this happening clearly this is happening if you're a radiologist you should be really nervous because a couple years ago they figured out radiologists don't have to stand next to the x-ray machine so they would send your x-ray digitally to somewhere somewhere who would for less read it and now you should be doubly nervous because it turns out if a computer sees your x-ray it can read it

more accurately than a human bad time to be radiologist in fact just about everything we did is going to be done differently what a chance of a lifetime what an opportunity to reinvent to make a difference so how do you do that first idea is this there are two ways to get married right the first way to get married is to go on tinder and swipe right over and over and over again proposing marriage to every single person you swipe this is a stupid way to get married the other way to get married is to

go on a date if it goes well go on another date with that person then on the third date you meet their parents they meet your parents you get engaged right you wait till the seventh date before you tell them you're out on parole this method of dating it worked for me maybe it worked for you it's a smart way to get married so why aren't you dating your prospects permission marketing is this idea of connecting to people who want to be connected to marketing to people who want to be marketed to delivering anticipated personal

and relevant messages to people who want to get them next big idea for the first time in history at scale we can treat different people differently treating different people differently is an extraordinary Lynch that has never existed you grew up knowing what the bell curve was you went to school you studied stats normal distribution you know why they call it the normal distribution because with 92 percent significance people are normal couple standard deviations and weirdness out there you can ignore the weird people sell to the normal people average stuff for average people it's the only

smart solution except the curve is melting bit by bit day by day if you give people a chance they take a chance if you give them a choice they make a choice there are now more weird people than normal people because the only ones who are listening to you are the ones who care the only ones who are listening to you are the ones who know they have a problem it's the weird people that are gonna raise their hand that are gonna pay the money that are gonna talk about you that are going to show

up so instead of worry about the middle where they can't stand you it's at the edges where we get a chance to make a difference you don't get to tell people what they're interested in you don't get to change people's narrative if someone thinks this dress is the wrong color it's the wrong color and all the yelling you're gonna do isn't going to change what they say so look at this list of brands every one of which is about 10 years old every one of which is building something worth billions of dollars and every one

of which is for weird people now one of these brands set out to say everybody this is for you not one of them all of them started at the edges and it's at the edges where we're going to earn the privilege of having people want to talk to us this is hard news to hear in an engineering centric culture where the whole mindset has been how do we do it right not how do we do it interesting it turns out that doing it interesting is what makes the weird people show up you cannot any longer

say you can choose anyone and where anyone because the fact is there's another anyone that's a little cheaper than you there's another anyone that's only one click away what we must do instead is talk to people differently because they hear us differently one size fits all is gone forever the next myth we have to undo is the idea that we are Haring all following the leader that what we are supposed to do is do what we are told to fit in that one of the things that is feared feared in New Haven Connecticut and feared

in Scandinavia feared almost everywhere is someone coming up to you and saying you know what you're not as good as you think you are then we don't want to hear that so we fit in so we don't bring our you Brits to the table so we don't raise our hand so we keep our voice low we are afraid of being called uppity of standing out too much but we live in a new economy now in a connection economy and in a connection economy only you Burris is rewarded only people who say over here because connection

is where value is not now not industrialization here's a map of the London subway where's the valuable stations it's obvious where all the lines cross here's a map of the Internet where are the valuable stations it's obvious where all the lines cross where all the lines crosses where value is created Matt Ridley famously said no one on earth knows how to make a computer mouse there is nobody who understands plastics and hardware and software and supply chain and manufacturing and import-export who can make a mouse we must do it as a team and it's when

teams work together that we create value so this new economy this connection economy what's it based on here are some basic principles the first thing is coordination you're all here today none of you were in this room a week ago none of you will be here next week value was created by coordinating our efforts number two is trust there's someone sitting behind you or in front of you and you trust them enough to talk to them you trust them enough to be in the room you don't even know them but you know that their fellow

travelers the next idea is permission which we just talked about the privilege of delivering messages to people who want to get them and the fourth element of this economy is sharing ideas all of us are smarter than any of us so if you think about what you do all day how many of these four elements are at the heart of what you do because the institutions that are growing and the organizations that are profiting are right in the center of that but here's the surprising part the surprising part is these four principles are based on

two words two concepts two principles generosity and art generosity because no one wants to connect to a selfish person no one wants to connect to an organization that's just taking an art art is what we call it when a human being does something that connects us when a human being does something that might not work when a human being says here I made this art begs for connection and that's what we seek out not the reliable sameness of perfection six-sigma but the art of knowing someone touched it so before I started ranting you may have

thought what marketing meant is things like lights and clicks and how many people are following you in hype no actually marketing is more alike what does it cost and what's the store and actually marketing is what your support and your use actually marketing is now what you make it is as far from advertising as it can be what marketing is is what is this thing what is the experience of this service what are the side effects it leads behind what does it mean to be associated with this let me crystallize this in the simplest way

I can here's the question the first person with a fax machine what exactly did he do with it I'll let you think about that for a second you can't use a fax machine by yourself built into the fax machine is the engine of the marketing of the fax machine as soon as you got one you know what you did you told everyone else you knew to go get one so your fax machine would work better right that that's built into Twitter and Facebook and everything else that's based on community Bob Metcalfe he's not shy coined

Metcalfe's law and Metcalf law says the value of any network is the square of the power of the people on the network so we are now in the business of building networks not in the business of building widgets because widgets are cheap and easy to make networks last a long time and they're hard to build next big idea my wife has transportation narcolepsy which is a fictional disease she got shortly after we got married this disease causes her to fall asleep on any moving vehicle unless there's a good movie on the plane that's how I

know it's fictional anyway 15 years ago we plant planted trip to France and we missed a flight and we missed a another flight in a connection and it ended up taking about 17 hours and for 17 hours my kids have been making a ruckus and for 17 hours my wife has been asleep so we're driving through this pasture in France it's a beautiful sunny day and it's you know cows and all that other stuff and I noticed in the backseat it's finally quiet and I go the kids are asleep and then I look at the

rear-view mirror they're not asleep they're staring out the window at this perfect specimen of a cow for about three seconds and then they went back to making a raucous you know why because cows are boring even in Finland cows are boring seem one cow five cows ten cows they're all the same we don't need to see more cows but what if it had been a purple cow that was a special effect I'll do it slowly what if it had been a purple cow if it had been a purple cow tell you what would have happened

I would have pulled over my wife would have woken up what's going on shoot he got on the phone call people back home told me she was looking in a purple cow I would have taken pictures to prove that I'd seen a purple cow and my kids my kids would have ignored me as usual open the door run across the street jumped over the fence and rub the cat so that when they went to show-and-tell in two weeks they could tell people they'd seen and touched a purple cow you know a purple cow is only

one thing remarkable and remarkable means worth making a remark about it is not up to you it's up to us about whether we're gonna remark about what you made and if we remark about what you made you know what happens the spam filters all go away the remote controls don't matter the word spreads the network builds you gain trust and connection so how much time you're spending making something worth talking about as opposed to meeting spec you have been to this meeting where the sales guy says whoa we just need to lower our price because

if we're the cheapest we'll be able to grow fortunately the CFO speaks up and she says don't do that that's a race to the bottom and the problem with a race to the bottom is we might win worse we might come in second that doesn't help so some wise guy says all right let's raise the price a few bucks because if we raise the price a few bucks our margins will go up but that a marketing says can't do that our customers aren't stupid they're not gonna pay extra for the same thing the only option

is to be the only one when you are the only one people will cross the street people will wait in line people will proudly talk about what they bought from you the price isn't the point but how can you possibly be the only and only one the answer is we must go back to understand how the legend of Icarus the myth of Icarus got under our skin you may have heard it Daedalus and Icarus banished to an island Daedalus makes a bunch of wings out of feathers he finds on the island he fixes them to

Icarus is back and he says my son fly away but don't fly too high because the Sun will melt the wax and you will die Icarus disobeys his father flies too high he dies what is this myth about it is about obeying your father it is about doing what you are told is about not getting uppity it's about the opposite of hubris the astonishing thing about the story is they changed it in 1850 if you look in the library and look in the old books that's not what the myth used to say what it used

to say is all of what I just told you plus the following sentence more important my son do not fly too low because if you fly too low the mist and the waves will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish they took that part out and the reason they took it out is because they want us to obey they want us to fit in they want us to do what we're told because that's what makes the industrial economy work we live in a culture where this is a real sign who else's risk are

you supposed to play at exactly that what we need to do as leaders is bring grit to our job the grit to say no we're not going to do that the grit to say no that's not good enough the grit to be willing to fall and skinned our knee and get up and do it again that is the hard part of our job bunch of scientists averaged a bunch of JPEGs and they said this is what the average person in each country looks like what they didn't say is this average isn't beautiful average is merely

average we don't need average we need beautiful we need alive bubbling unpredictable growing real viral something worth discussing the Japanese have a wonderful term commie Wazza common Wazza means godlike myth like the way that gods would do it ironically enough what it actually means is fully human fully present that this cheetah was running to the jungle he's not saying I wonder if I left the oven on and I don't know if I'm prepared for my meeting on Tuesday now he's full cheetah fully present when George Nakashima designed new kinds of furniture that changed the way

some people thought he didn't have a focus group he just showed up full Nakashima totally present Frank Lloyd Wright the most famous architect of all time designed this building in 15 minutes on the back of a paper bag and then he went to the client he said here I will build this for you if you wish he didn't say let's have a bunch of meetings and I can figure out what your needs are and we can average out the house and maybe we'll come to some compromises Frank Lloyd Wright was fully present he said here

if you wish I will make this for you so if you're afraid of flying please don't look at this these are 747s coming in for landing in London and what you'll see is they're dangerously and dramatically off course so they fly back to Paris and start over actually that's not what happens what happens is they adjust then every plane you have ever been on has been off course from the moment it took off and the pilot adjusts the whole way the pilot adjusts and I'm telling you today the cost of adjusting is lower than it

has ever been before that what we can do now this side wins what we can do now is put things into the world and adjust encounter people and adjust that that is what is being demanded of us so if you visit Kenya one phrase you might hear is the word Sawa Bana and Sawa Bana means I see you it means I know you are here I know who you are I respect you I am willing to engage with you is there anything our customers want more than saw Obama to be seen to be known to

be people if we are willing to extend ourselves this way we get the chance for enrollment enrollment means yes I want to go on this journey with you enrollment means I will follow your lead enrollment means you're not doing marketing to me it means you're doing it with me I was at a restaurant in Indiana they had this sign on the menu it was so unique I had to take a picture of it can you imagine a typical institution saying something like this saying you're human we are humans let us deal with it so why

is this so hard something's gone on they made it so hard for us to be human to stand out to be creative to have a new idea well here's the deal Mary Shelley wrote a book called Frankenstein it was a seminal work in the history of science fiction horror stories I don't want to talk about Frankenstein I want to talk about Mary Shelley's husband who was a hack named Paris Shelley he was a hack poet and he wrote an essay about poetry how it's reserved for the genius that if the muse shows up you can

write poetry and if it doesn't you're out of luck don't bother working hard at it don't bother being a workingman poet it's not gonna happen if it you don't have it you don't have it he invented writer's block writer's block did not exist before Percy Shelley wrote about it there's no such thing as writer's block writer's block is an invention where we say I don't have the right idea I can't be creative it's somebody else's job to lead I don't know what to say I don't have a question we made all that stuff up all

writer's block is is bad habits plus an inability to dance with our fear the bad habit of waiting for the right answer the bad habit of asking what kind of pencil do you use the bad habit of saying I'm not in the right emotional moment right and instead we want the fear to go away the fear is not going to go away but we can learn to dance with it first with meson plus that's what a chef calls it when they lay out all the ingredients all chopped and prepared before the orders come in then

when we understand that it's our job to be creative it's our job to speak a truth it's our job to lead we can organize to do it the Finns are really good at doing their work and now this is their work the next thing is that anchors are often associated with something thrown overboard that sinks us but we can anchor up we can promise ourselves and the people around us you will get something big from me tomorrow at noon not at 12:05 but at noon we can say to our team we will brainstorm our way

out of this and we're not leaving til we're done because we are each capable of doing it there is no such thing as a genius if Einstein is a genius and I'm a genius and you're a genius too everybody is capable of this but that's the last time I'm gonna reassure you because reassurance doesn't work you will probably fail you will probably be ridiculed you will probably bring things into the world that don't work you will probably bring more things into the world that don't work that's just true the same way if you run a

marathon you will get tired and anyone who reassures you oh no just run for 26 miles you won't get tired they're lying well the same thing is true of our desire to make a difference so if you say to me I'd like to do this but I don't have enough good ideas I'm gonna say back to you then you need more bad ideas because if you show me your list of bad ideas I'm betting some good ones will have snuck in that are a problem your problem is you don't have enough bad ideas you're waiting

for perfect and it's getting in the way of you being extraordinary we used to live in an economy based on scarcity there's still too much scarcity scarce respect scarce water scarce resources I'm not talking about that but in terms of choices we've now entered an economy based on abundance an unlimited number of people to follow an unlimited number of people to connect with and if you're walking around with a scarcity mindset we're gonna ignore you if you show up and say I don't have that much in my box and if I give it to you

I won't have it anymore we're gonna ignore you but if you show up and say I don't have that much in this box but if I give it to you we'll both have it that's a homerun because then the ideas spread which leads to this next big idea invented by Charlton Heston 5000 years ago the idea of tribes a tribe is a group of people connected by a culture and idea a costume a leader a goal these tribes are everywhere around us but they're only used to be three in our lives a spiritual tribe but

if you're from New Jersey a work tribe and a community tribe but now you've got the Red Hat ladies getting together in five hundred cities around the world over lunch having some martinis and getting up a tea you got the Red Hat guys who pay fifteen thousand dollars to go to Hawaii to compete in the Ironman Triathlon a race they know they're going to lose so why do they go they don't have water in Finland they don't have bicycles they go because the other Red Hat guys are there and that's worth it or these Red

Hat guys they train all year round in Portland for the big day the training is what makes them satisfied or these fans in their white hats or these fans with their special greetings the fact is for 50 years people have been part of a tribe that now has its own language not because you're getting paid to do it but because it's part of who they are it's something they want to do alright I know you're not a competitive group but let's time you doing this go ahead okay stop it took this side of the room

six seconds took you guys about eight seconds you guys are killing it here is the question how did you know which rhythm to clap you guys are having fast cadence you guys have to slow cadence but you figured it out one group I won't say in which country took 29 seconds to do this I was sweating bullets but every group I've ever asked to do this experiment has pulled it off I made no eye contact I didn't say everybody follow me and yet you figured it out in less than 10 seconds how it turns out

we like doing what other people are doing that's why humanity works that's why culture works look around is anyone in a prom dress anyone in a tuxedo how did you know what to wear today was there a memo right some people wish there was a memo but you spend time thinking I wonder what people will be wearing today that's what I'm gonna wear we like doing what other people are doing not all people just our people we want to be in sync with our tribe so here's the question whose job is it to tell everybody

how to be in sync yours it's your job to connect people who want to be connected to invent a culture on purpose to challenge people to go to the next level to communicate and commit and be clear about how you do it that is the job of the future that is what people want they want to be seen so abana they want to be connected this is our culture this is our economy you don't have to invent these people the Beatles did not invent teenagers they just showed up to lead them Bob Marley did not

invent the Rastafarians he just showed up to lead them so if you came for a marketing talk I'm about to give you a marketing talk at last one slide here we go marketing today is this people like us do things like this we gotta figure out who the people like us are are they people I want to be like and we have to figure out what do things like this means people like us do things like this and we get to invent the product and we get to invent the culture and we get to invent

the movement and we get to invent or lead the tribe so how does this work commercially here you go almost nobody gets a suzuki tattoo this is not an accident this was done on purpose they made a motorcycle that made a movement that made a tribe that allowed people who wanted to express something to express it is a Harley the most efficient way to get from here to there no is it the best way for a certain group of you'll say this is who I am of course or consider a walkathon which non-profits in the

u.s. run all the time walkathon don't raise that much money but that's okay because I look to my left and I look to my right and I say these are people like me and then I become a dedicated volunteer and then I give more money people like us do things like this but in the face of this if you're being honest you're saying yourself I could never do this I'm not in charge I don't have a budget I don't have the authority my boss won't let me well I want to tell you a tragic story

with an interesting ending in the United States until recently four million dogs and cats were killed every year by the SPCA and the Humane Society these institutions collected stray dogs and cats and killed them usually within 24 hours four million a year my friend Nathan Winograd went to work at the San Francisco SPCA he saw this happening he could not abide it he went to the City Council they said we're not going to change the law so he went to the people of San Francisco and asked for help not all the people just the weird

ones not all the weird ones just a subset people who could be enrolled in this journey he earned permission to talk to them in less than 100 days Nathan Winograd had enough money but more important enough volunteers that not one healthy dog or cat has been killed in San Francisco since that day and you say well that's easy it's San Francisco well he left there and he went to Tompkins County New York where again he had no budget and no authority and he did it again and then he went to Raleigh Durham North Carolina with

no budget no authority and he did it again anyone to Reno Nevada and he did it again one person started a movement that it spread around the world no fancy factory not with hundreds of employees because one person was able to model behavior and say to the weird people follow me but of course you went to school and at school they said uh-uh do what you're told quick little experiment please raise your right hand as high as you can raise it higher he what's that about the instructions were really clear but everyone held back they

always do why I hold back because you learned from a young age that your teacher and your coach and your parents and your tiger mom and your boss are all gonna ask you for more they're gonna keep asking him for more industrialists always ask for more so you better hold a little bit back right you pissed the sight you better hold a little bit back because that's the bargain of industrialism you know who doesn't old anything back artists don't hold anything back when Beckett was writing Waiting for Godot he didn't say oh I've got some

good lines I'm gonna save them for the next play write that when we go to school we are taught to fit in when we go to school we are pushed to be normal the reason they want us to fit in is so they can ignore us because that's what industrialists wanted replaceable cogs managers just want us to do what we did yesterday leaders don't know what's coming next I'm here to tell you Finland needs no more managers we don't have a manager shortage we need leaders here people yes and you are in this room and

that is what this is actually to talk about it's not to talk about marketing because marketing and leadership are now intricately related therefore a million years the way humans fed ourselves was by hunting only 10,000 years ago was farming invented that's how new it is and only 300 years ago did we invent jobs the idea that you would go to someone and say tell me what to do and give me money brand-new in Helsinki in 1700 the unemployment rate was zero because there were no jobs and I'm betting we're going really fast to a new

place where the stuff we think of jobs is gonna go away again and the good ones are gonna become art so give me a couple minutes to explain what I mean by art yes nerds descending a staircase art Pablo Picasso art Jackson Pollock art these are paintings but they are art but to understand the distinction realized that Jackson Pollock had a brother you never heard of him Charles Pollock he was a painter not an artist he copied Thomas Hart Benton his teacher over and over again no one needed a copy what we needed was art

art has nothing to do with painting Joseph boys in Germany made art with felt William Shakespeare in England made art with words but to put a really fine point on it in 1917 Marcel Duchamp put this upside down urinal in an art exhibit and he caused a riot this was art the second person to install a urinal in an art museum was a plumber and that's the decision do you want to sign up for plumbing in November I went to China right outside Shenzhen where they make all the smart phones now I visited a village

called Dauphin in Dauphin they make all the oil paintings one-third of all the oil paintings in the world painted over and over and over again as fast as they can you can buy the Mona Lisa in Dauphin for $29 but it's not the Mona Lisa it's not worth $29 it's a copy why would anyone buy it it's not worth it that this idea of merely copying that's not what we do if I asked you at the end of your best day at work last month what was your best day about your best work what's it

for I hope we can agree that what you actually do for a living is make change happen you change people's minds you change processes you change designs that making change happen is our job and change has an ugly brother his name is tension the tension of it might not work the tension if I might get in trouble the tension of I might be wrong you can't have change without tension and this works all over the world this is a friend of mine a woman named Lucy Lucy has an acre and a half in the fertile

valley of Kenya her neighbors on every side have an acre and a half an acre half of land you can barely make a living on an acre and a half of land you're a subsistence farmer one crop and people are gonna go hungry if it goes wrong Lucy doesn't use farm saved seed she buys for 30 bucks hybrid seed from Western seed and as a result she can grow so much more corn she can sell for $3,000 she used that money to buy two cows from Djibouti Colima on credit which made her enough money to

start a tree farm which made her enough money to start a taxi company and Lucy has under her bed 1 million Kenyan shillings in a cigar box and has paid for all nine of her kids to go to private school and on her left and on her right her neighbors are subsistence farmers hey Lucy I say what's this about she says I'm thirsty it's that simple I'm thirsty I'm not gonna take what's on offer I'm gonna figure out how to make something better people say to me after one of my rants all right I got

my notebook out I'm ready to write down the bullet points give me the map how do I go from here to there I can't give you a map I can't even give you a fictional map because if I gave you a fictional map you'd be a plumber but that's not gonna work because we need you to make art instead again hard to do because this is a real book people pay money to learn how to raise invisible sheep without raised making any mistakes that in Finland like many places competence is prized confidence is overrated we

no longer have a competence shortage if I can write down what I need you to do there's certainly someone somewhere in the world who's cheaper than you and so the internet comes along you've seen the Free Hugs video I went viral it's funny this guy hates the Free Hugs video because he worked really hard to pay his dues these guys don't care they're still happy to sell free hugs all day long so the same thing happens to everybody who makes a commodity the bottled water guys they've told us it's all the same so give me

the close one or the cheap one I'm not gonna pay extra I mean they tried this guy give him credit but it didn't work no folks the answer is simple its kryptonite the reason Superman works the reason Superman it's interesting is because it might not work because kryptonite might show up because it's not perfect because it's real as Kurt Vonnegut said we got to go right to the edge grow wings on the way down it's the only way we're gonna be able to learn to fly yes if you want to sing sing if you want

to dance dance the internet gives you a microphone everyone can use it right every one of you is blogging everyday of course sharing what you know spreading the ideas earning our trust connecting with people you're all innovating but you work for people say I'd love to innovate but what we do is so important failure is not an option but if they say that you must say back then neither is success because all innovation is is failing again and again and again until you figure out how it works that's all we've got it's all we can

do an easy way to remember it the guy who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck it's up to you to decide to get on the boat or not so the last foreign phrase of the day is salt immortality I think it might batteries you guys it's also more tali the leap into the void what does it feel like in that moment where we're between here and there when the Ueberroth is at its maximum when we're not sure one way it feels is I better not do that because it's just a little too soon let

me let someone else go first you know what it's always too soon when Gutenberg launched the printing press 93% of the people in Europe didn't know how to read this is a stupid time to launch the book not only that 15% of the people needed reading glasses in order to read and they hadn't been invented yet and there were no bookstores he should have waited for the Kindle or when Karl Benz launched the car it was against the law to drive in Germany he needed a letter from the king there were no roads a real

impediment there no gas stations and there were no all-night drive-through liquor stores he should have waited so there's a big difference between being ready and prepared all of you are prepared because that's what Finn's are but none of you are ready it's impossible to be ready because to be ready means to be sure and when you look on the Internet you know Google a video of for riding a bike all the videos show you what it looks like to ride a bike which is nothing but people falling off the bike because we can't possibly be

interested if people can successfully ride a bike instead we just talk about all the bad things that are gonna happen we have a voice in the back of our head that says don't do that you'll fail an alligator will eat you you will fall off a cliff a shark will land on your house do not fly too close to the Sun here's the thing Helsinki every three years is a conference of physicists called the Solveig conference this is the photo from 1927 you may recognize there's Marie Curie Albert Einstein Niels Bohr it said that Heisenberg

was there but it's uncertain the key thing about this picture is there are 29 people in it and 17 of them won the Nobel Prize in Physics and almost all of them wanted after the photo was taken you didn't get invited to solve a because you won the Nobel Prize you won the Nobel Prize because you got invited to solve a so here you are again at the Nordic Business Forum someone here is gonna change everything someone right there and someone right there maybe more than that it's just about choosing to understand that it is

always too soon that more you Burris is better than less hubris that the resistance that voice in our head isn't the point that fear isn't the opposite of creativity creativity is the opposite of fear then we don't have to act like sheep if we don't want to so you may remember the great movie singing in the rain and in the epic scene Gene Kelly is singing and thing up a storm with his whole heart but until this moment you probably didn't realize he had an umbrella the whole time but it's not called singing with an

umbrella it's called singing in the rain the rain is the point the uncertainty is the point the vulnerability is the point that what I am begging you to understand is our willingness to say here I made this is universal it's universal there's no border around Finland that says we can't do this yes you can do this if you care if you care enough the fact is some people you give them a mile they will take an inch but that doesn't have to be you it doesn't have to be us what we have now is the

privilege it is a privilege to bring a different kind of passion to our work a passion of connecting and of doing it because we can and because we want to there are people out there disconnected people lonely people people who are disrespected people who need you and need something and they are saying to you as clearly as they can please we need you to lead us my friend Celine gave me the line that I like to finish with which is simple everybody here is already successful there's no doubt about it that's not the question the

question is will you choose to matter I hope you will thank you very much [Applause]