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Home » Leadership Vs. Management – What It Means To Make A Difference: Seth Godin (Transcript)

Leadership Vs. Management – What It Means To Make A Difference: Seth Godin (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of author Seth Godin’s talk titled “Leadership Vs. Management – What It Means To Make A Difference” at Nordic Business Forum 2021.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Let me just make sure my technology is working. If my slides could go up somewhere, perfect. My microphone’s on. I’m in Stockholm, right? Today’s Stockholm? All right, thanks for coming.

So I live in New York, right near a fjord, like you live near a fjord. Fjord is a tidal estuary. Saltwater going one way and the other, brackish. Day by day, year by year, millennia by millennia, it carves a hole through rock. And that’s how we got taught to run our organizations. Do it, and then do it again, and then do it again. And that hard work, repeated over time, consistently can build you a really big fjord.

Innovation in Bike Racing

But I came today to talk about bike racing in Italy. Now here’s a video, actual footage, of a guy losing a bike race. And what he discovers is that doing the same thing over and over again isn’t really the best method.

And that perhaps, if he tried to use aerodynamics a little differently, to play by a different set of rules, he could figure out how, on the downhill, he could get ahead of everybody else. And this idea that innovation might pay off now and then leads us to a whole bunch of thinking about management and what we ought to do next. Thinking that’s confusing.

So I came to talk about the confusion. I came to talk about the fact that we got a whole bunch of it wrong, and that it’s possible, and there’s an imperative, that we think about it differently. So I’ve only given this talk once before, so it’s a little disjointed, but I hope it’s going to plant some seeds under your skin and make you think about it.

Leadership vs. Management

The first big idea is this. Leadership and management are different things. Leadership is not management, and vice versa.

Management dates back to Henry Ford, to scientific management, to Frederick Taylor, to the idea that if we could build a job where an obedient person can do it and create value, we could pay people a lot. Henry Ford was able to go to the workers in Detroit and give them a 10x raise in one day, because he said, if you come on the assembly line and do what I tell you to, I’ll pay you a lot of money. And that spread.

It spread to the idea that we could use it to make truffles and chocolates, because as long as we get the system working efficiently, we’re fine. And it went from there to another food business. This is one of my favorites. This is somewhere in India. They didn’t have enough room to put the place where the guy rolls next to the place where the guy cooks. And so this is brilliant management engineering, because one person took an innovation and then figured out how to make the system more efficient.

Efficiency in Big Organizations

You might not notice, because there’s no sound, but when he was about to throw it, he hits the rolling pin so the guy knows to get ready. Anyway, what we discovered then is that big factories are more efficient than little ones, big organizations where people are doing what they’re told work. The River Rouge plant that Ford built was so big, it took all day to get from one side to the other, that this idea that there’s a top-down method not only works for cars, it works for almost everything.

So this is an old slide, eight years ago, how far every person in the United States lives from a McDonald’s. Now, you can imagine that now it’s even more yellow and less dark. Because McDonald’s figured out that management works, that a McDonald’s manager is not supposed to innovate, not supposed to start selling spaghetti during the slow times to see what happens, that the job of people at McDonald’s is to crank it out, that cranking it out and doing what we’re told again and again, that works, until it doesn’t.

And when the world changes, we’re in trouble. When the world changes, management always fails, because we don’t understand how to go forward. And that’s fine, you say, I don’t live on Easter Island.

Changing World

It’s fine, I don’t have a book depository. Well, it’s not fine if, say, for example, you used to work in newspaper publishing, because you can see what happened. It’s not fine if you used to be a travel agent, because you can see what happened.

It’s not fine if you’re one of the four million people who drive a truck in the United States for a living, because self-driving cars. And it’s not fine if you live on the planet Earth and the weather changes. Because the thing is, the world is changing, whether you want it to or not. And it’s changing faster than ever before. So in the face of all of that change, we’re not going to be able to manage our way out of it. We’re going to have to lead.

Responsibility vs. Authority

And leadership is not the same as management. So the next idea is that responsibility and authority are different things. That managers need authority. They tell people what to do. But leaders need to take responsibility. So I’ll give you a little example.

If you do a Google search for “the great Arturo Toscanini,” you have to type in “the great Arturo Toscanini,” you get all these pictures of the maestro. He was the most famous and important music conductor of the 40s, 50s in the United States. He worked with Disney. He was the conductor of the NBC Orchestra. So when he recorded Beethoven’s Fifth, he could record it like this.