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Publisher's summary
“Economic instability and the rise of remote work have left us disconnected and disengaged. Alarmed managers are responding with harsh top-down edicts, layoffs, surveillance and mandatory meetings. Workers are responding by quiet quitting and working their wage. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Through 144 provocative stanzas, legendary business author Seth Godin gets to the heart of what ails us; he shows what’s really at the root of these trends, and challenges us to do better in ways that matter. The choice is simple. We can endure the hangover of industrial capitalism, keep treating people as disposable, and join in the AI-fueled race to the bottom. Or we come together to build a significant organization that enrolls, empowers, and trusts everyone to deliver their best work, no matter where they are.”
The Song of Significance is a loving anthem to what Godin calls “significance,” and what Leading Edge calls “employee engagement.” What would it mean, Godin asks, if we did our work not just for the paycheck, or because the boss was watching? What if our jobs were about “work that matters created by people who care”? For us at Leading Edge, no question could be more central in the professional world.
I have long been a fan of Seth Godin — especially his book This is Marketing, his pithy daily blog, and his podcast, “Akimbo.” But both the beauty and the limitation of much of his work is that it is — as this title advertises — a song. Which is to say, this book is not an action plan. It’s densely packed with wisdom, beautifully worded, and soars high in the clouds of abstraction. It’s long on poetry and short on practicality — and, to some extent, even internal consistency.
The paradox lovers among us will appreciate this; some will find it frustrating. I count myself in both those camps at once. I found myself nodding vigorously along while reading, often enraptured, and yet I finished the book feeling not at all clear about how one might make all of its gorgeous principles into realities in my actual job. Now, it’s okay to ditch practicality for inspiration — more than okay! As Simon Sinek said, “Dr. King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.” Still, for so professionally oriented an author as Godin, I wonder if he couldn’t have done more to hit both marks at once.
To take just one example, Godin wants leadership to be central and decentralized at the same time. As the bee pictured on the cover foretells, Godin uses bee metaphors many times in the book:
“Bees aren't self-organizing. They're simply organized, aware of what the other bees are doing and each bee's role in the journey of the hive. They have a culture of peer-to-peer awareness, not top-down authority. The same is true of all resilient, decentralized human organizations.”
Yet Godin also returns, over and over, to the importance of top leaders setting the tone and culture, leading to creating these “leaderless” cultures. Strong horizontal cultures need strong vertical leadership; that strikes me as true, and also strikes me as a paradox, or, at least, a polarity. Godin discusses both sides of this polarity, but never directly acknowledges that the two poles are in tension or sets them up in the kind of dialogue that would help us manage their coexistence. The problem isn’t contradiction, per se, as much as avoidance of conceptual confrontation.
But perhaps this is too harsh an assessment. Wisdom, after all, isn’t simple, and no amount of hand-holding from Godin could have made it so. Perhaps his project is to present readers with wisdom, in all its complexity and paradox, and leave us to find our syntheses and solutions for ourselves.
Godin’s greatest talent may be aphorisms; nobody is more virtuosic or generous with them. Here are just a few of my favorites from this volume:
“Significant organizations are team-centric... The purpose of a beehive isn't to make honey; honey is a by-product of a healthy hive.”
“What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes, and perceptions of the people who do the work.”
“In-person meetings are now like caviar, rare and precious. And yet we waste them.”
This book, too, is like caviar: rare, precious, and — it must be said — not for every taste, but, for those who appreciate it, well worth savoring.
About the Author
Seth Chalmer is Vice President, Communications at Leading Edge.
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