Seth Godin has ideas to make work better. Hint: They involve treating humans like humans.

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Rachael Xerri: Hello, I'm Audible Editor Rachel Xerri, and I'm here today with entrepreneur, American Marketing Association Hall of Famer, and bestselling author Seth Godin to talk about his latest listen, The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams. Seth is also the author of over a dozen audiobooks, including Purple Cow and Tribes, which you can also find on Audible. Welcome, Seth.

Seth Godin: Thank you for having me, Rachael. It's fun to talk to you.

RX: Thank you for being here. So my first question is, why do you want teams to hear The Song of Significance now?

SG: Well, work is pretty broken and a lot of people are feeling dislocated. Productivity is the lowest it's been in 70 years, and we're wondering whether it's even worth it or not. So yeah, we need to put a roof over our heads and feed our family, but a lot of folks are checking out. And the problem is that to spend 90,000 hours of our life at a work, job process, that doesn't mean anything is really sad. And we're only gonna be able to produce useful change in the world if our teams figure out how to work together to make things better. And I'm really excited about the audio of this thing. Recording my own audios has always been a challenge. I used to be really good at showing up and recording a six-hour audiobook in seven hours. People were sort of amazed that I could power my way through it. But as an untrained voice actor, as I've gotten older, it's harder and harder. So this one took months to record and I'm really proud of it.

RX: We'll talk about the audio, of course, but before we do that, can we talk about the cover? So there's a bee right in the center of it, and of course it holds a special meaning. Without giving away too much of the audiobook, can you share what drew you to reflect on the behaviors of hives in relation to the ways we work?

SG: Well, I love giving away the whole thing. I'm not here to cut down trees or use up tape. I'm here to make a change happen. What I have found is that immersing yourself into the whole thing makes a difference. But the bee. So the book wouldn't have existed without Jacqueline Freeman's fascinating book called The Song of Increase. And it's about feral bees and what happens to a colony, a hive, at the end of a long winter. And in the book I talk about the song of increase and I talk about the song of safety, but we are not bees and we have a chance to sing a different song, the song of significance. And one way we can understand what is possible is to take a look at these bees. They only live three weeks, which I didn’t know, and they live this extraordinary life filled with contribution and connection. And basically a beehive is a human brain turned inside out. Each bee is a neuron. And the deeper we look and the more we think about how a team of 10,000 bees is able to create this, led without a leader, organized without an organizer, it's a metaphor, for me, for our future.

RX: So one of the takeaways that resonated with me from your audiobook is how we can move past our society's current moment of late-stage capitalism. First of all, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, what is late-stage capitalism, and in your opinion, what needs to come next?

SG: So in the book I talk about two kinds of capitalism: industrial capitalism and market capitalism. Market capitalism is sort of an unalloyed good thing. It's when smallish organizations go to the market and solve a problem. And if the market doesn't like what they're doing, they have to stop. Capitalism in that sense, with a small c, has created an enormous amount of value and gives us freedom and responsibility. Industrial capitalism says, "I have a machine. If I can make that machine go more efficiently, I can lower my prices. I can then buy another machine. And if I can get big enough, I can control the market. I can do things despite my customers, not for them." And Henry Ford is sort of the poster child for industrial capitalism. If you've ever heard the phrase, "He's jerking me around," that comes from the Ford plant in 1920. Because when they looked at workers there, visitors, they saw people getting jerked around like they were marionettes with strings connected to them, because Frederick Taylor worked with Henry Ford to treat people like a machine. That's where the phrase “human resources” comes from. Humans are a resource to be manipulated and amplified.

"What we need to do is raise our standards, but treat the people we are with with respect and dignity, and serve our customers because we know they have a choice."

And the problem with industrial capitalism is not that it didn't create an enormous amount of wealth for an enormous number of people—as a percentage of the world population, there are fewer really poor people on Earth now than at any time in history. That every person who's listening to this has more power than the last King of France did, that it created all of this stuff, but it also indoctrinated us from the time we started going to school to fit in, to ask “Will this be on the test?” To do what we are told and to be part of that system. And what has happened, as you and I are talking in 2023, is that the incremental achievements that can be accomplished by industrial capitalism keep getting smaller. You can't make an air fryer any cheaper. You can't run a factory any faster. That the people who are working in the warehouse have basically become automatons, exhausted and broken. And so what many organizations are doing to respond to this is by turning the handle even harder, surveilling us, counting our keystrokes, giving us tiny metrics day by day. And a whole generation of people are saying, "Count me out. You already poisoned the Earth. You made a big promise to us about what our future was gonna be like and you keep breaking the promise. I'm not in on that." So my argument is that we need to return to the essence of solving problems, the essence of making change happen.

I still call that market capitalism. We don't need to lower our standards and all sing a song around the campfire. What we need to do is raise our standards, but treat the people we are with with respect and dignity, and serve our customers because we know they have a choice. And I don't see very many people drawing this distinction. I think it's easy to say everything about capitalism is bad because it was built on the back of racism and oppression, and it was. But we have very few alternatives about how we're going to create value going forward other than offering people a choice, making things better, connecting people, and then delivering value.

RX: The moment when you broke down human resources was such an aha moment for me, and I'm sure other listeners will feel similarly. So now that we are hopefully moving past this metaphorical assembly line, how will industries, companies, society benefit when leaders respect individuals and their autonomy?

SG: I'm not sure we're moving past it fast enough. I know that there are pockets where it is happening. And I think that one of the things that's going on right this minute is as AI starts to increase its abilities, "If you do mediocre work, we've got a computer that can do it for free." And so what that requires is the same way when the steam shovel showed up, if all you could do was dig a ditch, you were in big trouble. You had to figure out how to pilot a steam shovel or you were out of work, and AI is doing the same thing.

So I think the indoctrination and the system that pushes CEOs to be brutal, that leads to people having mass layoffs to make the stock price go up in one day, that leads to enormous amounts of side effects of stuff we're dumping in the ocean, in the air. That's not going to go away in one day. But what we are seeing is that people who have skill and passion and commitment have choices, and they're going to choose to work for entities, to work with entities, that do work that they are proud of. And I'm hoping we can shift gears fast enough, but we don't have a lot of time.

RX: AI is definitely a hot-button issue right now. It's something that we talk about fairly regularly, I think, at home and at work. So what's the best approach for employees or creators who are navigating developments in AI? How can we use these developments to our advantage?

SG: So for me, AI is bringing two things to the table in the short run. In the long run, it's totally different. In the short run, it's A) shameless and not shy about suggesting things. So when we were working on the subtitle for the book, I asked ChatGPT, I said, "Here's three paragraphs about what my book is about. Please give me 40 subtitles." And it did. And it did it faster and better than a committee would've come up with 40 subtitles. Now it was my job to take those subtitles and come up with the one that I could embrace. No, it wasn't one of the 40, but it prompted an enormous amount of new thinking that I wouldn't have had.

And the second thing is, it's always on. And I don't think people understand what does that mean. Because we're so used to calling an 800 number 24 hours a day and someone answers. That's pretty new that there's no nighttime, right? So if we think about Sigmund Freud and the origins of therapy, traditional therapy is done once a week for 50 minutes. Why is it once a week and why is it 50 minutes? Well, it's because you gotta drive to the office, which is a hassle. And once you're there, you might as well stay for a while, and you can't do that all the time. But once we've got an AI that can do modest therapy for people, why not do it in two-minute increments, right? Every time you're feeling stressed, press a button, tell it what you're up to and it'll get back to you with some thoughts, right? We could never do that with a real person. This idea that it's always on, always available, and provoking you to think about new things, it's gonna have to increase our speed of what's the next idea. The fact is that the world we live in right now is super weird, and this is as normal as it's ever going to be again for the rest of our lives.

"The fact is that the world we live in right now is super weird, and this is as normal as it's ever going to be again for the rest of our lives."

RX: I think I'm perhaps not alone in feeling fear when we talk about this society that we're building, where an AI can, in your words, generate ideas faster and perhaps even better than a person could. You talk about fear of failure quite a bit. Can you elaborate on how we should be navigating this fear during a time that is, for lack of a better term, quite fearsome?

SG: Okay, so there are a lot of ways to dig into this. The first thing is that fear in every animal that has ever evolved is a really useful tool. Wild animals don't like change because change makes the chances that they will have grandchildren go down. And so successful species have figured out how to avoid changes that threaten their evolutionary path. But human beings only thrived because we are the creators of change. And there were people who were incensed and fearful at electric lights, that Thomas Edison and Westinghouse had this ongoing battle in which elephants were electrocuted in public to make people afraid of AC power. That when cars came along it was really scary for people that this thing could move you from one place to another. That when the first movies were made and there was a train in the movie, people fainted in the theater. That this relentless cycle of technological change is how we ended up with seven or eight billion people, because human beings have figured out how to ride it the way a surfer rides a wave.

But that doesn't mean that our evolutionary wiring of our amygdala fears the unknown. The hard work is to separate useful fear from false proxies, from fake fear, from fear that feels like fear but isn't. So New York City is one of the safest places per capita in the world, but there are people who are afraid to walk in New York City at night. That's wrong. That's a false proxy. They are confused about fear of the dark with what is actually true in this place.

So what I am encouraging people to do is the same thing that a good coach does if you're training for the marathon. The people who finish the marathon are just as fit as the people who make it to mile 22. You cannot run a marathon well without getting tired. So don't go to a coach and say, "How do I make the tired go away?" What a coach will help you to do is put the tired somewhere useful. So at mile 22, when you get tired you can put it somewhere, acknowledge that you are tired, and run anyway. And the same thing is going on right here. This is different than the conversation about climate, which is urgent. In this case, this is apparent fear that we see that AI can do this or that and we are afraid, when maybe what we ought to do is say, "I am feeling this fear. How can I get smarter? How can I put this tool to work for me?” Not “How can I fight a systemic change that cannot be fought?"

RX: And so on the flip side of that, are you hopeful about the future of work?

SG: I am heartbroken and distraught about the future of our planet as humans inhabit it. I sit and I watch people using a gas leaf blower. I sit and I watch people ignore the issues that are right in front of us, and it breaks my heart because it's gonna be so expensive and so damaging to so many people in just a few years. But the future of work? Look at all the miracles.

So, Rachael, when I started in 1983 at Spinnaker Software, I got there the week they were installing a fax machine, and we didn't have voicemail, and email was just starting to be a thing at work. That we were sending 10, 20, 30, 40 FedEx letters a day to various companies to do our work with them. That we had one piece of software. We were a software company that ran on the Commodore 64, and it was so aggressive in the way it used the floppy disk, the floppy disk started on fire. And this was only 40 years ago, right? I was working with Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and Erle Stanley Gardner's estate, and Michael Crichton. These were people who were inventing the future and we were using toothpicks and glue to build things. Now I can connect with thousands of people around the world for free and weave together something of possibility. That Automattic, which runs 40 percent of the internet via WordPress, has 2,000 employees, they don't have an office, they don't have email and they don't have meetings. And yet they have built this resilient, thriving culture. And nonprofits like Lemontree, just a few people able to use systems to help thousands and thousands of hungry people find food.

I mean, just go down the list of how many things we have created that will enable us to create value. We built a vaccine that saved millions of lives in a pandemic in weeks, not in years. So when we think about what humans have built, sure the side effects are horrible and we need to fix them, but what work can be, the value we can create, the meaning that is possible, I'm super optimistic about that, if we can get our act together.

“...not only does this feel more morally and socially correct to treat people with respect and dignity, to create the conditions for possibility, but it's also more profitable.”

RX: So on that note, in this evolving landscape, let's call it, what qualities and actions do you think will separate managers, people who are just getting tasks from point A to point B, from leaders who are able to guide teams, guide one another into the next evolution?

SG: Love this question. So leaders and managers, we use those words interchangeably all the time. And as a writer I play with words and I needed to highlight that they are not the same. There's a reason we have different words. Managers use power and authority to tell the people who work for them what to do, and they get them to do what they did yesterday but faster and cheaper. And we need managers. If you've ever been on an airplane, you want that to be managed. You don't want the pilot making stuff up as she goes along. You don't want the baggage handler to do whatever they think they should do. There's checklists, there's processes, there's systems because we want airplanes to be boring and surveilled. But airlines don't make very much money or very much of a difference and if an airline went out of business, a new one would take its place.

What we really value are leaders, and leaders are doing something voluntary. They're exploring the liminal space between here and there. They are doing something with other people that might not work. So some managers are leaders, some leaders are managers, but they don't have to be the same. You don't run the company you work for, but you can, as the day goes by, act in ways that change the company where you work even though you don't have authority. Because you can take responsibility, you can solve interesting problems, you can do things that might not work. Whereas if you work in a regimented checkbox company, they don't want you to do that. And so figuring out where you choose to spend tomorrow is critical because you don't get tomorrow over again.

RX: So true. I know we started this interview with you talking a bit about your connection to audio. I really enjoyed listening to your performance. What do you think listeners stand to gain from the audio experience that they might not receive from the print experience of The Song of Significance?

SG: So in the last few years, I will confess that the number of books I read has gone down 90 percent. But I will proudly say that the number of audiobooks I listen to has gone up more than that. What happens for me in an audiobook is the energy and page-turning that the author brings to it helps keep me from getting stuck. Also, because I listen at 1.2, it runs at the same speed my brain does and it keeps me engaged. And so the reason that the audiobook of all my books is read by me and is important to me is everyone has a voice in their head. If I can help amplify the parts of the voice in your head that will keep you on the path to where you seek to head, that's a gift. I don't take it lightly. And so what I do when I make a book is I don't make it for one reader. I make it for a reader to share, to be able to have a conversation about it. And what I have found is if five people on a team read one of my books or listen to one of my audios, a conversation will happen after that. And that is the thing that's worth 20 bucks. The conversation after you've absorbed the rant that the author is sharing with you.

RX: So I have one more question for you and it's a big one. How optimistic are you that supporting humanity and furthering humanity is enough of a driver to motivate industry leaders to truly prioritize people over profits?

SG: Okay, so let's break down the question you just asked. They're mostly industry managers, not industry leaders. Industry managers aren't gonna change what they're doing until the stock market tells them to. And what I outline in The Song of Significance is, turns out that not only does this feel more morally and socially correct to treat people with respect and dignity, to create the conditions for possibility, but it's also more profitable. And so when Ray Anderson turned Interface Carpet around by making it the first environmentally positive carpet company, which is a very hard thing to do, he was motivated to do it because he was losing sales. Not because he was just motivated by what Paul Hawken had said in his book. And then as he got the idea and took it further, yes, he and his team were motivated by the impact on the world, but they also saw the stock price kept going up and they made more money.

So what's gonna happen is this, there's gonna be a race to the bottom. It's already going on. There's some anonymous factory somewhere far away that's making air fryers as cheap as they can. You cannot win the race to the bottom, and you don't want to. And the alternative is to race to the top. And what we see is that organizations, teams, whether they're nonprofits or political campaigns or for-profit companies that organize to continuously outperform, which means that if you're a mediocre manager that's depending on command and control and human resources and machines, you're gonna be behind. And this is a fork in the road, and we're either going to embrace it because it's the right thing to do or because you make more money. I don't care. Or we're gonna get left behind. And that's why it's so urgent.

RX: Thank you, Seth. For those of you listening, you can get The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams on Audible now.