1. How does a member of any particular tribe know she’s ready to lead one of her own?

Seth: Well, everyone is a member of a tribe. A community tribe, perhaps, or a spiritual one. The time to go start your own tribe is when you realize the obligation you have to contribute your leadership and when you are passionate enough about a goal that you will make the commitment the tribe demands to get there.

In other words, do it when you care. If you don’t care, don’t whine, don’t complain. But if there’s change you want to make happen (business change, social change, any change) then this is the way to do it.

Author: Brian Clark
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A perfectionist doesn’t do things quickly, it takes them too long to shift. It is better to be very focused on doing the best you can quickly and then later fix it to make it better.

SEO is not a black art. It’s often clients who want shortcuts rather than hard work that are the problem. The best SEO is great content and if you don’t create that you won’t get search engine traffic.

Author: Rachelle Money
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Answer: You don’t know many either, do you Guy? Ahh, we agree! I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.

Author: Guy Kawasaki
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A book packager is like a movie producer, but for books. You invent an idea, find the content and the authors, find the publisher and manage the process. Book packagers make almanacs, illustrated books, series books for kids and the goofy one-off books you find at the cash register. I did everything from a line of almanacs to a book on spot and stain removal. It was terrific fun, and in a good year, a fine business. Along the way, I worked with just about every major publisher and created more than a hundred books. I packaged (with various levels of success) video games, college professors, Julia Robert’s astrologer, an award-winning children’s novelist, the Weekly World News, Kinko’s and (almost) Craftsmen Tools.

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Amazon, for example, has a leap between it and other online retailers. Sure, you might be able to mimic part of what they’ve got, but the gulf is so huge, it’s hard to imagine displacing them any time soon. I think going for the leap is essential for creating a business for the ages, and I want to speculate that there are three ways to make it:

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92% of all the business presentations made in the United States are done with templates created by big companies in Excel or Powerpoint. This is a horrible tragedy.

First, programmers don’t often have a lot of taste. The fonts are flaccid, the defaults are wan and uninspiring. There’s no sophistication.

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There’s a finite number of people you’re going to be able to sell to, and every person you interact with knows everyone else, so you always have to be on your best behavior. You can’t say, “tough” and then go on to the next person. You can’t run ads that churn and burn through an endless supply of naive prospects. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and on the island, that impression matters.

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In the dark ages (ten years ago), the only way to spread your idea on a large scale was to do it yourself. Lots and lots of ads.

Today, marketers get all sweaty thinking about how this happens magically, virally, for free. If it were only that easy.

What’s interesting to me is that different products and ideas are spread by different groups of people. There isn’t just one professional association of idea spreaders, with everyone else being passive.

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Jacquelyne runs a tiny juice company called Chakwave. I met her in Los Angeles, standing next to an organic lunch truck. Like the little birds that clean the teeth of the hippo, there’s synergy here. The kind of person that visits the truck for lunch is the sort of person that would happily pay for something as wonderfully weird as her juice. And the truck owners benefit from the rolling festival farmer’s market feel that comes from having a synergistic partner set up on a bridge table right next door.

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