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Seth Godin spoke on the Main Stage at Convening Leaders 2019 in San Francisco. Photo by Jacob Slaton/Whatever Media Group.
Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of 18 books, including Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. Godin recently applied his expertise to the subject of events in a conversation with Digital Media Editor Magdalina Atanassova on the Convene Podcast. Below we’ve distilled three of Godin’s top insights:
Events are leadership.
“Management is using power and authority to get people to do what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Leadership is voluntary. So if I’m running an event, I can’t manage the attendees because they can just leave. I can’t tell people they have to do what I say or they’re fired because they don’t work for me. Events are leadership. Getting enrollment in learning is leadership. Dealing with change is leadership. So either you’re going to earn people’s attention and trust or you’re going to fail. But you can’t just write a memo, can’t just call a meeting, and expect everyone’s going to obey.”
Live events should change lives.
“I’ve been to more live events than most people and I would say that most of them are terrible. Given how much energy and money are spent, they should be extraordinary. If you’re going to have people come from all over the world — or all over the state, or all over the city — interrupting their day to show up in a place together, you’ve got to give them something better than they can find on YouTube. You’ve got to give them more interaction than they can get out of email. And we have settled for events that please the caterer, that please the venue, that maybe even please the accountant. But they’re not changing people’s lives as much as they should. And if you’re going to bother running a live event, you better be changing people’s lives.”
AI will inevitably change work — and allow event organizers to create magic, if they change how they work.
“AI is here and it’s a fascinating, useful tool if we understand it. And you don’t have to like it to understand it. Work is going to change the same way that factory work changed. Factory work changed with electricity and the electric light. It changed with mass production. So if you made leather handbags in 1870, you don’t get to do that anymore. Not in the same way. And many workers ended up with jobs that weren’t as satisfying. But the market doesn’t care — the market wants productivity.
“We need to realize the same thing is true for the highly paid indoor work that many of us get to do. Most of what you do all day is tasks — and most of those tasks are going to go away. My recommendation is to be thrilled at the notion you don’t have to do tasks anymore and start signing up to make decisions, to be responsible, to create magic. Because AI is going to have a lot of trouble doing those jobs.”
Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor.