Seth Godin

Heretics don’t settle. They’re not good at that. Managers who are stuck, who compromise to keep things quiet, who battle the bureaucracy every day—they’re the ones who settle. What else can they do?

The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on.

I define sheepwalking as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them brain-dead jobs and enough fear to keep them in line.

s it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization that’s flat and open and treats employees with respect? What happens when you expect a lot and trust the people you work with? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, too little predictability, and way too much noise. This isn’t the top-down model of the factory, or the king and his court. It’s chaos. It’s easy to reject out of hand.
Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses watch and shake their heads, certain that this is an exception and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base.

The organizations that need innovation the most are the ones that do the most to stop it from happening. It’s a bit of a paradox, but once you see it, it’s a tremendous opportunity.

It’s a myth that change happens overnight, that right answers succeed in the marketplace right away, or that big ideas happen in a flash.
They don’t. It’s always (almost always, anyway) a matter of accretion. Drip, drip, drip. Improvements happen a bit at a time, not as grand-slam home runs that are easy to get.

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.

Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another…so they follow.

some axes for you to choose from

It’s not going to market itself