Given the way that the Internet is redefining organizing, there's been a lot of recent material on Tribes.  Seth Godin's book (free in audio) elaborates on this:

Brand management is so 1999.  Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc. The MBA argued with product development and manufacturing to get decent stuff, and with the CFO to get more cash to spend on ads. Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world. [...]

A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It's our nature. Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger. But more important, they're enabling countless new tribes to be born.  [...] So the key question: Who is going to lead us?  The Web can do amazing things, but it can't provide leadership.

Rahul pointed me to David Logan's book on Tribal Leadership, where he defines each organization as a cluster of tribes:

Every organization is really a set of small towns.  [...] We call these small towns tribes, and they form so naturally it's as though our tribe is part of our genetic code. Tribes helped humans survive the last ice age, build farming communities, and, later, cities. Birds flock, fish school, people "tribe."

According to the book, a tribe is a group of 20 to 150 people; if it get any bigger, it'll split into another tribe.  Managers manage with the power of authority, but leaders meet people where they are and inspire a walk up the ladder of 5 tribal culture stages:

1. At Stage One people believe “Life sucks” and they cluster together, expressing hostility, such as in a gang.
2. At Stage Two people believe “My life” sucks. They feel they are surrounded by people who have power, but they themselves do not.
3. Stage Three is “I’m great,” which implies “You’re not.” It’s a culture of loan warriors.
4. At Stage Four the “I” turns to “We” as those lone warriors group into value-based relationships.
5. Stage Five is “Life is Great” where there is no “they.” These are the history-making groups that have excelled beyond competition.

Volunteer run efforts can't function at stage 3, so they have ultimately have a choice of organizing around the life-sucks or life-is-great meme.  CharityFocus is probably a 4.5 tribe on this scale, but I wonder what the authors would say about the 1.5 status of the remarkable Alcoholic Anonymous tribe.

Tribes, though, invokes the closest description of how networked clusters organize in the real world.

Posted by Nipun Mehta | comments (1) | permalink | more 'New Ideas' |