I’ve recently become a Seth Godin fan.  Yes, I’m late to the party.  The guy is a blogging machine.  His insights are spot on. I subscribe to his feeds and get one or two a day.  I’m lucky if I can post two a week.

A colleague recently sent me a Godin post that didn’t even appear on his blog and it’s the best I’ve read so far.  It’s called “How to Sell a Book (or Any New Idea) (step 1 is the hard part)” and it’s describing the attributes of disruptive leadership in Seth’s own unique style (e.g., you can’t figure out what the article is about by the title).

It’s a must read for you budding leaders out there.  Here’s an excerpt, then go read the rest yourself.

What’s hard now is breaking the rules. What’s hard is finding the faith to become a heretic, to seek out an innovation and then, in the face of huge amounts of resistance, to lead a team and to push the innovation out the door into the world. Successful people are the ones who are good at this.

Ok, one more excerpt to tease you, but then you’ll really have to read his full article to decipher what he means by “tribes” and “cheap.”

I’m talking to you about leading and mediocrity and connecting and tribes. It’s all so fluffy. So vague. So much art, no science. Except it’s not. What we see, over and over, is that the brave but cheap leadership that leads to passionate movements always (always!) defeats the top-down, mediocre, slow-moving and very expensive techniques we all grew up with.