12 Business Lessons from Seth Godin

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with marketing luminary, Seth Godin, for an episode of the Future Squared podcast.

Of course, Godin needs no introduction to most of you reading this, but the TLDR of it is this - he’s the author of 19 books including titles such as Linchpin and Purple Cow, he wrote 8,000 odd blog posts and founded of companies such as AltMBA, The Marketing Seminar and YoYoDyne. He sold the latter to Yahoo! For US$30M.

In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.

With such an enormous body of work, it was difficult to know where to begin preparing for our conversation, but after some pontificating, I landed upon reconciling conflicting belief systems and paradoxes that exist within entrepreneurship, business and life more broadly.

For example, if you are an ambitious entrepreneur who also meditates, how do you reconcile self-acceptance with drive?

Or, if you hire for culture fit, does that mean you suppress your company’s creativity and ability to innovate at a time when adaptability is key?

Or, say, if you build an efficient company, does this same efficiency, a strength characterised by process and policy, become a weakness in times of change?