The shibumi strategy by Matthew E. May is both a parable and a lesson on the quiet aesthetic simplicity and transformative energy in Japanese culture. It all starts with Andy Harmon’s sudden misfortune. One day, his company closes. A good husband and good father (very much the image of the perfect, hardworking American for a magazine cover of the 50’s… only several decades later), he can’t just go back home to tell his family that he is out of the job and lament.

He has a few hours to find a solution in a small town with virtually no job openings except, perhaps, at the town’s only car dealership. After enjoying a corporate position in a customer service call center, Andy decides to try his luck as a salesman at Mainstreet Motors, something for which he doesn’t initially have the right profile. The result is that he must basically reinvent himself – and he does. Through a Zen self-discovery process, and a fair amount of trial and error, he finds out how to be something else than the stereotypical car salesman, and meets with success by building a long-term referral business.

All’s well that ends well. Albeit a little bit schmaltzy at times, this book is an interesting perspective on leadership. If you are tired of exhortative talks “(yes, think-hard-you-can do-it”) and of in-your-face leaders who gab about business and their grand exploits just as passionately as car salesmen go on and on about their Toyotathon sales events, read this book. It is focused on internalizing leadership, rebuilding your own balance to look at your environment with fresh eyes, and transforming what’s around you for the better. Leadership is about pulling, not about pushing, and “shibumi” is about effortless effectiveness. Incidentally, the author also refers to the Italian “sprezzatura,” with the new meaning that Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) gave to the word in the The Book of the Courtier: a sort of nonchalance, “so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says seem effortless, and almost unpremeditated.”

Chatting over breakfast the other day at Il Fornaio with Nilofer Merchant, whose book The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy I discussed in a former post, I realized that a “new how” often starts with a “new me.” This “new me” can be triggered by unforeseen events – events that can either traumatize and send us into dispiriting limbos or, instead, move us forward. The latter definitely illustrates the early life of Nilofer. A Muslim girl born in Mumbai who followed her mother to the United States when she was five, she was culturally destined to become the lovely wife of (preferably) a rich man.

The tale of two worlds: Nilofer’s mother came to the Silicon Valley after she divorced her husband in India. In order to make a living to support her children, she decided get a degree in respiratory therapy. Nilofer saw her mother become a student – a great role model in a way. Yet, it’s a case when role modeling doesn’t necessarily mean that much. Nilofer’s mother worked out of necessity and not for self-development or accomplishment. In other words, she stuck to the culture in which she was born; as a result, she did not inspire her own daughter the way she intended, and the relationship between mother and daughter turned into a dialogue between the deaf when the time came of discussing the terms of Nilofer’s arranged marriage.

Nilofer had graduated from high school and just started Community College. She did not have an issue with the arranged marriage itself, and she had no interest in a cultural rebellion. “I knew,” she says, “that it was my responsibility to accept an arranged marriage. My mother had made many hard decisions to raise us. I always felt a combination of debt and gratitude, and my assigned cultural role was to get married in such a way that it would dowry-wise take care of my mother.” So what went wrong? One day, Nilofer, coming back from school, found her entire family (uncles, aunts, and cousins) in the midst of a sort of pre-Nikah party celebrating the fact that a contract for the arranged marriage had been completed. Everything would have been fine, except that when Nilofer asked her uncle if the contract arranged for college for her, he responded that her mother didn’t want to put the topic on the table. Being raised in the US, Nilofer asked to simply add this clause in the contract. Her mother wouldn’t allow it. After a few days of fighting, Nilofer realized that her threat of leaving the house wouldn’t sway her mother. So, she packed books and clothes in boxes and moved away — and was disowned: ” I no longer had a family;  I no longer had a culture. I no longer had a community,” Nilofer says.

Alea jacta est (The die has been cast): Such a defining moment comes by chance or mishap. It’s an inflection point on the road of your personal history, a sudden discovery that shatters your world and creates the acute sense that you must act quickly. Had Nilofer ever dreamed of moving out and settling into the tiny space she was given as student body treasurer? Obviously not: but she recognized that, while her mother had power because she owned her community, she herself had the power to negotiate because she was a valuable commodity. She saw two choices ahead of her that had never materialized before – one safe, the other unknown – and chose the uncharted road. In that act, she unwound her personal destiny from her cultural and family identities, and placed it into her own hands.

For Nilofer, reinventing herself was not so much an act of mutiny or even of provocation (in fact she was sure that her mother would change her mind) – as it was the instinctive acknowledgement that the world exists beyond one’s doorstep. Nilofer worked her way through college for ten years, landing jobs at Apple, GoLive Systems, and Autodesk. I found interesting that, as soon as she completed her MBA, she named her consulting firm Rubicon Consulting (a company she ran successfully for ten years). She is now onto her new venture, also quite significantly branded: Innovative Cultures & Kicking Ass.

Just received a review copy! Everything about this book makes you feel well!

1) The title is downright uplifting: You’re better than your job search. Most people look for a job these days may be somewhat nervous. More often than not, there is a “better” candidate. With hardships, self-esteem tends to go down; so the idea that one would be better than one’s job search can only help.

2) The design of the book by Priest + Grace: We are getting so used to improvised covers, hasty layouts, inconsistent graphic guidelines that this book comes across as a courteous homage to the reader – and the divider pages separating sections look like great summary posters.

3) The two authors Marc Cenedella, the founder of the Ladders, and Matthew Rothenberg, the Ladders’ Editor in Chief are sincerely “rooting for you” as they guide you through the job seeking process.

4) And, of course, the content and the author’s straightforward approach. The book is more specifically targeted towards people earning 100K+, but is a great guide for everybody. So “before you jump the gun and start applying for jobs (…) take a little time to read this book.”

Regardless of where you stand on the totem pole, looking for a job is always nerve-racking. Sometimes, it’s like shopping for clothes. You see a suit in the windows and you believe that it’s exactly right for you, soon to find out that something that goes amiss. It doesn’t perfectly fit, because of a little something in the design or a little something in you – and as you ponder over possible adjustments, another person comes by and the suit slips through your fingers. The book takes you through the eight key steps of a job search.

- Starting your job search: Take the time to think about all the aspects of the process, from defining your goal, crafting your personal elevator pitch, to becoming aware of how long it will take you to actually land a job, and all the steps in between. So from the very beginning, go through the checklist related to all the components involved.

- Your resume: You want to survive Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Yes, your resume must include all the relevant keywords, but don’t think that you can outsmart them that easily. It’s a machine, but a machine that, in the end, often reads humans quite well. Also, if you want to gloss over a few snags in your job history, don’t forget that credibility matters.

- Personal branding: You want to impress, no doubt, so show the excellence in you and as you want it to be perceived; express your arete, an ancient Greek term that the authors quite relevantly use, and dress the part.

- Networking: You need to leverage all available resources to reach out to people and to be reached. Social Media tools are a powerful way to expand your field of vision as well as your visibility, provided that you have a clear strategy and know what you want. Optimize your profile for search, but never forget that in all cases, you must create trust.

- Interviewing: Great step forward – but it’s easy to blow it. Come prepared to the teeth about the company for which you interview. The meeting is not so much about you, your life and your exploits. It’s primarily about what you can do for others, and make sure that you adjust well to the environment that is used for the interview: phone and Web interviews are now common (I would add that they are far trickier for foreigners than for native speakers).

- Work/Life balance: Another interesting chapter. Not quite what you would expect, but a great way to look at your time between jobs. Don’t let stress paralyze you, be flexible, and stay in good shape mentally and physically: “if your job hunt is getting you down, take the weekend and blow off some steam.”

- Salary negotiation: Yes, few professional conversations are “more awkward,” so glean the authors’ tips to establish some comfort zone in you.

- First 90 days in the job: That’s the happy ending. Prepare to feel stupid, though, if you don’t want to come across as an awful brat.

Books related to job search can’t be too fancy – understandably so. But they can be more of less informative and more of less efficient at convincing you to reflect on the current best practices (not quite the same as ten years ago!) and  to apply them to your personal case. Even if you want to believe that you know it all, read this excellent book first: you may be convinced that you are a “highly experience,” “seasoned,” “world-class,” superlative executive. That’s not enough: Make sure that others are convinced too after you sell them your story!

Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as and Seth Godin’s Tribes, will release the French translation of Seth Godin’s Linchpin on May 2o. This time, I was not the translator, but I wrote a preface that is available on the Diateino blog. Here below is the English translation of my text.

Seth Godin has written a dozen books within the last ten years, that read like epistles of sorts – short conversational treatises in which he urges company founders, managers, and marketers in simple terms to create and promote out-of-the-ordinary products, to select their targets insightfully, turn strangers into friends and friends into customers. Book after book, his message has become more personal, more humanist. This has lead to Linchpin, which the author said in an interview in Anvers is his last book. Even more than in Tribes, his tone is that of an exhortation, and in the “last word” conclusion of the book, he sounds like a facilitator for a conversation where the Buddhist prajña meets Kabbalistic balance. “The result of getting back in touch with our pre-commercial selves will actually create a post-commercial world that feeds us, enriches us, and gives us the stability we’ve been seeking for so long.” 

“Is it really the ‘last word’ of one of the biggest marketing gurus?” you might ask, “and is it what marketing is about?” Yes it is. For there are two types of marketing:

1) Mass marketing that harps prosaic messages for insignificant products offered to ordinary people, and for which schools train legions of average students whose personal goal is to do what they are told to do and then get back home, put on their slippers and watch TV.

2) Inspired marketing that addresses early adopters, plugged-in folks, geeks, and enthusiasts, and that tells stories about products or people you feel like discovering and events in which you want to participate.

Mass marketing doesn’t inspire. But inspired marketing can generate massive success. That’s the case of Seth Godin himself, actually. His blog is one of the most read marketing blogs in the world. Several million people have bought or downloaded one or more of his books. If you have never heard him in public, just go to YouTube and click on any video. Even a non-English-speaker will immediately get a feel of what an inspired marketer is about: someone who emboldens you to act, whatever you had in mind to do – buy or sell a product, or invite your neighbors to join a fundraising for a sick child. Inspired marketing is transformational; it makes you find out about new things and new people – as well as find about your own self. It urges you to ask yourself the right questions, as unsettling as they may be, such as, for instance: “Am I indispensable?” 

This book is for people who want to be more than “faceless cog[s] in the machinery of capitalism” (the “factory”), as well as executives who understand that they need more than “two teams” (”management and labor”) to make an impact on people’s lives, those who intend to create “a third team, composed of “linchpins.” That is, a group of people who, through their leadership and their drive, “can invent, connect, create and make things happen.” “Linchpins are the essential blocks of tomorrow’s high-value organizations. They don’t bring capital or expensive machinery, nor do they blindly follow instructions and merely contribute labor. Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.” As was the case of Tribes, this book sits in between several genres: it’s a socio-political pamphlet, a manifesto for individual and interpersonal development, and a call for a new workplace.

The book starts with a reference to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that focuses on the division of labor. Yes, “what factory owners want is an available set of compliant, low-paid, replaceable cogs to run their efficient machines.” But “great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.” So unlock the genius in you. Interact with people, because you can’t be a linchpin alone in your corner. Inspire. Be pragmatic with artistry, and invent new rules that will make you succeed, and with you, the colleagues and the companies that leverage your talent.

Linchpin is for those whose aspirations can be invigorated, who want to rebuild a sort of personal unity and express a positive energy through a job they like or a cause in which they believe. If you want to be a linchpin, if you are a linchpin, if you can firmly say that you are indispensable, if dozens, thousands are like you, people wanting to connect to make things happen, if you are one of the linchpins within a generalized insurrection of talents… what will happen? The end of pointless “factories.”

Seth Godin’s contagious optimism and fervent iconoclasm remind me of one of the most fascinating assailant of the concept of factory, the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), who similarly invited his contemporaries to read again The Wealth of Nations‘ first chapter, in his Fields, Factories and Workshops. Their ultimate goal is quite similar: revive the artist in you, or something of “the artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands,” but was replaced by a “human slave of an iron slave.” Both advocate novel “integral education” to help reshape a different future. This future varies based on any thinker’s present. In our time, the future will be designed by the change agents that Seth Godin calls the “linchpins,” because they will build a world where “dignity, humanity, and generosity” intersect. 

This book is not a theorist’s work. It’s the book of a man who calls for action without cluttering your brain with literary references. Don’t get it wrong, though! This is also the book of an extraordinarily cultivated author, who has obviously read and analyzed with a modern perspective the masterpieces he mentions in his remarkable bibliography.

Note on earlier posts:

About Dominique Gibert, the CEO of Diateino in December 2009.

About Seth Godin: For an Insurrection of Talents: Seth Godin’s New Book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? 

English translation of my French preface for Tribes that includes three parts:

- Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon. French version on the Diateino blog.

- Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena. French version on the Diateino blog.

- The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign. French version on the Diateino blog.

And it so happened that coming back home, I found my early copy of Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? in my mailbox. This book is for the people who want to be more than a “faceless cog in the machinery of capitalism” (the “factory”), as well as any company who understands that it needs more than “two teams (”management and labor”) and intends to create “a third team, the linchpins,” i.e. people who “can invent, connect, create and make things happen.” As was the case of Tribes, this book sits in between several genres: it’s a socio-political pamphlet, a manifesto for individual development, and a call to a new workplace.

The book starts with a reference to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that focuses on the division of labor. Yes, “what factory owners want is compliant, low-paid, replaceable cogs to run their efficient machines.” But “great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.” So unlock the genius in you. Interact with people. Inspire. Expose your artistry, and invent new rules. In many respects, Linchpin is a sermon in the original sense of the term, a speech addressed to believers whose hopes can be rekindled, and whose beliefs can be linked together. If you are a linchpin – if you can answer “yes” to the question “Are you indispensable?” – and if dozens, thousands, hundreds of thousands do the same… in other words, if there is an insurrection of talents, what will happen? The end of pointless “factories.”

Seth Godin’s bibliography at the end of the book is quite remarkable. He refers to real books with real messages. His diehard optimism and his fervent iconoclasm, however, also reminded me of one of the most fascinating assailant of the concept of factory, the Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) who similarly invited his contemporaries to read again the Wealth of Nations’ first chapter, in Fields, Factories and Workshops. He added that “the artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands is substituted by the human slave of an iron slave,” and advocated for a novel “integral education” to help reshape the future. Such future varies based on any thinker’s present. In our time, this future will be designed by the change agents that Seth Godin calls the “linchpins,” i.e. people who want to make a difference and for whom “dignity, humanity and generosity” can transparently intersect. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

 Twitter: @mddelphis