Quotes About Tribes

America" would still be an unnamed continent full of migratory tribes chasing the rear end of a buffalo every time their stomachs growled.

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

Also, human groups are formed of highly flexible alliances, not just among family members but between families, genders, classes, and tribes. The bonding is based on cooperation among individuals or groups who know one another and are capable of distributing ownership and status on a personal basis.

Americans today, ideology has become a powerful marker of identity. Ps, Cs, and Ls are now rivalrous, hostile tribes. As such, they have developed linguistic differences and negative stereotypes of one another, which the three-axis model can help to articulate. Within a tribe, political language is used to reassure others of one's loyalty to the tribe, to lift one's status within the tribe, and to whip up hostility against other tribes.

In politics, I claim that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. The language that resonates with one tribe does not connect with the others. As a result, political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves to increase polarization. The points that people make do not open the minds of people on the other side. They serve to close the minds of the people on one's own side.

Thus, I would view political disagreement as a social phenomenon rather than an individual one. We naturally tend to organize into tribe-like groups. Tribes differentiate in part on the basis of shared beliefs, including political beliefs. Our inclination to seek high status in a tribe leads us to become loyal to the beliefs of our tribe. This results in persistent disagreement.

The ancestors of the mightiest tribes must have grown to prodigious proportions . . . in the end the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god.

But another glacial age soon set in, cooling and drying the continent dramatically. Nearly all of Africa north of the equator became a desert, making much of the continent uninhabitable. Most tribes of Homo sapiens perished, and our species neared extinction; only a cluster of humans, including a few hundred women of childbearing age, survived.

Each of the five tribes claims to have been the victorious attacker. Each recalls the slaughter with relish. Each believes it was ordained by their own god as righteous vengeance, because of the unholy practices carried on in the city. Evil must be cleansed with blood, they say. On that day the blood ran like water, so afterwards it must have been very clean.

Arapahos had followed the buffalo, pitched villages in the lee of the mountains, ridden out like itinerant shop-keepers to trade buffalo robes and blankets with other Indian tribes. Intelligent, logical, peaceful, that was the Arapahos. "The businessmen of the plains," the first white traders had called them.

Cowardice is another form of community betrayal, and most Indian tribes punished it with immediate death. (If that seems harsh, consider that the British military took "cowards" off the battlefield and executed them by firing squad as late as World War I.)

Leaders lead when they take positions, when they connect with their tribes, and when they help the tribe connect to itself.

Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.

Tribes are about faith—about belief in an idea and in a community. And they are grounded in respect and admiration for the leader of the tribe and for the other members as well. Do you believe in what you do? Every day? It turns out that belief happens to be a brilliant strategy.

the new form of marketing is leadership, and leadership is about building and connecting tribes of like-minded people.

Given that leaders can appear anywhere in an organization, it seems to me that the job of senior management is to find them and support them. Leaders have tribes of their own, and someone needs to lead those tribes.

Tribes are the most effective media channels ever, but they're not for sale or for rent. Tribes don't do what you want; they do what they want. Which is why joining and leading a tribe is such a powerful marketing investment.

all tribes are made up of partisans, the more partisan the better. If you're a middle-of-the-roader, you don't bother joining a tribe.

The music business was built around five pillars: • Free radio promotion • A limited number of competing music labels • The high cost of production, requiring musicians to get financing from labels • The Top 40 hits–based focus of the baby boomer generation • A high-margin, nonreproducible medium (the LP) Notice that none of these five pillars has anything to do with tribes or leadership. One by one, each of these five pillars has crumbled

Crowds and Tribes Two different things: A crowd is a tribe without a leader. A crowd is a tribe without communication. Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe. Crowds are interesting, and they can create all sorts of worthwhile artifacts and market effects. But tribes are longer lasting and more effective.

Some tribes are stuck. They embrace the status quo and drown out any tribe member who dares to question authority and the accepted order. Big charities, tiny clubs, struggling corporations—they're tribes and they're stuck. I'm not so interested in those tribes. They create little of value and they're sort of boring. Every one of those tribes, though, is a movement waiting to happen, a group of people just waiting to be energized and transformed.

Tribes are about faith—about belief in an idea and in a community.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you'll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

Organizations give us the ability to create complex products. They provide the muscle and consistency necessary to get things to market and to back them up. Most important, organizations have the scale to care for large tribes. But organizations don't have to be factories, not anymore. Factories are easy to outsource. Factories can slow you down. The organizations of the future are filled with smart, fast, flexible people on a mission. The thing is, that requires leadership.