Tribes...

Seth Godin got me to join triiibes- his amazing scheme to get people to pre-order his new book while simultaneously proving its premise. It didn't cost me that much, and it seems like a good experiment to be part of. It had gotten up to number #5 on the Amazon top sellers list when I added it to my cart. It's since dropped off now that the promotion is effectively over.

I have been interested in the tribal dimensions of human behavior for a while. Ray Immelman's Great Boss Dead Boss is a thorough examination of this in a business novel format. Still, Immelman's tribal attribute #1 is : "A strong tribe has a well defined common enemy". [I think there are probably a lot of people that laugh at business novels- people that like novels probably don't like business books, and people that like business books probably don't read as many novels, but it's something I seem to enjoy.]

Another book a long the same lines, but with a completely different approach, is Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. It really drives home how many of our actions are driven by how we relate in terms of status to others. Reading everything de Botton has ever written is not a bad idea, either.

I do have a slight anxiety of being part of the sucker tribe for joining up with this stuff...well, I guess the sucker tribe is not really a tribe as much as it is the people excluded from the non-sucker tribe. Anyway, the book's pretty cheap, so it looks like the cost of briefly suspending my natural cynicism won't exceed $15.