Book Review: Linchpin by Seth Godin

Linchpin is one of the most influential and thought-provoking books this year. It’s about the value of being indispensable. Here at New Media PH, it’s pretty obvious that we’re big Linchpin fans–our ragtag group keeps posting about it. This is why.

Indispensable means to be absolutely necessary for something or someplace. A common notion in the workplace is that being indispensable is not good for success. This saying says it all: “Never be indispensable, because you can never get promoted.” Logically, this seems right. Why change the person doing the job that he does best?

Seth Godin challenges this very notion of being indispensable and gives a different implication on what this means. A linchpin is the pin that keeps the grenade from exploding–absolutely necessary, don’t you think? That’s the main point of Seth’s most recent book: Be that pin that every company or business needs. Not because you want to have the power to demand more and act arrogant, or the position to be untouchable, but because it’s innate in all of us. When we become linchpins, we create value for the organization and we can find ways to succeed more easily.

Everyone is an artist

Seth claims that all linchpins are artists, and they are able to be indispensable because they don’t do work; they create art. Art, in this book, is a result of work and emotional labor. It covers all forms of work, whether clerical, graphic design, finance, support. Aside from investing our talents, knowledge and experience into our work, we can invest more of ourselves, putting in emotional labor into our work. When we learn to do this, we can all be artists and be linchpins.

Art creates value, and generosity multiplies it

Scarcity creates value. Now if all of us become artists, where’s the value in that? The magic there is that in making art and giving a part of ourselves to our work through emotional labor, we personalize our work. We can pass on knowledge and skills, but we can’t pass on our personal touch. That in itself adds its own kind of value to the work, no, the art that we create. Thus, in this kind of linchpin economy, generosity is a tool that all linchpins use. The more art you give, the more art you create, the more value you contribute. It all comes from you.

The importance of shipping

This is my third favorite takeaway from this book. I’ve described why shipping is key in an earlier post, but just to reiterate, it’s good practice for us to acknowledge our fears and overcome them. In the book, “genius” is mentioned pretty often. In my own words, a genius is not someone who is, is, is. A genius is someone who does, does, does. All these people regarded as geniuses in our society kept doing and kept failing. In Yoda’s words (totally a Star Wars fan, I am), “Do or do not, there is no try.”

If you haven’t picked up a copy of this book yet, I hope this review has encouraged you to pick one up now. A part of me hopes that halfway through this review, you stopped reading and left your computer to get a copy of this book. The beauty of Linchpin is that it does not push for an entrepreneurial way of life; it shows that you can be indispensable anytime, anywhere, whatever your work is. In fact, I think that as a manager you will learn to look at your team in a different way, knowing how to truly discern the valuable team member over the others.

I love tying up books that I read, seeing how they relate to each other. A book that I think compliments this one is Drive, by Dan Pink. I’m only halfway through that book now (I’ve been busy), but I think I’ll do a review of that next.

Post Script: You might also want to read Dennis Sy’s Trap of Perfection which is related to this entry.