Seth Godin makes an interesting comparison between the success of the Grateful Dead and successful companies. I thought a summary was worth sharing:
More than Campbell’s Soup or American Airlines or CAA or Cisco or
McKinsey, the Grateful Dead is the template for how organizations are
going to grow and succeed moving forward.
No, not every element of who they were and what they did, but the
idea of conversations and open source, the idea of souvenirs and
emotion and live events and of remarkability. The Dead sells through
permission marketing, spread their music through an ideavirus and yes,
as long as we’re slinging buzzwords, profits from the long tail.
The most important takeaway is this: They repeatedly did things that
felt like huge risks, that challenged the status quo and that seemed,
on their face, to give too much power to their audience. And in those
moments, the Grateful Dead were at their most successful.
I was never really into The Dead, but I am into helping build successful organizations and understanding the genesis of such companies. And even though I wasn’t a big fan of the band, I do appreciate their cultish hold on people and their longevity.
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