On the subject of my post – Seth Godin on TED: Tribes are What Matter Now. When Seth speaks about tribes he often mentions his favorite examples: Zappos to illustrate the differentiating customer care, an engaged, socially accessible CEO or 37 Signals to highlight a focused software company with a focused customer service.
Dirck Jacobsz, Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation, 1532, Oil on canvas, 115 x 160 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
I would define a tribal culture as group of people bound with an engaged leadership. A hierarchy on the other hand is a social structure where leadership is unintentionally or deliberately detached from the “users”. In a hierarchy users are being “used” and easily disposed of to further the goals, status and survival of the hierarchical structure. Daniel Quinn writes in Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure:
“Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair–in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it’s intrinsically hierarchical, civilization benefits members at the top very richly but benefits the masses at the bottom very poorly–and this has been so from the beginning. Tribalism, by contrast, is nonhierarchical and benefits all members with notable equality.”
If you encounter a social structure with an involved leadership, concerned and engaged with the users, than you recognize a tribe but if you see an autocratic leadership, separated from the users by layers of bureaucracy, a leadership that is not listening to the users but broadcasting upon the users, than you see a hierarchy.
Dirck Jacobsz, Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation, 1561, Oil on panel, 91 x 185 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg