Seth’s Blog: Perfection or exploration.

If you are in business on the web (or anywhere else), and you don’t know Seth Godin, you need to get to know him. He is probably the Internet’s foremost marketing genius–but his work really isn’t about marketing. It’s about producing great work, surprising and delighting your customers, making whatever you do remarkable.

And by remarkable, he means work people will talk about. To Seth, the best marketing is delighted customers telling others about your work so they become customers. He’s absolutely right, too. I put a lot more confidence in a friend’s recommendation than in any TV commercial or banner ad, and I’m willing to bet you do, too.

This message, from a few days ago, is about what kind of organization we want to be part of. Do we seek perfection, in which case we want to get really, really good at a limited range of things? Or do we seek exploration, in which case we want to continually push the envelope to show, or (more importantly) to discover, what we can do?

Either way, we have to have the courage to speak up when we make a mistake. If we’re seeking perfection, mistakes threaten our business, and we have to fix them. If we’re seeking exploration, mistakes are what our business is built on.

You can find Seth’s books here.