Having read some excellent posts from Guy Kawasaki and noting how ubiquitous his name is in marketing circles, I bought this book with high expectations. It did not meet my expectations.
The book reminded me of one of those food sampler baskets you get at Christmas. A few items are very nice, most are palatable but forgettable, and some are kind of funky, to put it kindly. Let’s call them the good, the average, and the ugly.
I was intrigued to read a profile on Vice Admiral William McRaven, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command which executed the nearly flawless raid to kill bin Laden. Admiral McRaven wrote a book, SpecOps: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice, which examines eight case studies of special operations raids and distills lessons from these into six principles that must be followed to varying degrees in order to succeed in these highly risky ventures.
My intention in reading the book was simple curiosity: I happen to like military history and I’m always intrigued by people who can combine action and scholarliness. As I read, however, I was struck by some of the parallels with practical persuasion efforts. So, with advance apologies to the Admiral, I’m taking the liberty of applying most of his lessons to persuasion campaigns, especially presentations and sales calls to high level decision makers.
If only it were this easy…
Organizations don’t plan to fail, and they don’t fail to plan; in fact, most have excellent plans for success. But then those plans run up against real life, or a better competitor executes a better plan. It’s a familiar story: an organization long touted for its excellence in its field is trounced by an upstart competitor playing by different rules. It survives (barely) and then goes through a painful process of remaking itself and eventually returns to even greater prominence.
No, I’m not referring to IBM in the 1980s; the organization from which Stephen Bungay draws modern management lessons is the Prussian Army, which was all but annihilated by Napoleon in 1806. Carl von Clausewitz survived that battle and later went on to study the nature of war at the War College in Berlin. In the mid-nineteenth century General Helmuth von Moltke used Clausewitz’s theories to develop his officers and shape his organization as head of the Prussian General Staff, and many of his ideas have shaped the thinking of the American military today.
One of the central themes of Practical Eloquence is that content is king. If you take your responsibilities as a persuader or a decision maker seriously, then Blur is an important book for you because sound decisions depend on sound knowledge. Paradoxically, there is so much information available today, from so many sources, that knowledge is harder to come by. As Blur tells us: ”When information is in greater supply, knowledge becomes harder to create, because we have to sift through more data to arrive at it. Confusion and uncertainty are more likely.”
Besides the sheer volume, another complication is the tension between fact and faith. So much of the information we rely on for informed decisions has to be taken on faith. In a simpler age, most of what had an immediate impact on our lives happened close by, so we could rely on observable fact in making decisions. When companies were smaller, we knew the people involved or we knew our customers personally, so we either had a chance to see things firsthand or had a reliable sense of the trustworthiness of our source. As the world has become larger, more complicated and more connected, more of what affects us happens further away, so we have to make more decisions based on what someone else tells us—in other words to take their information on faith.
