Jeffrey Pfeffer is one of my favorite business writers, and unlike others who have been writing for a long time, his newest book ranks among his best work. Power is Machiavelli in modern terms, reinforced with current management thought and social psychology. It’s also a useful and refreshing balance to so much writing today that shies away from straight talk about what actually happens in organizations and what it really takes to get ahead.
As Pfeffer says, one reason that there is not a lot written about power is that people who have risen to the top and written about how they got there rarely are open about the tactics they used. Most business and political autobiographies are self-serving and gloss over the realities.
Just Listen by Mark Goulston is one of the few books I’ve read more than once (three times so far, actually) because it has given me many useful insights that have helped me both personally and professionally. Here are three:
I wrote recently about using labeling as a mental strategy to deal with pre-speech jitters. I first learned about it from reading this book, as a way to take control of your “reptile brain” when it is about to hijack your behavior. We all know how to move from the fight/flight mode to the logical mode; we just don’t always know how to do it fast. Goulston calls it “getting through to yourself first.” About a week after reading it, I actually got to put it into practice during a nasty encounter with a very rude person at the mall during Christmas shopping. After the person left, the sales clerk thanked me for the way I handled it.
The concept of the persuasion cycle is also useful as a model for knowing how to get through to people. Speed and directness aren’t always the best way to get someone to agree with you. If you’re trying to convince someone to have Indian instead of Italian for lunch, that’s a pretty easy sell. But if you’re trying to drive fundamental change, you have to be more patient. People go through various stages in the persuasion cycle: from resisting to listening to willing to doing to glad they did. This book shares nine principles and twelve techniques that are useful at various stages of the persuasion cycle.
Another principle that resonates with me is “be more interested than interesting”, because it ties in so neatly with my own advocacy of the “outside-in” approach to persuasion. People will be persuaded for their own reasons, not yours, so the best persuaders are not those who are glib and articulate—the best persuaders earn the right to be persuasive by taking time to listen, show interest and empathize.
I enthusiastically recommend this book. Maybe that rude person will have read it by the next holiday season. The world would be a better place!
There are a lot of reasons to recommend a book, but The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, by John Jantsch, has given me one of the best: reading it will make you money. It’s my first book recommendation on Practical Eloquence because of what it did for me:
