Influence and Motivation

Sometimes you can’t control the environment you’re in. If that’s the case and you’ve got to reward folks, I’d strongly suggest you pick up 365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees with Little or Not Money  by Dianna Podmoroff . I know that’s a qu...

One of the best things about 42 Rules of Employee Engagement by Susan Stamm  is that because it’s 42 separate rules – so you can consume the material a few pages at a time. The book for me was a sort of flash cards, a collection of bits and pieces that ...

Back in January I read (and reviewed ) Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point .   I liked it so much that Malcolm’s next book, Blink , quickly made my reading list.  I don’t read many books that don’t have some sort of technology tie-in so Blink  was...

John Kotter’s work on organizational change has been substantial and in reading Leading Change  and The Heart of Change  I became a fan of his work. Compared to those other works, the book Buy-In  is a radical departure in approach. The first half of...

Catalysts are different.  They make chemical reactions happen faster – but they’re not consumed in the process.  For those who are driving change, being a catalyst is what you want: better results without being used up.  The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone...

How do you persuade someone else to change their mind? How do you get someone else to come around to your point of view? These are questions at the core of Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds . Howard Gardner...

We do not like inconsistency.  That’s the fundamental driver behind Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory .  Joel Cooper provides appropriate nods to Leon Festinger – and those he studied with.  (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance , Fes...

There’s a lot of research that has been done on cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology is a guide to evaluate the research and what we’ve learned over the 60+ years since it was first proposed.  (See ...

It was a different time, 1977. Back then, publishing was harder and the focused energy that went into creating a book was larger. When Irving Janis and Leon Mann wrote Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment , they...

Death has its tentacles around every part of life.  Though we fight to release life from its grip and deny its existence, Ernest Becker explains we don’t have The Denial of Death .  I’ve previously reviewed The Worm at the Core , which extends Becke...

What makes you get up in the morning? Chances are it’s not your desire to conquer the world, unless you’re The Brain . One of the really crazy parts about working with SharePoint adoption is realizing how little we know about motivating users. In his ...

As I mentioned in my last post about my experience with the National Speakers Association (NSA)  that one of the speakers was Sally Hogshead . Sally convinced me, among other things, to buy her book Fascinate . But before I get to the book, I should exp...

It’s pretty common for professional speakers to have some sort of a book to promote themselves and their talks. That’s not at all different. However, the difference here, for me is that Mark Sanborn’s name just keeps coming up. I can’t explain that ot...

How do you write a review of a dictionary? That’s the question that came to mind as I was trying to write this review. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers  is sort of a dictionary, but instead of words, it’s desig...

If you’ve ever wondered how a group of people might become so polarized and radical that they would do things that would normally be unthinkable?  What’s crazy is that what we often see as “crazy” levels of polarization is the normal reaction.  In Going ...

It takes more than a clever title and a tagline to connect with people. That’s just one of the messages from Sam Horn’s book Got Your Attention? . The chapters are short, just like the goldfish-sized attention span that Horn says we all have today. She’...

I can remember as a child sending off a letter about an idea that I thought was powerful. It came from a story I ran across about a movie theatre that ran subliminal advertising for their concession stand. The idea was that the advertising was conveyed...

Imagine, for the moment, that you felt like India was the edge of the world. You had fought your way to what you felt like was the edge of civilization over eight grueling years – only to see more land before you than you could see the end of. Your e...

What makes us do something? Why do we decide to buy (and use) toothpaste A vs. toothpaste B? These questions start us down the path of wondering how we might get others to choose the choice we would like rather than the choice they’d make naturally. W...

"Nobody has ever had enough authority – they never have and they never will." It's the first highlight in Influence Without Authority , and it is the defining statement for why we need to learn how to influence others without authority. Coercive influence i...

Do you have influence? Most of us want to believe that we wield influence like a machete that can cut a path through the jungle striking a bush or tree in our path and having it instantly fall out of our way but most of us who have tried to wield this...

Rarely do I read a book that increases my level of anxiety. Rarely am I so conflicted by a message that I decide to skip the process of writing a blog post for it. You see, writing these blog posts are a part of my process for understanding and incorporating...

“Ambivalence is our constant companion.”  It’s my first highlight from On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes Your Life .  This isn’t the first work of William Miller that I’ve read.  He coauthored Motivational Interviewing and Quantum Change .  I...

Play  is, for many, a lost art. Somewhere between childhood and growing up, we’ve lost our ability to really play. However, play doesn’t have to be a separate activity from our day-to-day lives. Play can – and perhaps should be – woven into the very...

What can you do to make people more likely to accept your proposals? That’s the key question Robert Cialdini answers in Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade . He’s the same author who wrote the classic book Influence . His point...

Goldfish aren’t the first thing that you think about when you’re thinking about growth or profit, at least if you’re not a goldfish farmer. Goldfish are the pets that you don’t have to walk or bathe. They’re safe for kids. But, as it turns out, they’ve g...

You’ve only got an instant, and you’ve got to make the sale. Whether it’s literally selling to someone or selling the big idea – or even your potential as a romantic suitor – Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and Science of Changing Minds  is...

Lights. Camera. Inaction. Wait, that’s not right. Lights. Camera. Action. We all want action. We want to see people extraordinary and ordinary take action, to do something. We want to see the triumph of human achievement. We want to be inspired to take a...

Like most people I know, I’ve not found that “one” thing that my world revolves around.  I’ve found passing interests and desires, but no central theme has emerged.  The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything is a series of stories designed ...

It’s a classic.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance lays out Leon Festinger’s theory about how and why we change our attitudes.  More than 25 of the books that I’ve reviewed contain a direct reference to “cognitive dissonance.”  It underlies theories of ...

If you’ve been reading this blog then you know that I’ve been doing a lot of reading of my own lately, mainly associated with some professional development in the area of reconnecting to basic software development fundamentals that I’m already aware of an...

In our modern cultures, death is hidden, both physically and emotionally. If we acknowledge death as a part of life, then we must confront our own mortality, and that is something few are willing and able to do. However, some professions come face to...

The first highlight I have for the book is “Just because I’m aware doesn’t mean that I care.” It’s a truth that we first get exposed to around the age of three, when our theory of mind begins to accept that others think differently than we do – or at l...

What if everything that we did in life was designed to help us avoid the terror of our own death? What if we could explain everything from a framework that presumes everything we do is driven by an unconscious motive to transcend death? That's what The...