Feral Jundi

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Books: Influencer, by Kerry Patterson and Others

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , , — Matt @ 10:34 PM

   What a cool book, and the concepts discussed are fascinating.  It felt like this was a companion book to Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, if you are familiar with that.  One of the big ones that I took away from this book, was the concept of how to change a person’s mind or how managers can influence employees to do good work or do things differently.  

    I also liked the concept of finding opinion leaders in your company, and getting them on your side to implement a change within the company.  Or using the concept of a field trip, to convince non-believers within a company that something actually works or there is a better way.  Some shared reality stuff there, and this book is definitely a ‘How Too’ book on influencing people.  This thing is well researched, and backed with solid examples of successful influencer techniques.  Check it out. –Matt 

——————————————————————- 

Influencer

 

Product Description

Whether you’re a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you had more influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe it is too difficult, if not impossible. We develop complicated coping strategies when we should be learning the tools and techniques of the world’s most influential people.

But this is about to change. From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You’ll be taught each and every step of the influence process-including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world. You’ll learn how to:

Identify a handful of high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change..

Apply strategies for changing both thoughts and actions..

Marshall six sources of influence to make change inevitable..

Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand where you’ll see how seemingly insignificant people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You’ll learn how savvy folks make change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You’ll discover why some managers have increased productivity repeatedly and significantly-while others have failed miserably.

No matter who you are, or what you do, you’ll never learn a more valuable or important set of principles and skills. Once you tap into the power of influence, you can reach out and help others work smarter, grow faster, live, look, and feel better, even save lives. The sky is the limitfor an Influencer.

Are you an Influencer ?

Find out at www.influencerbook.com

——————————————————————

You don’t have to be a manager to realize that no one likes being told what to do. Yet lectures are still the main way we try to get people to change their behavior. Fortunately, social learning academics have been studying alternatives for decades. Patterson and his fellow consultants have now collected their findings in this engaging, example-rich book. The key message is hardly new, but it has gotten more sophisticated: Managers need to get out of the way and facilitate, not manage, the process of change for employees. They can do this by offering vicarious experiences, restructured environments, peer pressure, and frequent tests-all geared so that people embrace the change as authentic to them, not imposed by an outsider. Missing are only success stories of organizations that persuaded managers to drop their controlling habits and choose to be mere facilitators.-John T. Landry, Harvard Business Review

Jundi Gear Store Link for Book

——————————————————————

From the Comments Section of Amazon

 

–Two major points are to (1)Find the 2-3 things that you want to do differently that will have a cascading effect on all other behaviors to create the change you envision, (2)Ensure that you can do it, and that you think it is worth doing. The neat 6-box matrix belies the profound effect we can have on each other.

 

–This book looks at several influence success stories, including an Indian bank specializing in micro loans, reducing AIDS in Thailand, eradicating the guinea worm, and an environment that changes criminal behavior, and analyzes why they were successful

 

–*) The international effort to eliminate the guinea worm parasite, a terrible disease where people ingest the larva of the worm. Once the worm reaches adulthood, it literally bores its way out of the body and deposits its eggs.

*) The effort to get sex workers in Thailand to insist that their clients wear condoms during sex, thereby preventing millions of new cases of HIV infection.

*) The effort to get hospitals to recognize that approximately 100,000 people die in the United States each year in diseases caused in part by their hospital stay. Once the problem was recognized, take realistic and effective steps to prevent them.

*) An organization in San Francisco with an amazing record of turning people with extensive criminal records and a history of drug use into productive and valuable citizens. 

 

–In a nutshell, the book is about solving seemingly intractable human problems. (Or causing them; the authors caution these techniques are value-neutral.) It offers advice on how to find a solution, and then how to implement it. Implementation is the real meat of the book, and it boils down to two questions any rational person will ask when you try to get them to change their behavior: “Is it worth it?” and “Can I do it?” The book divides these two questions (motivation and ability) into three domains: personal, social, and structural (i.e. reward/risk). All of these have a bearing on the solution and need to be part of any influencer’s strategy. And having read the book, I’m convinced it would be doable for just about anyone to come up with a decent top-level strategy for influencing change, with some branches of that strategy filled in in detail.

 

Find all of them here

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress