About the book

Great many books or nearly all books are one hit wonders. Daniel Pink’s “To Sell is Human” is not. You can re-read it as many times as you want. So far this was my second reading experience and I’m still convinced that I could re-read it.

Why should you read it? Simply because it de-mystifies selling as a profession.

What are the key learnings?

The book is about ”the brave new world of non-sales selling.” Concept is simple. Pink made a survey and then used other data to highlight the change – which is that in fact everybody sells. He also has astonishing amount of research data to back his theories.

There a lot of key learnings:

–      Sales people are curators.

–      Selling is moving resources and/or people.

–      The new ABCs of moving others is A like Attunement, B like Buoyancy and C like Clarity. 

–      “Extraversion has “no statistically significant relationship . . . with sales performance”

–      Everything good in life – a cool business, a great romance, a powerful social movement, begins with a conversation.

–      Jim Collins favorite opening question is: Where are you from?

–      Asking questions rather than make statements and positive-inflected pitch.

–      Begin the day with one or two sales calls that will be friendly.

–      The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity.

–      Don’t forget to go negative every once in a while. Negativity and negative emotions are crucial for our survival.

–      Good salespeople are skilled problem solvers. They know what questions to ask, how to curate information and how find unexpected problems.

–      People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.

–      Three key abilities for people in sales: to pitch, to improvise, and to serve.

–      Offering a lots is a bad idea, but the lesson here is critical: The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea.

–      Six promising successors to the elevator pitch.

–      After someone hears your pitch . . . 1. What do you want them to know? 2. What do you want them to feel? 3. What do you want them to do?

–      Use iprovisational theater: “(1) Hear offers. (2) Say “Yes and.” (3) Make your partner look good.”

–      “Sales and non-sales selling are ultimately about service. Improving others’ lives. Plus make it personal and make it purposeful.”

–      This five-minute reading exercise of purpose filled content more than doubled production.

–      “The servant-leader is servant first.”

–      “Move from “upselling” to “upserving.”

Part One Rebirth of a Salesman

Who’s selling? “One out of every nine American workers works in sales. America’s sales force outnumbers the entire federal workforce by more than 5 to 1. And 25 percent of the Canadian workforce. According to the most recent available data along with calculations by officials at Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, about 13 percent of the region’s more than two-hundred-million-person” In Japan “1 out of 8 workers in the world’s third-largest economy is in sales.”

What is selling according to Pink?

Physicians sell patients on a remedy. Lawyers sell juries on a verdict. Teachers sell students on the value of paying attention in class. Entrepreneurs woo funders, writers sweet-talk producers, coaches cajole players. Whatever our profession, we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients.

“Definition of selling according to Pink is “moving”. “The conventional view of economic behavior is that the two most important activities are producing and consuming. But today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving. That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources.” 8 in 9 are spending their days moving others and depending for their livelihoods on the ability to do it well. Health care and education both revolve around non-sales selling: the ability to influence, to persuade, and to change behavior while striking a balance between what others want and what you can provide them.”

“We’ve seen movies like Glengarry Glen Ross and Tin Men, which depict sales as fueled by greed and founded on misdeed. When you think of “sales” or “selling,” what’s the first word that comes to mind? The most common answer was money, and the ten most frequent responses included words like “pitch,” “marketing,” and “persuasion.” But when I combed through the list and removed the nouns, most of which were value-neutral synonyms for “selling,” an interesting picture emerged.”

“Selling makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted (“ ick,” “yuck,” “ugh”), in part because we believe that its practice revolves around duplicity, dissembling, and double-dealing.

When sellers know more than buyers, buyers must beware. It’s no accident that people in the Americas, Europe, and Asia today often know only two words of Latin. In a world of information asymmetry, the guiding principle is caveat emptor—buyer beware.”

“The balance has shifted. If you’re a buyer and you’ve got just as much information as the seller, along with the means to talk back, you’re no longer the only one who needs to be on notice. In a world of information parity, the new guiding principle is caveat venditor—seller beware.”

Sales people are curators…

“When buyers can know more than sellers, sellers are no longer protectors and purveyors of information. They’re the curators and clarifiers of it—helping to make sense of the blizzard of facts, data, and options.”

“We bring them in and we put them in a one-week training course that’s not just about sales. We talk about customer service and social media.”

“Darvish says the qualities she looks for most are persistence—and something for which a word never appeared in either of the word clouds: empathy. “You can’t train someone to care,” she told me. To her the ideal salespeople are those who ask themselves, “What decision would I make if that were my own mom sitting there trying to get service or buy a car?” It sounds noble. And maybe it is. But today, it’s how you sell cars. Joe Girard is a reason why we had to live by caveat emptor. Tammy Darvish survives—and thrives—because she lives by caveat venditor.”

Myths about Sales:

– Stupid…. The first is the myth of the blockhead. “We do not seem to have gone much in for genius,” wrote Fuller Brush Company founder Alfred Fuller of his sales force. 11 The way this myth has it, the smarties go off to become engineers and lawyers, while those consigned to the less favorable portions of the IQ bell curve distribution migrate toward sales, which requires far less cognitive horsepower.EN5 Not quite. As you’ll see in Parts Two and Three of this book, when simple, transactional tasks can be automated, and when information parity displaces information asymmetry, moving people depends on more sophisticated skills and requires as much intellect and creativity as designing a house, reading a CT scan, or, say, writing a book. 

– Greed…. The second erroneous belief, and a reason that some people disdain sales, is the myth of the moneygrubber: that being effective requires being greedy and that the best (and perhaps only) way to succeed is to become a coin-operated selling machine. Once again, not quite. For starters, non-sales selling, especially in domains such as Ed-Med, has nothing to do with cash. And considerable research has shown that money is not the driving force even for the majority of people in traditional sales. 12 What’s more, as you’ll read in the Sample Case at the end of Chapter 9, a number of companies have actually increased sales by eliminating commissions and de-emphasizing money. 

– Everybody has a selling instinct…. Finally, many people—myself included until I began researching this book—believe the myth of the natural. Some people have sales chops. Others don’t. Some people are innately skilled at moving others. The rest of us are out of luck. Here we confront a paradox. There are no “natural” salespeople, in part because we’re all naturally salespeople. Each of us—because we’re human—has a selling instinct, which means that anyone can master the basics of moving others. The rest of this book will show you how.

Part Two – How to Be

““Always be closing” is a cornerstone of the sales cathedral. Successful salespeople, like successful hunters of any species, never relent in pursuing their prey. Every utterance and each maneuver must serve a single goal: pushing the transaction to a conclusion—your conclusion—and getting the person across the table, as Blake says, “to sign on the line which is dotted.”

The new ABCs of moving others: 

–      A is like Attunement, 

–      B is like Buoyancy and 

–      C is like Clarity. 

“Attunement, buoyancy, and clarity: These three qualities, which emerge from a rich trove of social science research, are the new requirements for effectively moving people on the remade landscape of the twenty-first century.”

“Attunement is the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in. The research shows that effective perspective-taking, attuning yourself with others, hinges on three principles.” 

1. Increase your power by reducing it.

“Then researchers gave the people in each group the E Test. The results were unmistakable: “High-power participants were almost three times as likely as low-power participants to draw a self-oriented ‘E.’” 2 In other words, those who’d received even a small injection of power became less likely (and perhaps less able) to attune themselves to someone else’s point of view.”

“Fewer resources, better attunement, great way of getting others perspective….. When you have fewer resources, Keltner explained in an interview, “you’re going to be more attuned to the context around you.” 4 Think of this first principle of attunement as persuasion jujitsu: using an apparent weakness as an actual strength. Start your encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the other side’s perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea, though. The capacity to move others doesn’t call for becoming a pushover or exhibiting saintly levels of selflessness. Attunement is more complicated than that, as the second principle is about to demonstrate.”

2. Use your head as much as your heart.

“Social scientists often view perspective-taking and empathy as fraternal twins—closely related, but not identical. Perspective-taking is a cognitive capacity; it’s mostly about thinking. Empathy is an emotional response; it’s mostly about feeling. Both are crucial.”

Empahty vs. Thinking…. “What happened? The empathizers struck many more deals than the control group. But the perspective-takers did even better: 76 percent of them managed to fashion a deal that satisfied both sides.”

“Perspective-taking seems to enable the proper calibration between the two poles, allowing us to adjust and attune ourselves in ways that leave both sides better off. Empathy can help build enduring relationships and defuse conflicts.”

“Social cartography.”….. This second principle of attunement also means recognizing that individuals don’t exist as atomistic units, disconnected from groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires training one’s perspective-taking powers not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to others.”

3. Mimic strategically.

“Successful negotiators recommend that you should mimic the mannerisms of your negotiation partner to get a better deal. For example, when the other person rubs his/ her face, you should, too. If he/ she leans back or leans forward in the chair, you should, too. However, they say it is very important that you mimic subtly enough that the other person does not notice what you are doing, otherwise this technique completely backfires. Also, do not direct too much of your attention to the mimicking so you don’t lose focus on the outcome of the negotiation. Thus, you should find a happy medium of consistent but subtle mimicking that does not disrupt your focus. 11 (Emphasis in the original.)

“And much as perspective-taking and empathy are fraternal twins, mimicry has a first cousin: touching.

The notion that extraverts are the finest salespeople is so obvious that we’ve overlooked one teensy flaw. There’s almost no evidence that it’s actually true.”

“Extraversion has “no statistically significant relationship . . . with sales performance” and that “extraversion is not related to sales volume.”

“But neither did nearly as well as a third group: the ambiverts. Ambi-whats? These are people who are neither overly extraverted nor wildly introverted. Selling of any sort—whether traditional sales or non-sales selling—requires a delicate balance of inspecting and responding. Ambiverts can find that balance. They know when to speak up and when to shut up.”

“Everything good in life—a cool business, a great romance, a powerful social movement—begins with a conversation. For guidance, look to Jim Collins, author of the classic Good to Great and other groundbreaking business books. He says his favorite opening question is: Where are you from?”

Master the techniques of strategic mimicry?

The three key steps are Watch, Wait, and Wane:

1. Watch. Observe what the other person is doing. How is he sitting? Are his legs crossed? His arms? Does he lean back? Tilt to one side? Tap his toe? Twirl his pen? How does he speak? Fast? Slow? Does he favor particular expressions?

2. Wait. Once you’ve observed, don’t spring immediately into action. Let the situation breathe. If he leans back, count to fifteen, then consider leaning back, too. If he makes an important point, repeat back the main idea verbatim—but a bit later in the conversation. Don’t do this too many times, though. It’s not a contest in which you’re piling up points per mimic.

3. Wane. After you’ve mimicked a little, try to be less conscious of what you’re doing. Remember: This is something that humans (including you) do naturally, so at some point, it will begin to feel effortless. It’s like driving a car. When you first learn, you have to be conscious and deliberate. But once you’ve acquired some experience, you can proceed by instinct.

One chair

Jeff Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It’s there to remind those assembled who’s really the most important person in the room: the customer. The empty chair has become legendary in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Seeing it encourages meeting attendees to take the perspective of that invisible but essential person. What’s going through her mind? What are her desires and concerns? What would she think of the ideas we’re putting forward?

“Gather a few people and ask them to think of items that somebody from three hundred years ago would not recognize. A traffic light, maybe. A carry-out pizza. An airport screening machine. Then divide into groups of two. Each pair selects an item. One person plays the role of someone from the early 1700s. The other has to explain the item.”

“How to stay afloat amid that ocean of rejection is the second essential quality in moving others. I call this quality “buoyancy.”

“Yes, positive self-talk is generally more effective than negative self-talk. But the most effective self-talk of all doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions. On average, the self-questioning group solved nearly 50 percent more puzzles than the self-affirming group. Those who’d heard the positive-inflected pitch were twice as likely to accept the deal as those who’d heard the negative one—even though the terms were identical.”

“Remember: Interrogative self-talk is the smart choice when preparing to move someone. And positivity during your efforts doesn’t mean coating yourself or others in a thick glaze of sugar. In fact, a particular recipe—a golden ratio of positivity—leads to the best results.”

3/1

“Once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1—that is, for every three instances of feeling gratitude, interest, or contentment, they experienced only one instance of anger, guilt, or embarrassment—people generally flourished.”

“Hall seems to have found the proper mix. He says that he tries to begin his day with one or two sales calls that he knows will be friendly. He also seeks positive interactions throughout his day.”

“People who give up easily, who become helpless even in situations where they actually can do something, explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal.

“In other words, the salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style—who saw rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and external rather than personal—sold more insurance and survived in their jobs much longer.”

“The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity.”

“Don’t forget to go negative every once in a while. Every silver lining has a cloud. Buoyancy, whether positivity ratios or explanatory style, isn’t about banishing the negative. Negativity and negative emotions are crucial for our survival. They prevent unproductive behaviors from cementing into habits.”

Clarity

“Clarity — the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identify problems they didn’t realize they had. Good salespeople, we’ve long been told, are skilled problem solvers. They can assess prospects’ needs, analyze their predicaments, and deliver the optimal solutions. This ability to solve problems still matters.”

“It’s those “who can brainstorm with the retailers, who uncover new opportunities for them, and who realize that it doesn’t matter if they close at that moment.”

“His best salespeople think of their jobs not so much as selling candy but as selling insights about the confectionery business.”

Identifying problems as a way to move others takes two longstanding skills and turns them upside down. 

1) First, in the past, the best salespeople were adept at accessing information. Today, they must be skilled at curating it—sorting through the massive troves of data and presenting to others the most relevant and clarifying pieces. 

2) Second, in the past, the best salespeople were skilled at answering questions (in part because they had information their prospects lacked). Today, they must be good at asking questions—uncovering possibilities, surfacing latent issues, and finding unexpected problems. And one question in particular sits at the top of the list.

The less frame

“Reducing consumers’ options from twenty-four choices to six resulted in a tenfold increase in sales. Adding an inexpensive item to a product offering can lead to a decline in consumers’ willingness to pay,” the researchers concluded. 14 In many instances, addition can subtract. Less is more.”

The experience frame

“Several researchers have shown that people derive much greater satisfaction from purchasing experiences than they do from purchasing goods.

Experiences also give us something to talk about and stories to tell, which can help us connect with others and deepen our own identities, both of which boost satisfaction. As a result, framing a sale in experiential terms is more likely to lead to satisfied customers and repeat business. So if you’re selling a car, go easy on emphasizing the rich Corinthian leather on the seats. Instead, point out what the car will allow the buyer to do—see new places, visit old friends, and add to a book of memories.”

The label frame

“The neatest group by far was the first—the one that had been labeled “neat.” Merely assigning that positive label—helping the students frame themselves in comparison with others—elevated their behavior.”

The blemished frame

“First, the people processing the information must be in what the researchers call a “low effort” state. That is, instead of focusing resolutely on the decision, they’re proceeding with a little less effort—perhaps because they’re busy or distracted. Second, the negative information must follow the positive information, not the reverse.” 

The potential frame

“People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating—and the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.”

“Most people who resist doing or believing something don’t have a binary, off-on, yes-no position. So don’t ask a binary, off-on, yes-no question. If your prospect has even a faint desire to move, Pantalon says, asking her to locate herself on that 1-to-10 scale can expose an apparent “No” as an actual “Maybe.” Even more important, as your daughter explains her reasons for being a 4 rather than a 3, she begins announcing her own reasons for studying. She moves from defending her current behavior to articulating why, at some level, she wants to behave differently. “

In the old days, our challenge was accessing information. These days, our challenge is curating it.

Part Three What to Do

“Three key abilities: to pitch, to improvise, and to serve. This chapter is about pitching—the ability to distill one’s point to its persuasive essence, much as Otis did back in 1853.”

“The world’s first elevator pitch was by Otis Elevators”.

Their central finding was that the success of a pitch depends as much on the catcher as on the pitcher. In particular, Elsbach and Kramer discovered that beneath this elaborate ritual were two processes.

1)   In the first, the catcher (i.e., the executive) used a variety of physical and behavioral cues to quickly assess the pitcher’s (i.e., the writer’s) creativity. The catchers took passion, wit, and quirkiness as positive cues—and slickness, trying too hard, and offering lots of different ideas as negative ones. If the catcher categorized the pitcher as “uncreative” in the first few minutes, the meeting was essentially over even if it had not actually ended.

2)   Second process is that in the most successful pitches, the pitcher didn’t push her idea on the catcher until she extracted a yes. Instead, she invited in her counterpart as a collaborator. The more the executives—often derided by their supposedly more artistic counterparts as “suits”—were able to contribute, the better the idea often became, and the more likely it was to be green-lighted.

The most valuable sessions were those in which the catcher “becomes so fully engaged by a pitcher that the process resembles a mutual collaboration,” the researchers found. 

Here are six promising successors to the elevator pitch—what they are, why they work, and how you can use them to begin a conversation that leads to moving others.

1. The one-word pitch (TLDR)

Saatchi has been touting what he calls “one-word equity.” He argues that a world populated with “digital natives”—those under age thirty who scarcely remember life without the Internet—has intensified the battle for attention in ways no one has fully comprehended. Attention spans aren’t merely shrinking, he says.

“In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind,” Saatchi writes. The companies’ aim, and the aim of this type of pitch, is “to define the one characteristic they most want associated with their brand around the world, and then own it.

Priceless, search, enjoy…. When anybody thinks of you, they utter that word. When anybody utters that word, they think of you. 

Saatchi insists that brutal simplicity requires one—and only one—word. “Two words is not God. It is two gods, and two gods are one too many.” 

2. The question pitch

Reagan asked a question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

When I make a statement, you can receive it passively. When I ask a question, you’re compelled to respond, either aloud if the question is direct or silently if the question is rhetorical.

3. The rhyming pitch

“If it doesn’t fit . . .” Most Americans who were alive at the time know the rest: “. . . you must acquit.” The jury exonerated Simpson—and one reason was Cochran’s seven-word rhyme: If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.”

“Kids and grown-ups love it so—the happy world of Haribo.”

4. The subject-line pitch

The researchers discovered that participants based their decisions on two factors: utility and curiosity. 

– People were quite likely to “read emails that directly affected their work.” No surprise there. 

– But they were also likely “to open messages when they had moderate levels of uncertainty about the contents, i.e. they were ‘curious’ what the messages were about.” 

– Along with utility and curiosity is a third principle: specificity. lines should be “ultra-specific.”

5. The Twitter pitch

Three of the categories rated the highest provide some insight on pitching via this new medium. For instance, readers assigned 

– The highest ratings to tweets that asked questions of followers, confirming once again the power of the interrogative to engage and persuade. They prized tweets that 

– Provided information and links, especially if the material was fresh and new and offered the sort of clarity discussed in Chapter 6. 

– And they gave high ratings to self-promoting tweets—those ultimate sales pitches—provided that the tweet offered useful information as part of the promotion. 22

6. The Pixar pitch

How does Pixar do it? Success has many parents—

– The foresight of Steve Jobs, who invested in the company early; 

– The distribution and marketing muscle of the Walt Disney Company, which struck a development deal with the studio early on and acquired it in 2006; 

– The meticulous attention to detail for which Pixar’s army of technical and artistic talent is renowned. But an additional reason might be the stories themselves.

Once upon a time ______________________________. Every day, _______________. One day _________________________. Because of that, ___________________. Because of that, _______________________. Until finally ___________________.

Read this…. “It’s even possible to summarize this book with a Pixar pitch: Once upon a time only some people were in sales. Every day, they sold stuff, we did stuff, and everyone was happy. One day everything changed: All of us ended up in sales—and sales changed from a world of caveat emptor to caveat venditor. Because of that, we had to learn the new ABCs—attunement, buoyancy, and clarity. Because of that, we had to learn some new skills—to pitch, to improvise, and to serve. Until finally we realized that selling isn’t some grim accommodation to a brutal marketplace culture. It’s part of who we are—and therefore something we can do better by being more human.”

Your Twitter pitch could include an online link to an artist’s rendering of the bridge along with a list of its benefits and entice people to click it with:

–      See what tomorrow’s Beeston and Arborville can look like & why we need to create that future.

–      If you’re sending information to your fellow Beeston citizens, your subject line pitch could be: 3 reasons why Beeston families support a new bridge.

–      Your rhyming pitch? Opportunities are wide on the other side.

–      Your question pitch could help people think through their own experiences: Should it be such a pain to get to Arborville?

–      And your one-word pitch could explain the reason for your efforts (not to mention an indispensable lesson of this chapter): Connect.

“After someone hears your pitch . . . 1. What do you want them to know? 2. What do you want them to feel? 3. What do you want them to do?”

Improvise

Use iprovisational theater: “(1) Hear offers. (2) Say “Yes and.” (3) Make your partner look good.”

1. Hear offers.

“The first principle of improvisation—hearing offers—hinges on attunement, leaving our own perspective to inhabit the perspective of another. And to master this aspect of improvisation, we must rethink our understanding of what it is to listen and what constitutes an offer.”

”For many of us, the opposite of talking isn’t listening. It’s waiting. When others speak, we typically divide our attention between what they’re saying now and what we’re going to say next.”

Suppose you’re raising money for a charity and you ask your brother-in-law to contribute $ 200. He might say no. But he’s unlikely to say only that. He’s more likely to say, “Sorry, I can’t give two hundred dollars.” That’s an offer. Maybe he can donate a smaller amount. Or he might say, “No, I can’t give right now.” That’s an offer, too.

2. Say “Yes and.”

But positivity in this regard is more than avoiding no. And it’s more than simply saying yes. “Yes and” carries a particular force, which becomes clearer when we contrast it with its evil twin, “Yes, but.”

3. Make your partner look good.

“The aim of negotiating shouldn’t be to make the other side lose but, where possible, to help it win.

But Fisher’s work urged young business students and law students, and less-young people inside organizations, to reframe these encounters as positive-sum games, where one person’s victory didn’t depend on another’s defeat.

Improv artists have long understood that helping your fellow performer shine helps you both create a better scene.”

Serve

“Sales and non-sales selling are ultimately about service. Instead, it’s a broader, deeper, and more transcendent definition of service—improving others’ lives and, in turn, improving the world. the two underlying lessons of the matatu sticker triumph: Make it personal and make it purposeful.”

Make it personal.

“Injecting the personal into the professional can boost performance and increase quality of care. And what’s true for doctors is true for the rest of us. Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant. Instead, we should recalibrate our approach so that it’s concrete and personal—and not for softhearted reasons but for hardheaded ones.”

“In both traditional sales and non-sales selling, we do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person.”

“But the value of making it personal has two sides. One is recognizing the person you’re trying to serve, as in remembering the individual human being behind the CT scan. The other is putting yourself personally behind whatever it is that you’re trying to sell.”

Make it purposeful.

– As surgeon Atul Gawande has observed, checklists and other processes can be highly effective on this front. 

– But Grant and Hofmann reveal something equally crucial: “Our findings suggest that health and safety messages should focus not on the self, but rather on the target group that is perceived as most vulnerable.”

“While we often assume that human beings are motivated mainly by self-interest, a stack of research has shown that all of us also do things for what social scientists call “prosocial” or “self-transcending” reasons.”

“Sales trainers, take note. This five-minute reading exercise more than doubled production. <= The stories made the work personal; their contents made it purposeful. “purpose group”—read stories from university alumni who’d received scholarships funded by the money this call center had raised describing how those scholarships had helped them. They more than doubled “the number of weekly pledges that they earned and the amount of weekly donation money that they raised.”

I, Me and Myself… “Greenleaf argued that the most effective leaders weren’t heroic, take-charge commanders but instead were quieter, humbler types whose animating purpose was to serve those nominally beneath them. Greenleaf called his notion “servant leadership” and explained that the order of those two words held the key to its meaning. “The servant-leader is servant first.”

“What helped servant leadership take hold wasn’t merely that many of those who tried it found it effective. It was also that the approach gave voice to their latent beliefs about other people and their deeper aspirations for themselves. Greenleaf’s way of leading was more difficult, but it was also more transformative. As he wrote, “The best test, and the most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

“Move from “upselling” to “upserving.” Upserving means doing more for the other person than he expects or you initially intended, taking the extra steps that transform a mundane interaction.

“The servant-leader is servant first.”

How should we change according to the book?

Make assessment http://www.danpink.com/ 

What should I personally do?

Read the following books:

–      Robert Greenleaf wrote an essay that launched a movement. He titled it “Servant as Leader”

–      In 1981 Roger Fisher co-authored Getting to Yes, the most influential book ever written about negotiation.

–      In 1989, Stephen R. Covey wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which went on to sell more than twenty-five million copies. Habit 4 on Covey’s list is “Think Win-Win.”

–      Read also Koji Takagi, American Sales magazine and Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink.

Summary

The book in six words – ”It is springtime and I am blind”