I recently read Guy Kawasaki’s book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. This book shows how to engage with other people and build better relationships similar to Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends & Influence People. Though, this book covers these topics in more professional context and it includes advice from several other business and management books. As, Guy is also a very savvy social media user, this book covers several tips on using modern networking tools to build personal relationships with others.
Enchantments
Guy describes enchantments as a way of delighting people with a product, service or organization, which is similar to the concept of Customer Delight popular in business literature. Guy suggests to start with a good product or service and fill people with the delight. This also reminded me Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.
Likable and Trustworthy
Once you have a good product, you build the enchantments by being likable and trustworthy. The likability chapter covers several pointers such as smile, dress appropriately, firm handshake, accept others, yes attitude, and work in open environment. Guy encourages finding shared interests with other party and creating win-win situation when negotiating. On being trustworthy, Guy suggests giving people benefit of doubt, disclosing interests and positioning yourself. Some of these techniques seemed similar to what I have read from Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and from agile development gurus.
Pre-Launch/Premortem
Guy gives a great set of tips on preparation before launching a product and suggests the product should be:
- great
- deep
- intelligent
- complete
- empower
- elegant
Product Launch
On launching a new product, Guy suggests telling personal stories, showing courage, planting many seeds and aspiring people by promising a better world. This chapter reminded me of how Steve Jobs promotes Apple products by promising better future, giving great demo, and simplifying the interface.
Overcoming Resistance
On overcoming resistance, Guy suggests creating perception of ubiquity and scarcity and finding a way to agree, which enhances your chances of being likable. I found the chapter on overcoming resistance a bit weak and encourage readers to look at Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard and Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas.
Enchanting Influencers
Guy offers a great practical guidance on enchanting influencers such as working on grassroots, creating intrinsic motivation, paying it forward, and reciprocity. I liked his advice of saying “I know you’d do same for me” instead of saying “You’re welcome” in response to thank-you”.
Ecosystems
In order to create a grassroots support of your products or services, Guy recommends creating a product worthy of ecosystem and then lists several tools, which encourage exchange of ideas and collaboration such as user-groups, blogs, conferences, reward system, open architecture. Another key factor for ecosystem is having a diversified team, which different roles such as advocate, skeptic, visionary, adult, evangelist and rain maker.
Push Technology
This is one of best chapters in the book and shows how to use modern push technologies such as Presentations, Email, and Twitter. Guy recommends engaging many people fast and often. He also recommends giving them credit and providing a value for them. On presentations, Guy recommends customizing intro based on audience, selling dreams, dramatizing and rehearsing it. He suggests keeping the presentation short with 10-20-30 rule, where presentation has no more than 10 slides, takes 20 minutes and uses no less than 30-size font. For email, Guy suggests keeping it short (under six sentences) and asking for a specific action.
Pull Technology
On pull technologies, Guy suggests creating a website/blog with good content, refreshing contents frequently and having an about page. On Facebook, Guy suggests having a good landing page and being helpful. On Linked-in, Guy suggests having a great profile and reaching out to others actively.
Enchanting Employees
Guy also provides useful set of pointers on being a good employer such as engaging employees by providing MAP (Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose) and empowering employees to do the right things. He recommends instead of judging actions of others against their intentions, be harsh on yourself and judge your results against their intentions. He also suggests celebrating success and includes tips from Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst such as protecting people from intrusions. Guy cites Michael Lopp’s advice from Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager such as setting ambitious goals, enabling, appreciating and providing feedback to the employees.
Enchanting Boss
On enchanting boss, Guy recommends:
- make your boss look good
- drop everything when boss asks for something
- under-promise and over-deliver
- prototype work by completing part of assignment and asking for feedback
- show and broadcast progress while giving credit to colleagues who helped
- form friendship
- ask for mastership
- deliver bad news early
Resist Enchanters
Finally on resisting enchanters, Guy suggests looking far in future, knowing your limits, having a skeptic attitude and not falling for example of one.
Summary
In this book, Guy Kawasaki provided a good collection of practical advice on building better interpersonal relationships and using tools from social media effectively. It shows that in order to build long lasting relationships, you have to be sincere and always be willing to help others. I found Guy’s pointers on push and pull technologies most helpful as he has created cult of followers on Twitter and Facebook and provided a number of tips from his personal experience.