Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions [Hardcover]

 

 

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Marketing and leadership books are strange animals. Some are great and others make you want to stab yourself in the eye with a fork. Almost all, though, usually fall into one of two categories:

1. How to develop a large and successful business; and
2. Why all marketers are liars

Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki is neither of these; instead, it's a book about one thing:

Influence.

'How can I influence others without moral compromise?' is the question at the heart of Enchantment. And it's an important one. There are a number of easy cheats to convince people to follow your leadership (carrots and sticks) or to buy your product or join your cause (incentives), but eventually those things always fail.

Why? Because they're disingenuous. They don't tap into people's passions. They don't move the heart.

And without that happening, whatever impact you have is fleeting at best.

The 'pillars of enchantment' Kawasaki puts forward ones you'd be hard pressed to disagree with:

1. Be likeable
2. Be trustworthy
3. Have a great cause

In other words, be someone you'd actually want to spend time with and offer something that matters. These seem like concepts that should be met with a resounding, 'well, I should hope so.' I mean, this seems to be common sense, doesn't it? That's thing about common sense, though. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, it's not that common sense has been tried and found lacking, it's that it's been found difficult and left untried.

Unless you're likeable, it's extremely difficult to be found trustworthy. And unless you're trustworthy, no one will rally around your cause, no matter how good it is.

Whether you're in the for-profit or non-profit world, whether you're in some form of vocational ministry or working for a huge conglomerate, who you are impacts everything you're involved with. Our character can be the scent of life or the stench of death, and we would all do well to remember that.

The rest of the book tackles the implications of being enchanting, from launching your cause, overcoming resistance, using technology, how it plays out with employees and employers, how to make enchantment endure'and even how to resist it.

A key principle that resonated with me is that of endurance. Even if you have the greatest cause, it's essential to remember that 'enchantment is a process, not an event.' You're working to build a relationship, not just get a sale or get someone to do something for you. And relationships take effort. This is something that is not easy for many in marketing and even in leadership positions to remember. The truth is, though, for many of us, it's easier to try to squeeze whatever we can out of our market today, and not think about the long-term consequences (like having no market in the future).

This is where social media comes in handy, especially Facebook and Twitter (two resources that Kawasaki highly recommends). These two tools allow organizations and individuals to connect in ways that previously weren't possible. And used well, they can allow you to truly enchant your customer or supporter base by engaging on their terms. Dell, among other organizations, fields support questions via Twitter (I know because an associate contacted me once after I complained about my previous laptop). This gives people a great experience with the company, even if they don't like the product.

One of the challenges with social media, though, is finding the right mix of promotion vs. conversation. Kawasaki suggests that if around 5% of your content is promotional, you should be in good shape, but he's also quick to point out that if people aren't complaining, you're probably not promoting enough (p. 115).

(Does this mean my Twitter followers will be seeing a shift in my updates? Probably, and hopefully for the better.)

Principles aside, the thing that caught my attention about this book is that it brought to mind people I know who are naturally good at this. They just seem to 'get' that this is the kind of person you need to be in order to be successful. Take some time and look around your office, your school or whatever context you spend most of your day in, and I suspect you'll see at least one or two people who are naturally 'enchanting' as well.

So here's the big question: Will this book help you to be 'enchanting' in your sphere of influence?

Possibly. This isn't a book that guarantees that if you follow these 8 easy steps, you'll have more friends, better posture and piles of candy. What it does remind readers, though, is that the only way to really make a lasting impact on people is to act with integrity. That's a big deal and advice we would all do well to heed.

If you have a chance, do pick up a copy of Enchantment. It's definitely a worthwhile investment and just might challenge you in a few places where you won't expect it.

Good seller, they have very good communication skills with customer. They take responsiblitits of what they do, they are good seller.

"They are joined one to another,
They stick together and cannot be parted." -- Job 41:17 (NKJV)

Enchantment is Guy Kawasaki's extension of Robert Cialdini's classic, Influence, in trying to integrate lessons from behavioral psychology to the level of creating a marketing program that makes enough of a lasting impression with a superior offering to make people change their habits. The book is mostly based on summarizing research done by others, with examples drawn either from the research methods or Mr. Kawasaki's personal experiences as a consumer. For someone who wants to understand how to be more influential in encouraging engagement and stickiness, the book is a decent summary that will save reading a lot of other sources and assembling them into a program. However, the book doesn't add much beyond being a digest of that research.

I mainly disagree that the book lays out a program for creating "enchantment," a psychological state that captures how people behave when they are doing something they love, just for the joy of it . . . such as finger painting with a child and not caring about the mess while having a giggling good time. Now a book with a title like "Enchantment" is going to sell a lot more copies than one about "Engagement and Stickiness" so I don't blame him for using it . . . but I think he's overselling his contents.

I appreciate that Mr. Kawasaki clearly states that he is on the side of ethical "enchantment." I found that the advice didn't always seem to match up with that standard. One glaring example is calculating how much swearing to do and when to make the best possible impression on listeners. To me, that seems more manipulative than enchanting.

A lot of behavior is also defined so narrowly that it will create an impression, but one that may well be forced . . . rather than free flowing. Smiling is a good example. Study the smiling countenance of some celebrity you like. Chances are you'll feel that you are in the same room with the person, and that you are being looked upon as if you were the celebrity's favorite person in the world. That can be enchanting for brief periods of time until you realize that the celebrity is really just putting on a practiced smile for a camera. It's an act.

Personally, I have been much more impressed in my business career by people who expressed actual interest in talking to me, acted with the absolutely highest integrity in every little thing, and honestly told me their innermost thoughts about what was good and not-so-good about their offerings. I didn't quite get that sense here. It was more like being prepared to put lipstick on a pig and present the pig as the greatest thing ever.

I think the lessons and the storytelling would have gone a lot better if they had been applied to a recent launch of an offering that Mr. Kawasaki helped with. Then, the practical problems would have been more obvious, and some good advice could have been presented about how to apply the research. But perhaps Mr. Kawasaki is more of a speaker than a marketing consultant. It was hard to tell from reading the book.

There's a quiz at the end that emphasizes remembering factoids from the book, rather than how to integrate the pieces together. That's emblematic of the book's overall limitations: It's more a pile of pieces than an integrated whole. It's easy to put the pieces of so many little rules together in a way that creates a Frankenstein monster clumping along looking for love rather than an enchanting engagement.

One particular weakness is that the book is probably an attempt to describe now to work with the early triers in a new offering category. These people are intrigued by anything new that offers advantages. Geoffrey Moore has written well on the subject. But most offerings must shift their appeal to meat-and-potatoes advantages if they are to reach a mass market. All of that is mixed up together as though all customers were the same. That's always a mistake.

Read, remember, and apply very cautiously.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Smart, Funny, Insightful and Enchanting
I was first taken in by Guy's writing style in "The MacIntosh Way" followed by "The Computer Curmudgeon" and "Database 101", all of which he gives away for free (in digital PDF... Read more

Published 8 months ago by TheMattDaddy

4.0 out of 5 stars A surprisingly good read of (hopefully) obvious material
I ordered Enchantment a few days before I saw Kawasaki speak at a marketing conference. I was underwhelmed by his Enchantment presentation, feeling that it bordered too much on a... Read more

Published 14 months ago by SBuckle

5.0 out of 5 stars Taylor Swift and Guy Kawasaki...
I have been listening to Taylor Swift's great new CD Speak Now and the song Enchanted. I bought the CD before Guy's book and I kept wondering "How is Guy Kawasaki going to write... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Gayle Hallgren-Rezac

5.0 out of 5 stars Guy As You've Never Heard Him!
Guy talks Enchantment of course, but he also talks hockey! Check him out on this special episode of the BusinessCast: [...]

It's terrific! Read more

Published 14 months ago by Robert Gold

5.0 out of 5 stars Guy Kawasaki's instruction manual on how to change the hearts and minds of people. Get it, read it and live it!!
It was Guy Kawasaki's smile that first led me to decide to interact with him in 2007, and since then, every interaction has been a positive one. Read more

Published 14 months ago by John Koshy

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanted by Guy Kawasaki's New Book
When I read a new book, I evaluate it on three dimensions: (1) Is it interesting? (Did I learn something new about something that interests me?), (2) Is it useful? Read more

Published 14 months ago by Danny Iny

5.0 out of 5 stars How to create a context within which there is authentic magic to be shared
I have read and reviewed all of Guy Kawasaki's previous books. This book's title caught my eye because it suggests ' and as it turned out, correctly ' that its material and... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Robert Morris

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