To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Read these books. Several books discuss some of the themes in this chapter—from framing arguments to finding problems to curating information. These are five of my favorites. Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini has done more to advance the scholarship of persuasion than anyone in the world. This book is his classic. You need to read it. Seriously. Go get it now. His public workshops, which I’ve attended, are also excellent. More information at: http://www.influenceatwork.com. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers are worthy successors to Cialdini. Their first book, which came out in 2007, is a gem. It will teach you how to create messages that stick, through the principles of simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Three years after Made to Stick, the Heath brothers came out with another book that’s equally good. This one is about change—which they’ll tell you depends on the emotional elephant and the rational rider working in concert. (Trust me—it makes sense.) Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. The opposite of clarity is murkiness. And murkiness’s close cousin is mindlessness—the state of being unaware. Wansink shows how mindlessness allows us to fall prey to hidden persuaders that make us overeat without even knowing it. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happines...