Product Description
Your projects, programs, and career turn on the difference between "no" and "yes." Yet selling ideas-especially the kinds of ideas that make organizations work-is a skill shrouded in mystery. Part emotional intelligence, part politics, part rhetoric, and part psychology, selling ideas is not like tricking someone out of his money. It's about helping others to see things your way-engaging their minds and imaginations.Charles Lindbergh, for example, needed woo to assemble backers for his famous flight. Nelson Mandela also used it to lead a revolution in South Africa. In any context, woo is two parts art and one part science.In The Art of Woo, Professors G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa offer a self-assessment to determine which persuasion role fits you best and how to make the most of your natural strengths. They also share vivid stories from their experiences advising thousands of leaders and stories about famous people like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Andy Grove, and Bono. Whether you're introverted or extroverted, competitive or collaborative, intellectual or practical, The Art of Woo will strengthen your persuasion skill in every aspect of your life.
From Publishers Weekly
Shell and Moussa, both on the Wharton School faculty, aim to help readers get attention and sell their ideas through strategic relationship-based persuasion, or "woo"-or "winning others over." The authors consider wooing to be one of the most important skills in a manager's repertoire; while the concept may seem simple, mastering it is an art. The challenge is in striking a balance between what the authors identify as the "self-oriented" perspective-where focus is on the persuader's credibility and point of view-and the "other-oriented" perspective, which focuses on the audience's needs, perceptions and feelings. Drawing on their experience in teaching executives to negotiate, the authors examine the most important moments of influence and provide a four-step process to achieving goals: survey your situation, confront the five barriers, make your pitch and secure your commitments. They offer a practical guide to improving one's wooing skills, highlighting successes and failures from history and the present day. An entertaining and useful guide to acquiring the power of woo, this book will help readers beyond the professional realm.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
An internationally recognized expert in law, dispute resolution, and negotiations, G. Richard Shell is the author of several books: the award-winning Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, a work that has been published in more than fourteen languages, and Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will, a work on competitive strategy and law.Professor Shell is the academic director of the Executive Negotiation Workshop and Strategic Persuasion: The Art and Science of Selling Ideas in the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a professor of legal studies and business ethics. He teaches in a variety of open-enrollment and customized programs. A partial list of his consulting clients includes the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Merck & Co., Citibank, Bank of America, and several of the largest labor unions in the United States. Mario Moussa is a senior fellow in the Wharton School of Business's Leonard Davis Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs and teaches programs in health care. He is also a lecturer at the Aresty Institute of Executive Education, where he has led the development of programs for corporate security managers, energy executives, physician leaders, and banking executives. He teaches negotiation, influence, strategy, change, and corporate culture. In 1999, he was appointed co-director of Wharton's Essentials of Management. He is also a principal and a member of the management committee at CFAR, Inc. He has consulted to a number of corporations, universities, and foundations. A specialist in large-scale organizational change initiatives, he has led projects at United Health Group, PNC Bank, the Georgetown University Medical Center, and State Farm Insurance. He has published widely in the field of organizational dynamics, power, and influence, and is a regular contributor to Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Higher Education. Winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards and a multiple finalist for the APA's prestigious Audie Award, Alan Sklar has narrated over 150 audiobooks, including Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings by Thomas Maier, and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. Named a Best Voice of 2009 by AudioFile magazine, his work has earned him a Booklist Editors' Choice Award (twice), a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and Audiobook of the Year by ForeWord magazine. The Dartmouth graduate's theatre credits include Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Seagull, and many modern roles. Alan has also narrated thousands of corporate videos for clients such as NASA,Sikorsky Aircraft, IBM, Dannon, Pfizer, AT&T, and SONY. For several years, he has been the spokesman for TracFone Wireless Co. and can often be seen and heard on TracFone radio and TV spots and infomercials."I am so pleased, as is my husband, to have found a narrator that holds our attention so well that we have come to compare every other narrator to him (you). So far we have found none with such a talent as yours. We very much plan to listen to as many of your works as we can find." ---Sandi King, a letter to Mr. Sklar
