March 8, 2011
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Guy Kawasaki's new book, Enchantment- The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions, is released today. He is the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the Web, and a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures. Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple. Kawasaki is the author of ten books and a resident expert at OPEN Forum.
I interviewed Guy to talk about how business owners can use enchantment to help their business grow.
Q: Why did you name your latest book, Enchantment? It seems a strange name for a business book.
A: The thought process was that Tom Peters owns “excellence” and Malcolm Gladwell owns “ tipping” and Geoffrey Moore owns “chasm” and... I wanted a word that I could own that was beyond and different from wooing, influence, and persuasion. Enchantment just happened to be sitting there just perfect for me.
Q: How do you define Enchantment in business?
A: I define enchantment as this mutually beneficial relationship in which you are delighting people and you are changing their hearts, minds, and actions. It's built on trust and likability and a great product or service.
Q: How do you achieve likability and trust?
A: Well for achieving likability, the key is this first impression. You know, a smile that involves both your eyes and your mouth... with likability, you need a good solid handshake. I give you a mathematical formula for the perfect handshake. And the final aspect of likability, the foundation, is that you dress more or less equally to your audience. Not above them because you don't want to show them that you think you're richer or have better taste than them, and not less than them because you'd be insulting them.
The basics of trustworthiness... it starts off with the knowledge that for you to be trusted you have to trust others first. There is definitely an order there that you trust others and they will trust you. A great example of that is Zappos. Zappos trusts women to buy shoes and keep them if they like them but they'll also trust you to return them and pay postage both ways.
Want more on Enchantment? Check these out:
Another powerful way to become trustworthy is to always default to a yes attitude. That when you meet people, rather than trying to figure out how they can help you, you should always be thinking how can I help them. If they ask me for help, I will default to yes.
And the final aspect of trustworthiness -- and the main thing because I have a whole chapter about it -- is that you think like a baker not like an eater. So the difference is that an eater looks at a pie and says, “I have to get as big a slice as possible.” A baker thinks, “I can bake a bigger pie for everybody."
Q: What if you want to enchant your boss?
A: I think the key to enchanting your boss is something that some people may find distasteful but, what can I say, let’s be practical here. The key to enchanting your boss is that when your boss asks you to do something, you drop everything else and you do it. Now people are going to say, well what if I’m working on something that's more important to me, maybe even more important to your boss, maybe even more important to the organization?
You will not enchant your boss. The reality is that let's give your boss the benefit of the doubt. ...You don't really know the full context. So if your boss asks you to do something, drop everything else and do it. If you did that, that's 90 percent of the battle. It might seem distasteful. It might seem suboptimal, but [that’s] the answer.
Q: At the end of the book you also talk about how to resist enchantment. Not too many people really quote Adolf Hitler and Spiderman really in the same book. From Adolf Hitler you quote, “What luck for rulers that men do not think.” And for Spiderman, of course, you talk about, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Why’d you think it was important in the book to give this kind of warning?
A: Well because the book really can help you become more enchanting. Some of you believe that I'm going to give you some tips and some skills and some perspectives -- and you know, I wouldn’t say weapons -- but some ways to become more enchanting. Now for enchantment to last a long time, it has to be mutually beneficial. But some people may just take these skills and try to enchant people for the short-term and some of this enchantment may result in people convincing others to do things that are not in their best long-term perspective. So I felt it was a moral responsibility to tell you this is how you resist enchantment.
Take Guy’s Realistic Enchantment Aptitude test on Facebook.
Unfortunately, I scored only a 9 before I read the book.
Listen to the entire interview here.
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Barry Moltz 1 year 2 months and 20 days ago
Yes, Brian, "free" is really enchanting!