Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Guy Kawasaki has made a career out of enchanting people. He has summarized what he has learned so far in Enchantment. (Think How to Win Friends and Influence People 2011.) Reading his book you will clearly see that enchantment doesn’t happen by accident. It is a state of mind that can be developed and perfected.

In a perfect world, if you had a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to your door. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way anymore. In our social media driven world you need to enchant them.

You need enchantment when you are trying to change the world because you need to convince people to dream the same dream you do, you need to overcome inertia and the fear of big changes, the process of getting people to diverge from a crowd is similar to getting them to join one, and you need people to engage for the long term.

The process of delighting (enchanting) people with a product, service, organization, or idea begins with three steps:

Likeability. Guy knows likeability. (330,000+ Twitter followers can’t be wrong.) You need people to like you. The way to do that says Kawasaki is to accept others and find something to like in them.

Trust. Like likeability, you go first. You trust others first and they will trust you. Kawasaki says there are two types of people in the world: bakers and eaters. Eaters think zero-sum. They want the biggest slice of any pie. The bakers don’t see the world as zero-sum game. They want to make more and bigger pies. Bakers are more enchanting than eaters.

Get Ready. Make your offering great. It should be DICEE—Deep (many features), Intelligent (clever/innovative), Complete (all aspects of the offering is a great experience), Empowering (makes possible what you couldn’t do before), and Elegant (works with you not against you).

As a part of getting ready he suggests you do a pre-mortem. Before the launch, assume you failed and ask, “What might have gone wrong?” Come up with reasons why the failure occurred in order to prevent problems and increase the likelihood of success.

In two very practical chapters, Kawasaki talks about push and pull technology. “Push technology brings your story to people. Pull technology brings people to your story.” Push technologies are presentations, e-mail and Twitter. Pull technologies are web sites, blogs, YouTube and Facebook.

Enchantment is about becoming the kind of person people want to follow and it begins with approaching people thinking how you help them rather than wondering what they can do for you.

How enchanting are you? Take Guy’s Realistic Enchantment Aptitude Test online.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:32 AM
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