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December 2011Our Smarter Advertiser Book Club Choice this quarter is not strictly a business book. You Talkin’ To Me is a book about Rhetoric. This may sound a bit old-fashioned, but in fact it’s a brilliant study of the art of persuasion, from Aristotle to Barack Obama – taking in Churchill, Hitler, Martin Luther King and even Homer Simpson. It’s a handy guide to all the skills you need to get buy-in for your ideas.
The other two books we’ve reviewed this quarter are Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. You talkin' to me? by Sam Leith
This may not seem an obvious choice for the book club, as it is not a purely business book. And Rhetoric – surely that went out with the Victorian Age?
This book is a brilliant users guide to the art of persuasion. We’re all in the business of communication and Sam Leith explains exactly how the techniques of Rhetoric can be used to make us better communicators, better sales people and win more arguments everywhere in our lives from the boardroom to the bar room.
Rhetoric used to be taught in schools as a matter of course. It was dropped over the years for more supposedly exciting subjects. A glance at the technical and rather dry glossary at the end which is really complicated (from Alliteration to Zeugma) makes it clear why. But Leith makes the subject seem very exciting. The subject is brought alive with contemporary examples drawn from pop music, business, politics, movies, literature and TV. He explains the techniques of winning an argument using JFK, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King . (Also Homer Simpson!)
Leith shows how the techniques of Rhetoric can change the outcome of events. On the “paromologia” or apology : “ I used to write gossip columns for a living and apologies were enormously useful….. By apologising for the one mistake in ten that someone bothered to complain about, we made the cavalcade of defamatory innuendoes, half-truths and outright fabrications that filled the column day in, day out, look, by implication, like cast-iron facts”.
The book is very funny, even laugh out loud funny (see the transcript from the 1967 film Bedazzled for one example of this).
His champions of Rhetoric include Obama, Churchill and “The Unknown Political Speech Writer”. And Hitler. Leith is aware of the moral issue of giving the label of champion to someone so evil. He says this is the very point of mentioning him as “Strive though theorists have since ancient times to naturalise the connection between oratory and civic virtue, Hitler is a good instance of the extent to which they have failed. Rhetoric’s effectiveness is, in the final analysis, independent of its moral content or that of its users. This is one reason why the more the good guys get clued into how it works, the better off we will all be”.
Good guys – get clued up here.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
The cover cites that McKinsey Quarterly calls Rumelt “Strategy’s strategist”. This may be off putting to some readers, but Rumelt’s dissection of limp and vague ambitions posing as business strategies is actually quite bracing.
The book opens in 1805 during Napoleon’s attempt to gain control of the sea from England. The English fleet was outnumbered by the combined French and Spanish fleet by 33 to 27 ships. A normal sea battle tactic was for the ships to line up in opposition facing each other and fire. But Lord Nelson had a brilliant strategic insight. “He broke the British fleet into two columns and drove them at the Franco-Spanish fleet, hitting their line perpendicularly.” By the end of the Battle of Trafalgar the French and Spanish had lost two thirds of their ships, and the British had lost none. From this extraordinary act of strategic bravery came an unprecedented period of British naval dominance. And of course Trafalgar Square in London. Nelson’s response to being outnumbered by the enemy was to risk his lead ships and to break the coherence of the enemy fleet. He focussed his resource and as modern marketing speak would have it sacrificed and overcommitted to his plan. (He won the battle but lost his life in the course of the action which is of course quite a sacrifice).
It is a simple and clear strategy to beat the competition, and the rest of the book gives example after example of many more of these in the more normal business context.
Rumelt is convincing that for a company to be successful it must focus. To create a breakthrough a business must abandon multiple goals and concentrate resource. There may well be a series of actions and activities that need to be carried out in order to achieve a single goal, but clarity about where the company wants to be and how it is going to get there is essential.
Rumelt says “Bad strategy is more than just the absence of good strategy. Bad strategy has a life and logic of its own, a false edifice built on mistaken foundations… Leaders may create bad strategy by mistakenly treating strategy work as an exercise in goal setting rather than problem solving. Or they may avoid hard choices… to cover all the bases rather than focus.”
It is a simple proposition and the book illustrates it with examples that range from NASA to Starbucks and include Cisco, IKEA, TIVO and Melbourne, Australia.
For anyone concerned with clarity of strategy and its distinction from a list of objectives and ambitions this book is a great business tool. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
When a book comes with a cover review that describes it as ”a landmark book in social thought, in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud” you know you are in for either something very special or a hugely over-hyped disappointment.
Thankfully Thinking, Fast and Slow is definitely the former: the book is a distillation of a lifetime’s work in the field of human perception from the distinguished psychologist and Nobel prize winning father of behavioural economics, Daniel Kahneman, and introduces the general reader to the ideas he developed with his long term (now late) collaborator Amos Tversky.
In a nutshell the premise of the book is that what we believe about the way we think is often dangerously wrong: as humans we presume we are paragons of rationality and logic (and our economic, philosophical and political systems have been based on this assumption) yet in reality – as the book skilfully demonstrates - the way we make decisions and form judgements is very often in fact governed more by worryingly unreliable intuition and emotion.
The book takes us on a tour of the mind and explains the two systems that are involved in the way we think, process information and make decisions. The first system – ‘System 1’ – is the intuitive part of part of the brain, quick to form immediate judgements, but often wrong in its conclusions. The second – ‘System 2’ – is much more deliberative, slow and rational, but is ‘lazy’ and all too often leaves the intuitive System 1 to do the thinking. After setting up this framework the book then goes on to look in detail at a series of fascinating implications that stem from this, each one based on a wide range of rigorous experiment and observation over many years.
Although Kahneman wasn’t widely known outside specialist circles prior to this book, the ideas and theories he has developed (that are covered here) have influenced countless others, from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge theory through to Paul DePodesta, one the central characters in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball (now a Brad Pitt movie).
Reading this book you can see why Kahneman’s influence has been so wide. This is a rare book, in that it makes you genuinely question some of your fundamental beliefs and perceptions about the way we think and communicate. Although not a light read (in either sense of the word) Thinking Fast and Slow should be a must for anyone involved in the business of communicating ideas and information. The examples in this book will profoundly affect how you view human understanding and its conclusions leave lightweight pretenders in the field of popular economics standing.
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