Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary - Frank Luntz

I was looking for a book to help me improve my communication skills, and ended up finding this book in a list of online reviews. I think that the book is more inspirational in nature than informative, from my point of view. Here are the key learning points:

1. Selling yourself. I think this is a paradigm shift that is useful for my (and anyone's) career. It is the recognition that communications and marketing is more than about one's ideas, but more importantly, selling oneself. Henceforth, it will be key to think carefully about what is the professional image and identity that I want to portray.
   
2. Empathy is practiced. Maestros such as Bill Clinton took time to hone his skills in listening and empathising. The appropriate facial expression and tone to use, for example, was carefully rehearsed. I see that each encounter with people is an opportunity for one to practice one's skills in these areas. One key prong of effective listening is really about respect - giving the speaker the full attention in that moment. This takes great discipline.
   
3. "Get your hands dirty". To fully understand one's customers or one's competitors, it is not possible to remain in the ivory tower and base one's thinking on pure logic. There is a strong need for leaders to be on the ground, listening and learning all the time.
4. One sentence answer. Communications is centred very much on brevity. Practice how to condense your ideas into one sentence forms that can be sold quickly to people.
   
5. Selling the problem. The most effective way of selling a solution is to sell the problem. Steve Jobs' talks on the release of new gadgets, for example, sells you the problem by telling you no less than 3 times before he unveils the product.
6. Types of audience. He classifies the audience's receptiveness to one's ideas according to 5 levels - Rejection, disagreement, neutrality, agreement and action. The right thing to do for each of these groups are different. For example, for the vehement rejection group, just getting them to stay silent is good enough. Whereas for the agreement group, what you need to do is to energise them enough such that they go around evangelising for you like the action group. This useful way of classification allows one's messaging to be targeted.
   
7. "Persistence is the art of manufactured motivation". Speaks for itself!
8. Crafting the vision for your people. To engineer passion and commitment in people, give them a vision, and communicating this vision well to people is key.