Book 1: Changing Minds

The book “Changing Minds” of Howard Gardner is a very interesting and enjoyable book. This quick, enjoyable research make you start thinking on how to convince others (even yourself) to adopt a different viewpoint in various settings, including business. And the good point, is that sometimes changing mind comes easily but what we have seen is that minds are exceedingly hard to change. Unfortunately, the book doesn't provide any specific tools or techniques for applying his model for changing minds. Nevertheless, the author, Gardner, present a model and reminder that one must keep both mind and ears open to effectively change others. And in order to change someone’s mind you always have to start by developing an ability to influence people’s thinking and gain their trust towards you.

And here as an example I wanted to talk about “resonance”, when it’s two people talking, resonance is the key factor. There is no general recipe for resonance; you have to know your audience well enough to know what’s going to resonate with this person on this day. If you want to bring about a change in the CEO, you have to know him or her very well. You need to do your homework before you get into that one-on-one situation. You need to know if this person is a story person, a theory person, an emotion person or a paranoid person. You need to know what are the sets of levers that work with him. And to the extent that it’s a very high-stakes performance? This is your two minutes, you have to make the case now or never? You’ve got to be monitoring very carefully.

Some chances comes only on time in your life and you have to be prepared to change the mind of the person sitting on the other part of the table.

Anri