Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) | Robert B. Cialdini | What's the difference between several version of the book?

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Influence: The Psy...

	Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) Robert B. Cialdini Collins Business, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 263 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say "yes"?and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.

You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader?and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.

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Should be required reading

Nutshell review - This should be required reading. It discusses and explains many ways in which we are being influenced and persuaded, often to our detriment. If you want to know how it is done, and how to defend yourself against it, then read this book - a few times.

What's the difference between several version of the book?

I read Influence: the new psychology of modern persuasion, a 1984 Quill version. I wonder what's the difference between different versions about this or similar book? Is 1984 content outdated?

Good background

This book gives a very good background to persuasion. At times it goes into a bit too much detail, but still definitely worth the read.

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Insightful

This books looks at the various ways in which salespeople and other influencers use techniques in order to get us to do things we normally wouldn't want to do. These sales techniques are foolproof and usually have the desired effect. The author provides lots of personal experiences and even joined certain sales organizations in order to find out their techniques. You'll be fascinated by what he has to say.

One thing to note is that the approach of this book is how to resist sales techniques, not how to use them. So if you're thinking of getting this to improve your sales skills, you'll definitely learn about the techniques and you'll learn some of the strategies that people use to resist them, but you won't get any advice on how to use the techniques.

Another thing that distracted from this book is that a lot of the illustrations look like they're from the late 70's or early 80's. Even though this is the latest volume, it still looks a bit old. It would have been nice if they updated some of the photos to reflect modern sensibilities. Despite this, the content itself remains very up to date, so while the old photos are distracting, they don't ruin the book.

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Basically Common Sense Approach

There's actually very few book on the subject of persuasion - most are written for the sales department and take that particularly aggressive approach liked by sales management and trainers who long left the coalface of real selling and continue to use the terminology of war tactics and strategy. Personally I never quite understood the mentality of 'attacking' markets and 'controlling' clients. However this is an interesting addition to the conversation and pulls together quite a few examples and analogies. Overall though I feel this hasn't been written in the heat of actual persuasive discussion. It feels more like a course for baby sales and marketing people still in college.

Buy the book if you're creating a library on the subject (it's been around a long time so it can't be all iffy) - but there are plenty more to reasearch.

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