Persuading executives with charismatic decision making style

Persuading others, especially senior executives, is a challenge one often confronts in corporate life. After some reading on the matter this is how I see the art of persuasion.

Most folks fall into one of the five types of decision makers according to the work of Miller, Williams, and Hayashi charismatic, thinker, skeptic, follower, and controller.

Here are some interesting elements of this 5 paths/styles of decision making.

Charismatic decision makers:
About 25% of executives fall in this group. They are open to new ideas and are often excited by new ideas, but are cautious and tempered when making decisions. They rely equally on emotion and rational to arrive at their decisions.
Buzzwords that get their attention are results, proven, actions, show, watch, easy, clear, and focus.
Research suggests, while persuading charismatics folks to fight the urge to join their enthusiasm and focus on results. These type of decision makers prefer simple and straight arguments. They also prefer visual aids.

Do you currently work for someone whose decision making style is charismatic? Next post is on Thinkers.

Presenting like Steve Jobs

This morning, via GuyKawasaki’s tweet, I came across a cool review of Carmine Gallo’s recent book. Gallo provides 5 tips to on how to present like Steve Jobs. I had fun tweeting these 5 tips.

Here are the 5 steps to start being Steve Jobs:

1- Introduce the antagonist

Job’s always introduces a villain before Apple rides in to save the day. In the early days of Apple it was IBM and these days it is of course, Microsoft/Windows. Carmine’s suggests introducing a antagonists each time you are presenting. The villain may be a competitor, state of the industry etc

2- Create Twitter-friendly headlines

Job’s is superior at writing headlines for jounalists, says Carmine. He suggests all presentation should be summarized into less than 140 characters. Example, Job’s summed up his presentation on Appel’s Mac Air with a simple statement – World’s thinnest laptop !

3- Sell transformative experience (and not your product)

Job’s, according to Carmin, only sells dreams. I think that is very true, when Job’s first introduced iPod he did not talk about them as a better designed MP3 player. He talked about how the experience of listening to music would be transformed on the go.

4- Zen simplicity

Keep the presentation simple and visual. Keep it less Gates like !

5- Rehearse

This one is easy, but difficult to execute.

The video below is very good material about power point presentation.

I decided to be blogkrupt !

I took at look at the various blogs I have been following and reading, they are over 60. I am not sure why I am subscribing to these blogs and what I am gaining. Therefore, I decided it is time to declare blogkruptcy.

Blogkruptcy – I Googled the term to see if anyone else has coined and defined it, but to my surprise no one has. So here I am sipping some Dragon Jasmine green tea and brooding over what I just did.

I basically went to my Google Reader settings and selected all the blogs I am currently subscribing and hit unsubscribe! In two clicks I erased my subscriptions to numerous blogs and I am excited to start fresh.

So what is blogkruptcy, in my view, it is more that I did. Blogkruptcy is deleting your presence on the blogosphere by unsubscribing to all blogs and deleting your own blogs.