Let the Story Do the Work shows how the art of storytelling is key for any business to achieve success.For most, there’s nothing easy about crafting a memorable story, let alone linking it to professional goals. However, material for stories and anecdotes that can be used for your professional success already surround you. To get people interested in and convinced by what you are saying, you need to tell an interesting story.As the Founder and Chief Story Facilitator at Leadership Story Lab, a company that helps executives unlock the persuasive power of storytelling, Esther Choy teaches you how to mine your experience for simple narratives that will achieve your goals.In Let the Story Do the Work, you can learn to:Capture attentionEngage your audienceChange mindsInspire actionPitch persuasivelyWhen you find the perfect hook, structure your story according to its strengths, and deliver it at the right time in the right way, you’ll see firsthand how easy it is to turn everyday communications into opportunities to connect, gain buy-in, and build lasting relationships.

    It's more persuasive than marketing, advertising, or any other form of communication. And it all starts with seven universal triggers: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust.Fascination plays a role in every type of decision making, from the brands you choose to the songs you remember, from the person you marry to the employees you hire. And by activating the right triggers, you can make anything become fascinating.To explore and explain fascination's irresistible influence, Sally Hogshead looks beyond marketing, delving into behavioral and social studies, historical precedents, neurobiology and evolutionary anthropology, as well as conducting in-depth interviews and a national study of a thousand consumers, to emerge with deeply rooted patterns for why, and how, we become captivated.Hogshead reveals why the Salem witch trials began with the same fixations as those in "Sex and the City." How Olympic athletes are subject to obsessions similar to those of fetishists. How a 1636 frenzy over Dutch tulip bulbs perfectly mirrors the 2006 real estate bubble. And why a billion-dollar "Just Say No" program actually increased drug use among teens, by activating the same "forbidden fruit" syndrome as a Victoria's Secret catalog.Whether you realize it or not, you're already using the seven triggers. The question is, are you using the right triggers, in the right way, to get your desired result? This book will show you.

    Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

    Busy executives expect you to respect and managetheir time more effectively than ever. You need to do thegroundwork to make your message tight and to the point. The averageprofessional receives 304 emails per week and checks theirsmartphones 36 times an hour and 38 hours a week. This inattentionhas spread to every part of life. The average attention span hasshrunk from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight in 2012.So, throw them a lifeline and be brief.Author Joe McCormack tackles the challenges of inattention, interruptions, and impatience that every professional faces. Hisproven B.R.I.E.F. approach, which stands for Background, Relevance, Information, Ending, and Follow up, helps simplify and clarifycomplex communication. BRIEF will help yousummarize lengthy information, tell a short story, harness thepower of infographics and videos, and turn monologue presentationsinto controlled conversations.Details the B.R.I.E.F. approach to distilling your message intoa brief presentationWritten by the founder and CEO of Sheffield Marketing Partners, which specializes in message and narrative development, who is alsoa recognized expert in Narrative Mapping, a technique that helpsclients achieve a clearer and more concise messageLong story short: BRIEF will help you gain themuscle you need to eliminate wasteful words and stand out from therest. Be better. Be brief.

    This is not a book just for copywriters and other advertising experts but a book for every business owner, marketing expert or anyone who needs to increase sales.The reason why is because it deals with how to channel the forces in the marketplace which control sales.Put simply, Gene's book addresses the universal problem of all copywriting: How to write a headline — and an ad that follows it — that will open up a whole new market.

    In this practical guide, legendary copywriter Joe Sugarman provides proven guidelines and expert advice on what it takes to write copy that will entice, motivate, and move customers to buy. For anyone who wants to break into the business, this is the ultimate companion resource for unlimited success.

    Your product or service works beautifully - but something is missing. People just don’t see the big idea - and it’s keeping you from being successful. Your idea has an explanation problem.The Art of Explanation is for business people, educators and influencers who want to improve their explanation skills and start solving explanation problems.Author Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft, a company known around the world for making complex ideas easy to understand through short animated videos. He is your guide to helping audiences fall in love with your ideas, products or services through better explanations in any medium. You will learn to:• Plan: Learn explanation basics, what causes them to fail and how to diagnose explanation problems.• Package: Using simple elements, create an explanation strategy that builds confidence and motivates your audience. • Present: Produce remarkable explanations with visuals and media. The Art of Explanation is your invitation to become an explanation specialist and see why explanation is now a fundamental skill for professionals.

    It directly translates the revolution in neuroscience that has occurred over the last 40 years into practical new techniques for effective persuasion.Whether your goal is to persuade one person—a husband, child, or boss—or the millions who might purchase an Apple Watch or a Budweiser, 7 Secrets of Persuasion will show you how to:*Unearth the motivation that actually changes a behavior like smoking, voting, or buying, even if the person(s) doesn’t know why they do what they do.*Tap into the mental process that gives religious symbols, political symbols, and commercial logos their power.*Make a promise that is delayed, uncertain, and rational more compelling by making it immediate, certain, and emotional.*Transform your candidate, service, or product into the one people want to buy by utilizing what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.”

    "This book is a real eye-opener and I would recommend it for any manager at any stage in their career."—Professional Manager MagazinePhilip Graves reveals the myriad tricks and psychological games retailers play on consumers, the ways in which we are manipulated into buying things we don't want, and the cutting edge science being used to change our habits to ever more significant degrees.

    Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers. Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that people simply “get”. In this book Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw. Drawing on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries of vision science, this book shows anyone how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visual thinking tools – tools that take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show. THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN proves that thinking with pictures can help anyone discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights. This book will help readers literally see the world in a new way.

    With chapters like "The Ten Rules of Successful Communication" and "The 21 Words and Phrases for the 21st Century," he examines how choosing the right words is essential. Nobody is in a better position to explain than Frank Luntz: He has used his knowledge of words to help more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies grow. Hell tell us why Rupert Murdoch's six-billion-dollar decision to buy DirectTV was smart because satellite was more cutting edge than "digital cable," and why pharmaceutical companies transitioned their message from "treatment" to "prevention" and "wellness." If you ever wanted to learn how to talk your way out of a traffic ticket or talk your way into a raise, this book's for you.

    In The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton sets out to help you learn. By observing a typical day of decision-making, from trivial food choices to significant work-place moves, he investigates how our behaviour is shaped by psychological shortcuts. With a clear focus on the marketing potential of knowing what makes us tick, Shotton has drawn on evidence from academia, real-life ad campaigns and his own original research. The Choice Factory is written in an entertaining and highly-accessible format, with 25 short chapters, each addressing a cognitive bias and outlining simple ways to apply it to your own marketing challenges. Supporting his discussion, Shotton adds insights from new interviews with some of the smartest thinkers in advertising, including Rory Sutherland, Lucy Jameson and Mark Earls. From priming to the pratfall effect, charm pricing to the curse of knowledge, the science of behavioural economics has never been easier to apply to marketing. The Choice Factory is the new advertising essential.

    

    A successful marketing manager and product inventor challenges conventional ways of thinking and reveals how to successfully market new ideas.

    Each chapter applies a different theory to case examples and - to provide continuity - to a fictitious client' constructed from many past clients of the authors.