Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down
Written by John P. Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead
Narrated by Tim Wheeler
4/5
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About this audiobook
You believe in a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it, hoping for enthusiastic support. Instead, you get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets. Before you know what’s hit you, your idea is dead, shot down.
It doesn’t have to be this way, say John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead. In Buy-In, they reveal how to protect good ideas and win the support needed to deliver valuable results. The key? Understand the unfair attack strategies that naysayers, nitpickers, and handwringers deploy with great success time and time again:
- Death by delay: Endlessly putting off or diverting
- discussion of your idea until all momentum is lost
- Confusion: Presenting so much distracting information that confidence in your proposal dies
- Fear mongering: Stirring up irrational anxieties about your idea
- Character assassination: Undermining your reputation and credibility
Smart, practical, and brimming with useful advice, Buy-In equips you to anticipate attacks and turn them to your advantage—so your good idea survives to make a positive change.
John P. Kotter
John P. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School, and is widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on leadership and change. His has been the premier voice on how the best organizations actually do change.
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Reviews for Buy-In
22 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent book and many good takeaways. Strongly recommended for any leader or person involved in change.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellents conseils pour mettre tous les atours de son côté lors de présentation de projet
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Excellent book to help you get your idea accepted. This is not a sales or negotiation book while some of the ideas can be applied for both. It starts with a story that anyone can relate to. He then breaks the story down with his theory. When you finish the book the main points are on his website. It's like a lesson plan for implementing his techniques. This book is not a page turner but it is short, clear and concise. One counter intuitive concept I really liked was that it can be beneficial to let the attackers of your idea into the group discussion. This is because they create drama and your greatest enemy is lack of attention. That said you need to be prepared for them and this book arms you with some ways to do that. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kotter breaks down common argumentative techniques used to object to ideas into four major categories - death by delay, fear mongering, confusion, and character assassination - and illustrates them with 24 common common "objections." Unlike many other books of this type he provides clear and concise responses for each of the arguments. While a few fall short of the mark (Argument #24 is "We are not equipped to do this," and his suggested response is "We have much of what we'll need and we'll get the rest," most of his suggestions are on the mark for keeping a discussion on point. He provides examples setting the arguments and suggested responses in context, and (using the same technique as in Our Iceberg is Melting), wraps it around the fable of trying to obtain more computers for the Centerville Library. A short, readable book, I actually found myself wanting much, much more. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tis a great little book (like Elements of Style). Describes the objectives of personal politics in tangible terms. They rightly paint the lowly committee as the place where most of us will make the biggest impression on others, beyond the color we paint our houses.Great take away, timing, focus & trade secrets of town meetings.