The Invisible Mentor

Booked for Mentoring: Review – Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions by Guy Kawasaki

July 19th, 2011 |

Author: Avil Beckford

Image via Wikipedia

“Good enchanters are likable, but great enchanters are likable and trustworthy.”

Guy Kawasaki in his new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions defines enchantment as “the process of delighting people with a product, service, organization, or idea. The outcome of enchantment is voluntary and long-lasting support that is mutually beneficial….It causes voluntary change of hearts and minds and therefore actions….Enchantment transforms situations and relationships. ”

There is a shift taking place in the universe today. The consciousness is changing as evidenced by the kind of books that are being written. We have passed through the Information Age and entering into a new one, one that is more tribal in nature. Power and information is no longer filtering down from the top. Instead, the funnel has been turned upside down and information is moving from the grassroots up to the top.

More and more people realize that life is more than about them, and they are interested in causes that matter, that change lives. Success now comes with greater responsibilities, and to captivate audiences require different actions. And you have to be likeable and trustworthy – you have to be authentic.

That means you have to become an enchanter!

And that’s where Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions comes in. The book has 12 chapters with titles such as:

Why Enchantment?
How to Achieve Likability
How to Achieve Trustworthiness
How to Prepare
How to Launch
How to Overcome Resistance
How to Make Enchantment Endure
How to Use Push Technology
How to Use Pull Technology
How to Enchant Employees
How to Enchant Your Boss
How to Resist Enchantment

To become likeable, Guy Kawasaki suggests you should strive to create win-win situations, accept others, seek common ground, not impose your values on others, try to default to yes, among other things. To be trustworthy, you first have to trust others, be a Mensch, disclose your interests, give for intrinsic reason, gain knowledge and competence, show up, bake a bigger pie, enchant people on their own terms, position yourself and be a hero. And he goes into great detail to explain what he means.

For instance, to be a mensch, Guy Kawasaki paraphrased his friend, Bruna Martinuzzi’s 10 ways to achieve menschdom and added two of his own.

Always act with honesty.
Treat people who have wronged you with civility.
Fulfill your unkept promises from the past.
Help someone who can be of absolutely no use to you.
Suspend blame when something goes wrong, ask “What can we learn?”
Hire people who are as smart as or smarter than you are and give them opportunities for growth.
Don’t interrupt people; don’t dismiss their concerns offhand; don’t rush to give advice; don’t change the subject. Allow people their moment.
Do no harm in anything you undertake.
Don’t be too quick to shoot down others’ ideas.
Share your knowledge, expertise, and best practices with others.
Focus on goodwill.
Give others the benefit of the doubt.

To me, living the 12 precepts of “menschdom” is not easy but it’s something to strive for. And we have to recognize that we won’t be on top of them all the time.

Guy Kawasaki: The Pillars of Enchantment

If you cannot view this YouTube video from Forbes Video, please click here.

There is some unexpected wisdom in Enchantment. I particularly liked the idea of conducting a pre-mortem. A post-mortem is dissecting after the fact to determine cause, but in a pre-mortem, before you launch a new product, service or whatever, you project into the future with a mindset that you failed and why. The team is uninhibited in brainstorming the many reasons for failing because the project hasn’t launched yet so they will not be offending anyone. After the failure brainstorming session, they make the necessary changes to the product, service or whatever, to safeguard against those failures. Isn’t that a brilliant idea?

I also liked the sections on how to use technology to become an enchanter, and I appreciated that Kawasaki consulted with experts to get their tips to share, and they are tips that you can implement right away. Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki is well researched and as a reformed researcher, that gave him even more credibility in my eyes. At the end of each chapter, you experience enchantment in action via vignettes from many ordinary people. There is also a quiz at the end of the book.

If you want to be more likeable and trustworthy, then Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions is the book for you because it has concrete steps on how to become an enchanter. But I also recommend that you read Linchpin and Poke the Box by Seth Godin, Do the Work by Steven Pressfield, Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod because all these books help you to reach your highest potential, which I think is part of being enchanting.

Guy Kawasaki mentions Apple and its products a lot in Enchantment, and people may find that annoying or offensive, but I know that he is an Apple evangelist so it doesn’t bother me. I would like to mention that I received a copy of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions from the publisher to review.

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