Brilliant Influence

Three of my Brilliant title are now available in Polish translation:    

November’s copy of The Treasurer is out.  This is the professional magazine of the Association of Corporate Treasurer’s and the editor invited me to write an article about negotiation.  You can read a version of my article below, or click the image to download the article as a pdf.   The need to negotiate is not negotiable.  We all do it; whether formally, in a boardroom, discussing millions of pounds, or around the dinner table, planning your family’s next outing. ...

Have you ever got to a hotel and found the reservation that they have for you is not what you booked?  Or arrived at a restaurant to find that your booking has gone completely missing?  Maybe you have arranged for a delivery at noon, to find it turned up while you were out, at 10am.  How can you recover the situation and get what you want? The first thing is to recognise that your sense of righteous anger will not...

In a fascinating paper* by Assistant Professor Marlone Henderson at the University of Austen, he shows that you will get a better result from your negotiations when you move further from the person you are negotiating with. Henderson compared negotiators miles apart with those who were only a few feet away. When the negotiators were miles apart, the negotiations went more smoothly, showed more compromise and less commitment to entrenched positions and focused more on higher priority, substantive matters, rather...

Changing my mind is difficult for you to do. But I do it all of the time.  So one of the most powerful ways for you to change my mind is to ask me questions.  When I answer them, you have compelled me to think for myself. When you ask good questions, you compel me to think in new ways. Here are seven tips to help you ask good questions Reduce friction and resistance by starting with wide open questions...

“Both” say researchers Melanie Dempsey (of Ryerson University) and Andrew Mitchell (of the University of Toronto). Their 2010 study* had three stages. Stage 1 They exposed experimental participants to hundreds of screen images.  Among the images were images linked to two invented brands of pen.  One brand was designed to be far superior to the other.  The images included 20 positive images connected to the inferior brand, and 20 negative images linked to the superior brand. Stage 2 Participants were...

Try an experiment – probably it’s best to do it when nobody is looking. See if you can quickly make a facial expression of happiness.  Easy?  Try this one: sadness. Let’s keep going: here are a few more to try: Happiness Sadness Anger Disgust Fear Contempt Surprise Frustration For most of us, we don’t need a RADA training to quickly pull a face that we are pretty sure others will instantly recognise as conveying one of the big emotions.  Illustrators...

There is a lot of interest on the news channels for how the Scottish Government wants to frame the question for its proposed referendum on Scottish devolution.  Does it really matter, as long as the question is clear?  The answer turns out to be a might “Yes it does” and this should result in a huge political tussle over the referendum wording. Professional pollsters know this.  When a client wants an opinion poll, the pollsters can frame their questions with...

When you are about to lie, or break your word, your conscience dives in to make you feel uncomfortable.  This is what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” and what I call “the Jiminy Cricket effect” – after Pinocchio’s friend. The question is, can we know when Jiminy Cricket is waking up? It turns out that the answer is yes. Research by Thomas Baumgartner of the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that, just before we break our word, brain scans show that that certain brain...

The advance copies of Brilliant Project Leader arrived on Tuesday morning and they are looking excellent. It is published today, on 17 November and Amazon UK are promising availability from 23 November. This is my fourth book in the Brilliant Series, two of which are in the Personal Development category, and two in Business. . “As with all Mike’s books, this provides a clear, concise and practical guide to project leadership. This book has the ability to greatly enhance your...