This week, I was fortunate enough to chat with Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com, former chief evangelist of Apple, and author of Enchanment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Enchantment was released today. You can get it here
What does it mean to enchant someone? In short: to fill her with delight. While persuasion and influence can be employed for evil, Guy tells me that his goal in writing Enchantment was to provide people the tools necessary to persuade and influence people for good. For this reason, he puts a heavy emphasis on the absolute necessity of having an enchanting cause at the root of any enchanting company, organization, or movement. In the book, Guy writes: “In a perfect world, you are so enchanting that your cause doesn’t matter, and your cause is so enchanting that you don’t matter. My goal is to help you achieve both.”
Guy’s book is literally full of tips and tricks for how to convince people to join your cause, whether it’s a rock band or a software startup. From how to make a glowing first impression to how to make a captivating PowerPoint presentation, Guy’s advice has you covered from beginning to end and everything in between. The real power of the book, however, lays in its underlying philosophy: that winning people over is about doing great things and treating people with respect. While many other books out there can give you advice on how to use give a good handshake or get your boss to like you, Enchantment
But don’t take my word for it, hear it from Guy himself in the interview below.
Andy: Your book opens with a story about a time you were enchanted. Can you describe that time?
Guy: At the time I was in the jewelry business and my classmate from Stanford, Mike Boich, took me in the back of the building and showed me this computer that had MacPaint running on it, and it had something called Pepsi Caps by Andy Hertzfeld, that showed bouncing Pepsi caps and a Macintosh icon in the window, and at the time, you know – this was a long time ago, 1983 – most people had computers that were 24 by 80, if you were lucky you had upper and lower case. You had cursor keys to move the cursor around and to see graphics, and to see MacPaint it was a religious experience.
Why is it important to know how to create enchantment in others?
From a pure business standpoint, it is a much better relationship with your customer. It means that you will probably be able to sell more to your customer. It means that your customer has both higher expectations and greater patience with you. So imagine the relationship between Nordstrom and its customers, or Zappos and its customers and Apple and its customers, and Virgin America with its customers—those are good relationships.
You write about four things that enchanting people do on a first impression. What are they?
The core of enchantment is that you have to be likable, trustworthy, and have a great product or service. Likeability starts from your physical appearance, that you have a smile and it called Duchenne smile that incorporates both your eyes and your mouth
The second part of likeability in this initial impression is that your dress…you’re not dressed above the crowd, you’re not dressed below the crowd. You should dress for a tie – no pun intended – and then the next thing is your physical contact of a handshake, and I provide a mathematical formula for the perfect handshake, out of the University of Manchester.
Now, likeability in and of itself is not enough because many of us like celebrities and movie stars, right, but we don’t trust them. You don’t take, necessarily, life advice from Tom Cruise. So now you need to get trustworthiness, and there are some key points to trustworthiness; and I think the first thing is that if you want to be trusted you first have to trust.
It’s not a chicken or egg thing, the onus is upon you to trust first, and a great example of that is Zappos—where Zappos basically says ‘we trust you.’ So if you don’t like the shoe we will even pay shipping it back to us, so there’s truly no risk. And if Zappos had had a different attitude of—‘well, we are a startup right now, if you don’t like the shoe, you’re going to have to send it back at your expense,’ it would not be the billion dollar success that it is.
People that you trust default to a yes or positive attitude. They’re looking for ways to help you as opposed to ways that you can help them. So the next time you go to a party, and you meet new people, you should always be thinking: how can I help this person, how can I help this person—as opposed to how can this person help me.
The final analogy I would use is that trustworthy people are bakers not eaters. An eater looks at a pie and says: I want to get as big a slice of the pie as possible. A baker says: I will bake more pies or bigger pies so everybody gets more pie. And trustworthy people are bakers not eaters.
Are there characteristics that people can do when they are engaging or enchanting online as individuals, or with their own companies to reflect those same values and those same approaches?
I can help you optimize your online experience and your online reputation, but it starts with the baseline of you, trustworthy or not, either likeable or not. In an online situation, if you want to accelerate and optimize your reputation and your image, then the first thing you should do, is you should respond to people quickly, within 24 hours, and so very few people do this and believe me – I have great difficulty doing it too – but anybody who is responses within 24 hours already has a big, big plus that this person answers his or her email, or Direct messages, or Facebook messages.
So one—is respond quickly. Second—you should respond to everyone. You know, not just the A-listers, not just the powerful, famous people, but to everybody, because anybody could help you tip…this is a flattened or, if not, inverted world where lonely Joe may be the person who makes your book successful, not necessarily The New York Times book review editor. So respond to everybody.
And the other thing is that you need to respond and engage constantly. I think some people still look at social media as this thing which you do after you do everything else. And I think that is totally wrong. Social media is marketing today, and so to say that—well, I’ll check on Twitter and Facebook after I do everything else, is the equivalent of saying: after I do everything else, I’ll do some marketing, and see what I can scurry up. Marketing is core, basically you build something and you sell it, those are the two core functions of any organization, so to say that—well, I’ll sell stuff afterward, you know, if nothing else is left for me to do, it’s just plain wrong.
How does someone resist enchantment without offending people?
First of all, you could make a case that from time to time, as a person who is trying to enchant people you will offend some people. In fact, I might make a case that—if you haven’t offended some people you’re probably not trying hard enough. So let’s not have a zero tolerance for enchantment. Or zero tolerance to the resistance to enchantment, it may be. In particular with Twitter—on Twitter if you’re not pissing somebody off you’re not using Twitter right.
When presented with something that’s a great product or a service that’s innovative, people either get it in the first five minutes or they never get it. And if they never get it, or if they don’t get it in the first five minutes, then I could argue that you should just give up and cut your losses and move onto a different person.
There is a theory about never giving up and just grinding away on the person and finally, breaking down the resistance and they become your customers; but enchantment is love at first sight. You either got it or you don’t. You either enchant a person or you don’t.