Three Somewhat Surprising Rules to Enduring Company Success

1. Better before cheaper: When you must decide between making something better or cheaper, choose to improve rather than cut prices.

2. Revenue before cost: When you must decide between finding a way to increase revenue or reducing cost, choose to look at ways to increase revenue.

3. Change anything to follow Rules 1 and 2. Why? See 4.

How to Succeed over the Long Haul by Following These Rules

4. The twin shockers: There are no strong correlations between specific behaviors and exceptional company performance; and there is no strong connection between innovation and exceptional outcomes for the companies, thus the third rule.

5. Therefore, paradoxically, you don’t need to be exceptional in order to help make your company exceptional, yet you will probably be seen as such if you help your company stick to the three rules.

6. In the rare times when you find a way to avoid the tradeoffs inherent in Rules 1. And 2. you are on the path towards greater innovation, as described by Raynor in The Innovator’s Manifesto.

7. Put Rules 1 and 2 into practice: When allocating scarce resources or making other decisions among competing priorities, choose what will most enhance the non-price factors of what you sell, and which will most enable you to increase prices or to sell in greater volume.

8. The three rules facilitate organization-wide strategic alignment because they are simple, accurate and generally applicable.

9. Unlike the familiar admonition in many business books to “have a clear strategy” where there is actually no metric or other way to really know what is “clear”, you can know how your prices compare to what your competition charges. And, via durability, selection, delivery time and other measures, you can measure whether you are better. Thus you know whether you are following the rules… See the rest of the column at Forbes.

Do Others See You as You See Yourself?

We see some things about ourselves very clearly, such as recognizing our level of optimism, pessimism and self-esteem.  Yet, we are biased by our craving to be liked. Thus we’re heavily invested in believing in our traits such as intelligence, attractiveness, body language so they become our blind spots. That’s one of the reasons why it is helpful to recognize our personality traits by what we display, according to Gosling. We send mixed signals, in what we display and do, when ourselves differently than others view us, thus the chance of misunderstanding and friction.

He join forces with other Psychsters to offers the YouJustGetMe app for free. Use it to explore the “bright spots”, “dark spots” and “blind spots” in your relationships with others.

What are you inadvertently revealing?

We often reveal aspects of our personality traits by what we display, according to Gosling. From the pet you choose, to where you sit in a group, to the clothes you wear, you are constantly revealing your personality, what you most value, how you feel about yourself and others, how you view the world and even how you want to be treated.

• Dog owners, for example, rank higher in agreeableness, conscientiousness and extraversion than cat owners but lower in openness and neuroticism. Dog owners:  Is your pet’s personality compatible with yours?

• You are showing whether you are more extroverted or introverted.

• Even the ambiance of a place  – and what kind of personalities it attracts — can be determined by the profiles of the Foursquare users who frequent it.

• “Your desk is actually a window into your personality,” says Gosling. “An empty desk often indicates dissatisfaction with or a lack of dedication to a job. An overgrown fern says a worker is there to stay. Every single element, every item, got here somehow.”

How Do You Mark Your Territory?

I’ve summarized some of Gosling’s other clues over at Forbes.  

1. What Do Those Apparently Shifty Eyes Mean?

When someone is telling you something and looks up to the right, they are lying, according to an often-cited Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) claim. And they are telling the truth if they glance up to the right.

Yet at least three studies show no differences in truth telling by which way you look up. While a co-director of the NLP Training Center of New York, Steven Leeds recently asserted that NLP only cites eye movement as a way to recognize whether someone uses visual, auditory or kinesthetic (physical) cues to take in information, even that is disputed.

2. There are Unexpected Personal Benefits of Lying

Knowing when to remain silent, or to tell a white lie is, in fact, a social believes Feldman said. “We don’t want to hear hurtful things.” Bizarrely people who lie tend to be more popular. And embellishment-as-lying has its benefits. In interviews, college students who exaggerated their GPA later showed improvement in their grades. Their lies were self-fulfilling prophecies. Further, “exaggerators tend to be more confident and have higher goals for achievement,” according to University of Southampton in England psychologist, Richard Gramzow who concluded that, “positive biases about the self can be beneficial.”

Yet, our overall psychological health improves when we tell fewer lies.

3. Few Are Good Lie Detectors

“Most so-called lie detection experts — experienced detectives, psychiatrists, job interviewers, judges, polygraph administrators, intelligence agents and auditors — hardly do better than chance,” wrote Adam M. Grant. “In a massive analysis of studies with more than 24,000 people, psychologists Charles Bond Jr. and Bella DePaulo found that even the experts are right less than 55 percent of the time.”

Amateurs and so-called experts over-estimate their ability to read body language, including detect deception. According to Sue Russell, that confidence, “is counterproductive and even lowers the accuracy of judgments. People under stress—being wrongly accused certainly qualifies—can behave in ways impossible to distinguish from those who are lying.”

Yet, when business professionals, “amateurs” at lie detection, were asked to interview prospective employees, which kind of person was better at detecting liars and thus less likely to hire them, the more skeptical or the trusting evaluators? *See the answer at the end of the column, over at Forbes.

1. Give Them an Obvious Sign

• When you see a path of big green footprints you are more likely to follow them to the public bins and throw your trash away. That’s what the Danish Nudging Network discovered. First they gave distinctively wrapped caramel candies to pedestrians in an area.   Afterwards they searched nearby garbage cans, bicycle baskets and even ashtrays for the empty wrappers, and counted them. Then they painted green footprint up to recycling bins and repeated the experiment. While 70% of the wrappers weren’t found in both settings, 46% fewer wrappers were littered in the “green footprints” experiment.

• After an image of a housefly was etched inside the urinals at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, the amount of misdirected urine fell by about 80%, according to the airport. They had something to aim at so the idea has spread.

• To sway more people to take the stairs, the Dutch NGO Hivos painted bright red strips from the lobby to the stairs. During the 24-hour experiment, they saw a 70% increase in the number of people who choose to climb the stairs. It’s all part of their Seduction Project, a clever label that’s sure to nudge people to volunteer for it.

We can also be nudged to not forget our belongings. 

Hint: What symbolic scene can you use to nudge people to move, or put something down or pick it up?

2. Don’t Make Them Feel Cornered

The counterintuitive way to pull others into buying or helping is to verbally reinforce, in a face-to-face situation, the feeling that they are, of course, free to do what they want. The exact language does not matter, according to several studies. Phrases such as “but you are free” or “But obviously do not feel obliged” seem to work equally well.

Hint: Giving others the freedom and cues to talk themselves into something specific often increases the chances they will. See the rest of the column at Forbes.

Seize the opportunity to follow the ongoing coverage as a free primer on the priceless power of a winning label. Whether you are selling, serving, advocating or courting, try this formula for winning hearts and minds:

Compared to What? Create a S.E.A. Change to Influence Others

Evoke these three elements for crafting the label that sways others:

S. Securely Tied Together

Connect your message to a specific character trait or kind of situation that can color others’ perceptions by evoking a specific feeling.

E. Easiest to Picture 

Craft an instantly vivid mental picture that sticks in their minds like earworm songs they can’t stop hearing.

A. Already Familiar Idea

Piggyback your message on top of a well-known incident and/or person. You know you have an advantageous head start over those who are still when we are already running or driving. Similarly, if your characterization builds on something that’s already higher in their mind or memory than your opponents’ messages, then yours is likely to travel faster and farther.

Real Life Examples of  S.E.A Change in the Media Stories about the “Scandals”

Securely Tied Together

• When charactering the impact of Jon Stewart’s blistering criticism on The Daily Show, Salon political reporter, Alex Seitz-Wald, dubbed it Obama’s Cronkite moment. That is, “one of the most famed moments in broadcasting, when CBS News legend Walter Cronkite delivered an editorial opinion after the Tet Offensive in February 1968 saying, ‘It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.’

Apparently watching at the White House, President Johnson, who had lost the left long ago, reportedly turned to an aide and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.’”

• “Scandal reduction surgery” does double duty in labeling when Politico’s Glenn Thrush and Jennifer Epstein use it to label Obama’s two press conferences this week. They compared the situation to a medical need and reinforced the “scandal” label as a central part of the anti-Obama narrative. To alter a common saying, familiarity breeds acceptance, adoption and variations on the theme, such as “scandal sickness.”

• Right leaning The American Spectator’s alliterative headline, From Bimbos to Benghazi ties together two situations, the core point of their commentary, that “…the tactics used to smear Bill Clinton’s women — his ‘bimbo eruptions’ as the phrase of the day went — are now being wheeled out to deal with Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi whistleblowers.” Peggy Noonan also uses alliterative labeling: “The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister.”

Easiest to Picture

• “This is the final brick in the wall against a primary of any credibility,” said Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager Jesse Benton, told Forbes columnist Howard Fineman.

• “That’s the main lesson from this latest mess: the federal government is an untamable beast,” wrote Reason’s Steven Greenhut. Hint: Specificity makes a label stickier. Instead of “beast” Greenhut might have written tiger, oct0pus or gorilla. Read the rest of the column at Forbes.

She continued, “We haven’t been on a plane since we flew here from Bogota last November.  My professor advised us to leave right away. In fact, he gave us the money for our tickets.” I smiled at her, not knowing what to say.

“We are going to our new home.” She nodded again towards her father.. Her father was gripping his canvas bag with both hands, staring steadily at a blank pillar.   I touched the top of her hand for a moment, and smiled again. “My mother and four brothers were taken from our home in the middle of the night. They said they’d kill me if we tried to stop them.  You see, they wanted to silence my father.”

“He stood up to them, even when they pointed guns at him, but he’s afraid of flying. We have different fears. Now I must help him.”

He was shifting in his seat.  She paused and then blurted out, “And he needs his dignity now, more than ever. “ Her eyes looked down and then up, as if for understanding. I nodded once more, trying to find the right thing to say.

Finally I smiled again and simply replied, “Looks like you are doing just the right thing for him.”

We sat in silence for another half hour until our plane finally arrived, deplaned and the gate agents asked us to board. The young woman rose, we smiled at each other, and then she followed her father onto the plane.

I started to rise when a trim man with a short crew cut on the other side of me gently put his hand on my forearm, “There’s a tornado warning where we’re going,” he whispered. “Let me ask the agent to change seats so I can sit across from her father.  I speak Spanish so I can ask him about his homeland.  Keep him talking if we wobble in the air.”

Wobble was a gross understatement for what happened later on that plane. No matter what altitude our pilot attempted, our 16-seater rocked, dropped and rolled almost continuously on that long seventy-minute flight.  But in the two seats on either side of the narrow aisle ahead of me those two men talked through most of it, tightly clutching their armrests. Only after we exited the plane did five passengers, including me, throw up, just steps from our waiting luggage.

The next morning I left my hotel room to meet the conference planner in a ballroom where I was to give a keynote. After greeting me, she said the board member who was to introduce me was just coming in the ballroom door behind me. I turned to see Mr. Crew Cut striding towards us.

As the meeting planner started to introduce us, he smiled at me and interrupted, “We have met already, at an educational session last night.”  I grinned back in surprise.  He continued, now looking at the meeting planner “It was designed to help people overcome a fear of flying and it appears to have worked for me.”

While I enjoyed several educational sessions at that conference the lesson that has stuck with me the longest is the one the crew-cut man gave me: Overcome a fear by helping someone who has the same fear.

What incidents have become stories that shaped your life? One of Mario Cuomo’s recollections has stayed with me: “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.”

Want to understand and share the incidents of your life in ways that make them meaningful to others?  Nothing rings more real than sharing the stories that mark turning points in your life.  From what we share out loud, we can learn what matters to us and to each other. Here three ways for finding meaning, and self-understanding through pivotal life moments and connecting more deeply with others as you do.

1.   First, literally see what makes a great story stick

My favorite example is watching Wall-E and Toy Story Screenwriter, Andrew Stanton revealing “the Clues to a Great Story.”

2. Spontaneously act out scenes 

Like jumping into the deep end of the pool to learn to swim, learning improv can be a fast way to literally feel incidents that resonate with you because of an underlying truth.  TheatreSports, has evolved in an elaborate set of charade-like improv games that Drew Carey popularized with his TV show, “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?” All over the world, chapters have sprung up. It’s a fast way to see parts of yourself through other’s eyes, especially with people you are just getting to know. Melinda Blau dubs them “consequential strangers.”

3.   Bring out others’ humanity at work apt vignettes 

Pull others into your purposeful narrative so they can see a role they want to play in the story you tell, suggests Peter Guber in Tell to Win. See how stories can boost participation and performance.

Who knows? “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift,” wrote Erin Morgenstern in The Night Circus.

This column also appears at Forbes.

Legend has it that British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his political rival William Gladstone had a date with the same woman on different nights. When asked her impression of the two men, she said, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.”

Disraeli’s talent is echoed in what Jack Nicholson’s character famously said to Helen Hunt’s character in the movie, As Good as it Gets: “You make me want to be a better man.”

Counterintuitive Likeability Hint: People are more likely to be drawn to you and act admirably when they like how they feel and act when around you. That’s even more vital than how they first perceive you.

2. Craft Scenes That Make Us Feel important and Cared for

Was it the butterscotch-colored walls, light coconut scent wafting through the door as I opened it or the cushy island of azure blue carpet under my feet as I stepped into the boutique hotel? I don’t know yet I instinctively sighed with relief. And that was before I saw the smiling doorman walking towards me, saying, “We’re glad that you’re safely out of that storm. Let me help you with your coat, if you like, and your bag.”

The lobby was light with the soft, full-spectrum lights that store make-up counters have, making us all look and feel our best.

Feel Good Hint: Positive multi-sensory cues multiple their emotional impact when we feel more than one at once or three in quick succession.

In fact, without my knowing it at the time, that doorman looked more handsome and caring than I would have experienced him if the entry to that hotel had shiny metal railings, an elaborately patterned carpet and/or a dark colored wall.

 3. The Scene That’s Most Often Neglected Has the Biggest Impact on How We Feel About Our Experience

Further, since the last “scene” when I left the hotel the next morning was as a positive as the opening scene, I tended to forget the slow room service or cramped bathroom, according to research on the power of the sequence of events within an experience – from a vacation to a colonscopy. Yet that last scene we have in a hotel, hospital, restaurant, store or conference is often the most neglected. No small farewell gift? No smiling staff saying “We look forward to seeing you again.” These “peak end” moments have the most impact on how we recall the whole experience.

Even apparently small physical moment make a big emotional and even learning difference. Adapt these multi-sensory cues to pull others to you, your place or event.

Leaving Hint: The last thing you remember is often the most memorable.

4. Get Us Motion Together to Feel Togetherness

Children “are better at math when using their hands while thinking,” found to Josh Ackerman, a MIT psychologist. Further, the weight, texture and hardness of objects we touch affects our opinion of the people and the situation.

Moving Hint: Get people in convivial motion together, walking down a hall where the walls have a sequence of captioned images that build interest, suspense and conversation, Burma Shave-style, to collectively discover the “punch line” or answer in the last captioned image. See the rest of the tips at my Forbes column.

Taxi Mike, Geek Squad and

Like you, they realize that traditional selling is dead in our digital world.

Potential buyers can quickly compare products, as Daniel Pink eloquently suggests in To Sell is Human. Yet, unlike these three very different organizations, surprisingly few others have turned this truth into an opportunity to become the top-of-mind choice for their kind of customers.

What is their secret? Simply this.

They understand that extremely relevant helpfulness is not only the most human way to attract customers but it is also the best way to keep them loyal as Jay Baer demonstrates in his new book, YOUtility. 

As Baer suggests, “Sell something, and you make a customer. Help someone, and you make a customer for life.”

 Adapt one of these partnership-based ways to be more helpful than your competition, on-line and in-person:

1. Coddle Your Biggest-Spending Customers

Offer a gift with the purchase of a “bundled” collection of your services or products. Your gift is provided by your partnering business. Your clients can receive it by taking the gift card you give them to the partner’s outlet. You reciprocate providing a gift of equal value to your partner’s clients who walk in your door to receive it. Of course, you can replicate this method online. With this approach, you give customers more reason to buy more at one time and you get introduced to your partner’s biggest spenders.

2.    Serve Those in Difficult Situation Better Together 

After watching her mother staining clothes while taking her dialysis treatments several times a week, Megan Stengel and her partners began designing functional yet attractive clothing with hidden zippers and other alterations. Their firm, Libre Clothing, now partners with grateful dialysis clinics, hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation to make it easier and more comfortable for their “mutual market” of patients to undergo chemotherapy, dialysis or other treatments requiring intravenous lines, catheters or infusion tubes.  Hint: when you provide a first-of-a-kind combined service you are often a magnet for media coverage, especially if your helpfulness supports those in a dire situation.

See three more ways to pull in appreciative clients over at my Forbes column.

Become More Beneficial With Savvy Prosocial Support

When the bell rang we were to give a piece to someone else in the group who would then be expected to give some piece back.  We could not ask for a certain piece from someone else. All of us could be giving and receiving at the same time. The goal of each team member was to create a complete triangle shape out of the pieces they received. The winning team would be the first one in which every member had a completed triangle of pieces in front of them. Soon after the bell rang one team member was grimly grinning at me as she took one of my pieces and gave another back. While not violating the rules like her, most of us were also looking at everyone’s pieces to find the ones we needed.

Yet the man on my left was on a different path. He carefully looking around at each teammate’s set of pieces and then at his own. He would then give one of his pieces to someone, and put the one he received to one side. I was slow to understand his strategy but when I did I felt a surge of warmth towards him and imitated his approach. You see, instead of figuring out how fast he could complete his triangle by pulling the right pieces from others, he was helping them complete theirs by seeing which if his pieces would help each of them. Inevitably the leftovers in front of him would eventually form a triangle too.

Give and Become  Sought-After

Our “team” won because of him, and I am certain I got accepted to the program on his coattails of connective leadership. Meeting him was a life-changer for me. That was years ago and Jim remains a hero and a friend of mine to this day. Organizational psychologist and Give and Take author Adam M. Grant would call him a successful giver and he has certainly proven to be.  Jim is widely admired and sought-after in many realms of work and life. From his studies, Grant would say that Jim, with practice in strategically helping others, has strengthened that selfless “giving muscle” we all have, thus also boosting his willpower and focus, becoming more productive in the use of his time and energy. (See the chocolate cookie/handgrip squeeze test described in Grant’s book).

Not all givers are successful. In fact some are the least productive, most unhappy people, according to Grant’s research. Most of us learn that lesson the hard way, and keep re-learning it.

Become the Kind Of Giver Who Gets the Most Success and Satisfaction

The priceless core lesson of Grant’s extraordinary book (my favorite on behavior since Quiet) is that we can become successful and lead a satisfying life with others if we learn the right way to give. This talented, widely-liked and introverted social scientist divides the world into givers, takers and matchers:

• The majority of us are givers, according to Grant, yet “are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success.”

• “Takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf.

• Matchers expect some kind of quid pro quo, “with a master chit list in mind.”

What makes some givers successful and sought-after is that they have both a deep, evident caring for others, yet they also attend to their own self-interest. They are not “doormats.” Grant cites three relevant behaviors for being productive, happy givers:

1. Be judicious about giving to takers
2. Give in ways that reinforce and support your most vital relationships. (You can’t serve everyone extremely well and care for yourself)
3. Consolidate your giving into chunks of time with an individual or group so your support has a more substantial, meaningful impact

From my experience a fourth point is also vital to delivering the most helpful value for others, and yourself:

Recognize the Need to Feel Needed and Connected

In art as in life it is often a matter of where you draw the line, the saying goes, and to succeed at work you need to draw a line to create healthy boundaries. Sacrificing your precious time with closest friends, colleagues and family members because you are devoting it to too many others may not be judicious choice for the self-care that Grant advocates.

As Susan Dominus observed in her New York Times article, Grant has a traditional marriage where “his wife “who has a degree in psychiatric nursing, does not work outside the home, devoting her time to the care time of their two young daughters and their home” and “works at least one full day on the weekend, as well as six evening a week, often well past 11.”

As an alternative model of healthy giving that reflects Grant’s definition of also taking care of oneself and “chunking” the helpful time with others, serial investor, Brad Feld has often written about how he gives and sets boundaries, becoming a role model in productivity. Feld helps many in the locally-based TechStars start-up communities, the start-ups in which he and his business partners invest, and boards on which he sits. He also scales his knowledge in his blog and co-authored books, and by providing open “office hours” to help most anyone.

In his self-caring approach to giving, he resolutely and publically sets aside specific vacation and other times with his wife, and for visiting with his parents, and closest friends – and for reading and running. A core theme running through Brad’s approach is connective, collective giving. That often means apt teams help others. This models behavior for those who receive to emulate, spurring them to enjoy the camaraderie of collectively giving, using their complementary talents with and for others an each other.

Help Others to Become More Helpful

We can feel that heady, immediate hedonic high each time we help someone who seeks our advice or an introduction, yet there may be surer ways to both support others and ourselves while also spurring them to emulate the giving behavior they receive. Those who continue to keeping getting the help they ask for, without any explicit expectation of reciprocity, may become habituated to asking for help; and thus inadvertently be turned into takers. Over at Forbes, see the rest of this column, including  three kinds of behaviors that I have experienced that spur a natural balance of give and take…

Four More Reasons Employees are Key to Reputation and Sales

1. 41% of us believe employees are the most credible source of information regarding their business. “Employees rank higher in public trust than a firm’s PR department, CEO, or Founder,” according to Edelman’s 2013 Trust Barometer.

2. “Customer engagement must start with employee engagement,” notes Steve Farnsworth. The more responsibility, recognition and training that companies provide employees for engaging smartly with stakeholders the more connected and adaptive the company becomes. And the flip side can cause much more brand damage in our digital world.

3.  “Corporate learning and capability is now the #1 challenge in businesses around the world,” according to Josh Bersin. What better way to create relevant, efficient, collective and iterative learning than by establishing a customer-centric employees-as-brand ambassadors program?

4.  We know that people increasingly compare and share product experiences, giving them game-changing power over your brand reputation.  Turn this growing threat into a great opportunity by using your best asset: your employees. IBM, Ritz Carlton, Zappos, Harley Davidson, GORE-TEX, L’Oreal, LEGO, Virgin and a few other companies discovered years ago.

Declare Great News About “My” Company to Deepen Belief in it

“Publicly declaring your support and affiliation motivates you to back it up with real loyalty and engagement. It’s loosely like telling yourself, ‘I can really do this,’ before trying to shoot a free throw, wrote InformationWeek editor David F. Carr: “Pepsi discovered that over 50% of its employees already wanted to share news about Pepsi with their networks.”  That’s a priceless opportunity since emotions and behavior are contagious to the third degree, according to Connected co-authors James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. .That means your employees not only influence the views and behaviors of those with whom they interact but others as far as two more interactions away from them. That’s a huge multiplier of a negative or positive brand reputation.

Four Vital Skills for Becoming Valued, Visible Brand Ambassadors

1. First, step into their shoes and be helpful in ways they find helpful. Be a productive and successful giver, gleaning ideas from Give and Take. Recognize the value of building real relationships, not just “hooking up” as Whitney Johnson dubs the one-way entitlement some feel in asking for help.

Johnson cites Judith E. Glaser, author of Conversational Intelligence, “As we reciprocate, we build trust and relationships, flooding our brain with oxytocin that is essential not only to collaboration, but to innovation.” For employees and thus for the company, that approach can create a virtuous circle of well-being and high performance.

2. Be a deeply responsive listener who demonstrates you heard what they said, and does not immediately revert the conversation back to yourself. Instead seek to serve them their way, based on what they said, exhibiting The Golden Golden Rule, doing unto others as they would have done unto them. Offer a relevant, concrete scenario that explicitly shows how they will benefit by doing what you suggest. Craft what Peter Guber calls a purposeful narrative where they can see a role they want in the story you tell, reshaping it to make it their own to share with others.

3. Be so vivid that others tend to remember and repeat what you say, using the A.I.R. method and other communicate-to-connect cues. See more connective behavior tips from my talk (bottom of page) at BusinessNext. See the rest of the column at Forbes’ Quotable and Connected.