Book Report: Enchantment

Enchantment is a bit of a marketing book from the guy who used to be the chief evangelist at Apple (yes, that really is a title!). It was a bit more ‘nuts and bolts’ than I thought it would be- it’s chock full of useful tips, things to do (and not do), checklists, etc and I was expecting more of a principle or philosophical book, but it has some good stuff nonetheless: • Default to yes- one way to become likeable is to adopt a ‘yes’ attitude. This means your default response to people’s requests is ‘yes’. To make a default yes work, you must assume people are reasonable, honest, and grateful. Everyone isn’t always reasonable, honest, and grateful, but most people are, and you can live your life in one of two ways: thinking people are bad until proven good or thinking they’re good until proven bad (24-25). Here's a very useful question- do you think people are bad until proven good or are good until proven bad? I think our answer reveals a lot. • For presentations- my guideline is called the 10-20-30 rule: make a ten slide presentation in 20 minutes with no font smaller than 30 points (122). We'll see if I can follow this rule when I preach this Sunday! • Judge your results and others’ intentions. People often judge their intentions against the results of others: “I intended to meet my sales quota, but you missed yours”. By doing this, they seldom find fault with their performance and almost always find shortcomings in the performance of others. If you want to enchant employees, you should reverse this outlook: Judge yourself by what you’ve accomplished and others by what they intended. This means you are harsher on yourself than others and embrace an understanding attitude like ‘at least his intentions were good’ (153-154). Really good word here. • And even some good marriage advice(!): If your wife asks you to do something, drop everything and do it. You may not think it’s important, but you aren’t juggling four kids, a career, and several charitable causes. You may think you see the ‘big picture’, but you don’t see her big picture (166-167).