A richly personal view of improving the interactions at the heart of sales.
Cowan outlines principles of salesmanship distilled from a lifetime in the business.
Drawing on his more than six decades of selling and sales management experience, the author shares his vision of the best principles and practices of sales (concentrating on one-on-one interactions rather than group sales, telephone sales, or the internet) and proposes ways that salespeople can adapt their psyches to improve their sales. As Cowan notes at the outset of his nonfiction debut, the general public tends to view sales and salespeople in a less than favorable light, evidenced by the fact that very few institutions offer university-level training in salesmanship. “We all recognize that to travel the same road we have traveled for a long time is quite comfortable,” he writes, invoking Robert Frost’s famous poem. “To choose a road less traveled takes courage and faith to meet new and exciting challenges.” Central to much of the author’s advice about selling is an emphasis on good interviewing, which often boils down to the art of listening. “Too often,” he observes, “the salesperson who loves to talk can’t wait for the prospect to stop talking so he can talk more.” Cowan includes not only diverting cartoons and sketches of some of the people he references but also affectionate stories about individuals who’ve shaped his own journey in sales. This is in line with the warmly personal tone he adopts throughout the book; there’s an enormous amount of wisdom conveyed, but it’s all delivered in such an invitingly personal way that the reader will feel encouraged rather than lectured to. (The author’s stress on listening as the true basis of trust is refreshing in a professional world that loves to hear itself talk.) Cowan’s focus on individual psychology is equally thought provoking as he posits that, in order to be truly good at what they do, salespeople should understand themselves before they try to understand their potential customers.
A richly personal view of improving the interactions at the heart of sales.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9798218260613
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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