#231: Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human, Pt 2
Good morning dear friends
This is 2024’s final letter. This year’s favourite letters were How To Listen Better, Love &, Stay in Your Comfort Zone and How To Be Effective, Part One and Two. I will return on 19 January.
As you review your year the Power of Reflection and Questions for Powerful Reflection may be useful.
Two weeks ago, I shared some of my Cape Town favourites. If you’re not coming to Cape Town, you might want to get some Cape Town to you.
If you’re in summer heat, Banele Vakele’s Tembela Chenin is hard to beat. Kiara Scott Farmer’s Brookdale Old Vine Chenin will also make you happy. Kiara won this year’s Diners Club Winemaker of the Year.
Dele Olojede, founder of the ever-inspiring Africa in the World, would not forgive me if I left out Chris Alheit’s genius or the grandaddy of South African Chenin, Ken Forrester’s FMC.
(Banele and Kiara are both Cape Winemaker’s Guild Protégés. Click on their names above to learn more about them.)
If you’re in winter’s shiver, my default is Adi Badenhorst’s Kalmoesfontein Red. I am loving the newly-released Staanspoor, and you can never go wrong with multi-award winning Chris and Andrea Mullineux’s Syrah.
If you’re still looking for books to read, The Guardian’s Best Books to Give This Christmas has recommendations from Elif Shafak, Salman Rushdie, Attica Locke and many others. Brittle Paper’s 100 Notable African Books is also packed with delights.
My summer reading stack has some of these, but I am missing a few, so I’m open to gifts from both lists 😉
/strategy
We’ve been exploring Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human.
You remember that he identifies three qualities essential to building successful influence – attunement (read more here), buoyancy (read more here) and clarity. Today, we focus on clarity.
Pink defines it as “the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identify problems they didn’t realize they had”.
He notes that the radical democratisation in access to information qualitatively shifts how we must provide clarity.
In the past, we needed to be good at accessing information. Now, in the flood of information, we must be effective curators.
In an information-poor environment, the best salespeople had the answers. When answers are readily available, the best salespeople are skilled questioners. They’re thinking partners, helping their clients uncover possibilities, and find hidden problems and emergent risks.
Clarity is aided by contrast.
Pink tells us ‘Compared to what?’ is the essential question. When clients understand how our offering contrasts with its alternatives, they’re better able to decide.
We can increase contrast using these five framing techniques:
- The ‘less frame’ – help your customers see their choices instead of overwhelming them.
- The experience frame – research shows people get greater satisfaction from purchasing experiences than goods, so frame your offering in terms of the experience they will have.
- The label frame – what we name things matters. If our labels hint at what behaviour is expected, we get better results. In an experiment conducted by researchers from Northwestern University, a group of fifth graders who were told they were the ‘neat group’, indeed became neater than the other groups in the study.
- The blemished frame – identifying the limitations of your offering can build trust. However, they must be small relative to the benefits and be expressed after the positives – “this newsletter is a rich curation, but you can’t read it in three minutes”.
- The potential frame – “next time you’re selling yourself don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow”.
//self
On 12 August 2022, celebrated author Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution when a man stormed the stage and stabbed him repeatedly. Rushdie very nearly died.
Released earlier this year, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is his way of returning to the world.
He reflects, “Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another… Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world…”
After six weeks and two hospitals, Rushdie was allowed to go home.
He writes “…Eliza lay down next to me and then, suddenly, she was sobbing uncontrollably as all the stress poured out of her.
‘My husband’s home,’ she sobbed, ‘My husband’s home’.
There are moments, such as this when these events are painful to set down”.
Indeed.
It is a story of trauma, love, loss, courage and fear.
He reflects “my way of trying to deal with PTSD was to claim, most of the time, that I was okay. I told my therapist, ‘I don’t know what good it does to complain.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t you know that the reason you’re here is to complain?’”
It comforts me that even as insightful a soul as Rushdie might struggle to be okay with not being okay.
He journeys towards life, reflecting “The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too”.
He reminds us, “Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity… And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus Caesar, but the poetry of Ovid has outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam’s life was ruined by Joef Stalin, but his poetry has outlasted the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered by the thugs of General Franco, but his art has outlasted the fascism of the Falange”.
For his story’s trauma, Rushdie reaches for life, “… that Chautauqua morning, I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason – the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called ‘motiveless Malignity’ – and we also contain the antidote to that disease – courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger, lying on the ground”.
We can choose and our choices matter.
///soul
Last week, I introduced you to Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning Orbital.
This quotation is a fine way to end the year, “They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that wars abound and that borders are something that people will kill and die for. While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that’s where it ends. There’s no wall or barrier – no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear”.
As our year ends, I wish you dissonance of this variety, the disruption of convention to reveal possibilities. I hope you find ways to be connected to the indivisible fullness of life. There is much beauty to be embraced and protected.
If you need a smile, I think these pics from nonprofit Ethiopian Girl Skaters, might just work.
As always, thank you for being here. You can read past editions of the newsletter here and find our favourite quotations here.
All the very best
Karl
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