Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter

July 2010

Book review: You Need This Book ... to get what you want

Book author: Mark Palmer and Scott Solder

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia

You Need This Book to Get What You Want aims to assist readers to get everything from a great job to that refund at the shops. You know that feeling: all you want is to stay in control and feel empowered.

The book is a ‘spin off’ from the authors’ highly successful seminars aimed predominately at business clients, and uses a variety of supposedly simple techniques, anchored from human behavioural techniques and interpersonal dynamics

The tone of the book is written in an accessible and undemanding style to engage the reader quickly, with some deliberate ‘tricks’ in syntax and random storytelling to purportedly help the reader’s memory and learning processes.

Personally, I found the deliberateness of the writing particularly irritating and patronising, particularly with the ‘DO THIS’ summaries interspersed throughout the chapters. These tangents, according to the authors, are to ‘confuse you’, which will then ‘lead you to learning’. It led me to boredom and irritability.

I suspect this book may be more accommodating to someone new to sales, since many of the techniques claim to help you to ‘get what you want’ include ‘using your celebrity’, ‘getting personal or impersonal depending on the situation’, and using ‘the Red Button’ technique when all else fails – that is, shaft the other person before they shaft you!

Some of these techniques claim to use subtle persuasion to ‘get what you want’, but I suspect what it means is to lie, pure and simple. On one hand it says to be as ‘human’ and authentic as possible, and on the other it tells you to ‘use your celebrity’ through acting like someone else to ‘get what you want’.

Furthermore, I couldn’t help but think that many of these techniques are rather obvious. I think many of us are aware of the old adage, ‘It’s not what you say it’s how you say it’ and that we all come with a set of different principles and values and the ensuing clashes this can cause. One pearl of wisdom includes, ‘In today’s world, getting what you want means constantly adapting your behaviour to fit each situation.’ No kidding?!
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What’s more, I believe this book is most likely a trite comparison to the authors’ live seminars. The authors themselves admit at the beginning of the book that they hesitated for quite some time because they couldn’t work out how to convey all the live techniques.

This book sees itself as a modern day How to Win Friends and Influence People, but I can’t see the similarity myself. How to Win Friends, written by Dale Carnegie and first published in 1937, is one of the first bestselling self-help books ever published. If this book comes anywhere near the notoriety of this book, I’ll be the first to eat my words.

In summary, a pedestrian read. Save your money – you don’t need this book.

By Victoria Barker, Women & Leadership Australia

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