The book
The forces that decide what we want, what we believe, and who we become — who is holding each one, and how to choose among them.
Most books on influence promise to make you immune to it, and that promise is why none of them work. Influence isn't an intrusion on an otherwise independent person. It's the material a person is made of.
In 1915 an ad in Harper's Bazaar invented a defect that had never troubled anyone, and within thirty years most American women couldn't have told you the standard was ever otherwise. Nobody at Netflix decided you would watch almost exclusively from a row of ten titles out of eight thousand. Nobody at Facebook decided that anger would travel further than delight; the system found it. And cult leaders don't recruit broken people — they recruit searching ones.
The book is the long version. These are the short ones.
About the author
I run a global cause-based marketing agency. I've raised more than $50 million for charitable causes and managed over a billion dollars in marketing spend for clients from the Olympics to the UN Foundation to Nike. In 2012 I helped Kroger launch Simple Truth, which became a billion-dollar brand on the strength of a label.
I help purpose-driven companies harness the power of persuasion to make the world a better place. And I teach everyday people how to prevent being hijacked by platforms, groups and algorithms that create harm.