Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down [ハードカバー]

If you ever lend a hand at PTA meetings, church, volunteer groups, or wherever good new ideas are most needed, you know how often important ideas die quietly. Kotter and Whitehead know this too, and they want to help you guide new ideas through resistance so those who need them can hear them. Though this book comes from a business press, more than just business people need what lies between these covers.

Kotter and Whitehead point out that most resistance comes not from the crowd who votes on your idea, but from a few heel-draggers. You need not to persuade this small, vocal minority, who are largely set in their ways, but to answer their objections in a way that wins the hearts and minds of your silent audience. Once you accomplish that, you have begun to win support for your idea, or at least to get it heard.

To do that, you must recognize the core attack, and how it can be deferred without sinking to your opponents' level. Kotter and Whitehead distill routine snipes and grouches into four basic angles, and twenty-four basic attacks. If you can grasp what method your opponents use, and why, you can defuse tedious baseless resistance and keep your idea in play. And if it stays in play, it has a chance of a fair hearing.

This book is not a complete rhetoric for ideological disputes. It will not teach you how to bolster weak ideas, repair flawed ideas, or defend bad ideas. It focuses on how heel-draggers quietly kill even the best ideas, and how you can keep that from happening to you. Even if you don't work in the high-stakes business world, study this book if you ever float ideas. Hey, it's better than burying one before it's truly dead!

QUICK SUMMARY: This brief, read-it-in-a-day book identifies four general ways your good ideas get shot down, and it offers ways on how to effectively deflect challenges that arise when you present your ideas. The book is brief -- too brief -- and left me wishing it had more and better-developed content and examples of the authors' strategies put to use.

BACKGROUND: I'm a big John Kotter fan. I was introduced to him in my graduate studies in leadership, so I jumped at the chance to read and review his new book. But I was somewhat disappointed in this book because I kept thinking of ways I'd have liked this book improved. It's okay, not great, not as good as Kotter's Leading Change book.

WHAT I LIKED:

- Extremely easy to read and understand. I finished reading the entire book in 24 hours, and I'm a very slow, methodical reader.
- Identifies four general approaches that others use to sabotage your ideas, and offers helpful strategies for defending against those approaches.
- The authors used a story format for the first half of the book, reminiscent of what Patrick Lencioni did in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. I enjoyed the story in this book, but the storyline in Buy-In isn't nearly as engaging or as well-written as the storyline in Lencioni's book.
- The over-arching message is easy: always show respect to others (always!) and be prepared for how people may try to subvert your ideas. Simple (to remember).

WHAT COULD BE BETTER:

There were too few real-life examples of these defensive strategies put to use. When real-life examples were given, they were obscure examples familiar to these authors, but they did not employ people and companies that everyone has heard of. The examples given should have used very well-known people, events and organizations, so we could also use those same examples when trying to rebuff our own attackers.

Many, if not most, of the 24 attacks were explained with just too little information. Example: In Attack #2, a defense against the attack, "Money is the issue..." says to point out examples where great things were done without money, like, say, Steve Jobs working in a garage, or George Washington and an underfunded army. Well, okay, but maybe I don't know those stories well enough to recount them to someone. I wish these authors would have developed these stories they allude to with quite a few more pages, so I don't have to go elsewhere to fill-in the blanks after reading their book. I felt this way throughout my reading of this book.

I would have liked to have had a whole section at the end of the book, after they've equipped the reader, where I could read an attack scenario, identify it, then try to think through what I'd do if I faced such an attack. Tear-out cards with the 24 attacks and responses printed on them would have been a nice feature, too (although the authors say we don't really need to memorize these 24 attacks, I get the sense they really do want us to know them all).

CONCLUSION:

I like that John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead are trying to equip people to advocate and defend their own good ideas. The book has a worthwhile message, briefly delivered. If you haven't read Kotter's Leading Change book firstly, do that before you buy this book, as I think Leading Change is a much better book overall.

In their preface to this book, authors Kotter and Whitehead succinctly present the challenge of implementing good ideas. The amount of thought and education put into the creation of good ideas today often outweighs the knowledge and instruction on implementing those very ideas. For example, the field of strategy has made huge advances in the last twenty years, but the field of strategy implementation has made far less progress. It would be great if good ideas that one champions on and off the job could simply stand on their own, but unfortunately this is not the case far too often. The authors remind the reader that this book is not about persuasion, general communication skills, or all the methods one might use to create buy-in.

The single method presented here to build support for a good idea is rarely used (or at least used well) and does not necessitate extraordinary rhetorical skills or charisma. The ideas that the authors offer are partially based on observations of Lorne Whitehead over the years as an entrepreneur, executive, administrator, and professor at the University of British Columbia, as well as the continuous research being conducted by John Kotter at Harvard Business School and the body of knowledge on the topics of leadership and change that has been published in several of his past works. According to the authors, the method they present is counterintuitive because it shows respect for all and uses simple, clear responses that can turn attacks to one's advantage because it focuses on capturing attention and eventually building buy-in.

The first third of the book presents this method in the form of a story - a story that focuses on a small band of individuals comprising a citizen's advisory committee in defense of an idea before a crowd of seventy-five individuals over a span of a few hours time. The authors point out, however, that there are obviously many different settings in which this story could have taken place, and they believe that the method used to defend the idea is the best regardless of situation. The second part of the book provides an analysis of this story, and later provides twenty-four responses to twenty-four attacks that will not silence valid criticism but will stop the killing of good ideas by verbal bullets.

Kotter and Whitehead are careful to point out that many of these attacks might be innocently raised by individuals who are not explicitly trying to kill the objects of the attacks, but this does not mean that they are any easier to wrestle. In outlining their method following the case study story, this reviewer was especially influenced by the assertion that overcoming attacks with tons of data, or logic and more logic, should not be attempted, and that the opposite should be the goal. This reviewer could not help being reminded by the Seinfeld episode where character George Costanza is influenced by character Jerry Seinfeld when he said "If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right". Of course, the authors are not proposing that this blind philosophy should be followed, but it is probably closer than one might think.

The authors categorize the four types of attacks as confusion, fear mongering, death by delay, or ridicule and character assassination, and they indicate that it helps the idea generator to realize that attacks boil down to this small number because individuals often get bogged down by weighty lists that try to be comprehensive but end up being unmanageable. The twenty-four attacks and responses are grouped according to the implicit attitude of the attacker, which are essentially (1) the problem the idea generator is attempting to solve does not exist, so the idea is not needed, (2) the problem that is being presented admittedly exists, but the solution being proposed by the idea generator is not very good, and (3) the problem does indeed exist, and the solution that the idea generator proposes might actually be a good one, but it will not work in the case at hand. Well recommended text. The book is laid out well, focused, and lacks the tangents that so many texts seem to possess.