You know you’ve read something spectacular when you’re energised upon finishing it; when you are nodding along through the book; when you immediately sit down to write about it.
“Make Your Idea Matter” is a collection of stories around the ideas that have succeeded in the world and why they worked when thousands didn’t.
If it sounds a bit like a book about marketing or business. It’s not!
It’s a way to frame every conversation, every idea that you have. Bernadette Jiwa’s starting premise is work out what the “how are you selling emotional wants not servicing simple needs.”
This book makes sense of why there are those that manage to go the extra mile.
Take the manager of the pet chip tagging company that I rang the other day wanting to make sure they had the correct details for our cats. It turned out that I had not only rung the wrong number but also the wrong company in one case. It would have been so easy for her to fob me off – but no, she took the info, passed it onto the relevant people for action and then sent me an email just half an hour later “I just wanted to tell you that’s it all been sorted and your pets are now safe”. She was appealing to my emotional need. Result – she will get my business and referrals.
And in this day and age where companies continue to try to differentiate themselves from the pack, where competition is stiff and business is hard; there’s a whole lot to like about the premise that there is a lot that is within your control & that you don’t need to be a passive bystander watching others succeed.
The implications for employees and getting them to sign up to your idea are huge. Imagine if every call centre person cared as much as the example above.
I ran a focus group a year or so and I asked the employees why they stayed in a very uncertain and somewhat difficult environment. One employee answered that it was all around the joy they gave the end user when they tasted their product. That’s who they were “working” for. Imagine if every production worker thought like this.
Read this book. And I promise you’ll have your notebook out; scribbling how the ideas can apply to your business, your employees, your customers.
Then let me know what you think.
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