Book Review

A business book, but the author presents strategies that work in education and instruction because teachers have to persuade others to accept their position.

The key is to get others to cooperate with you, and to willingly go along with your ideas.

The Books' Topics:

• Assessing your Current Strengths


• Adjusting your Philosophy toward Life and the People you Work With


• Creating No-Risk Offers


• Maximizing Satisfaction for your Services


• Testing Everything you Do


• Heads Up, Eyes Open, Mind in Gear


• Your Unique Definition of Success


• How to Establish and Reach your Life Goals

The central themes of this book are:

• You have a lot of offer. And if you offer your talents, skills and abilities in more useful ways; you will be more successful. You will also be appreciated more


• Strategic action out performs working harder, working smarter or working longer


• Valuing people (students, supervisors) and caring for their welfare increases these people's willingness and readiness to help you and their readiness to cooperate with you

Keywords:

• Unique Selling Proposition


• Unrefusable Offer


• Host-Beneficiary Relationships


• Unique Definition of Success

Main Idea:

You have a lot of talents and abilities, so why not embark on a strategy of applying these in a way that brings the most positive outcomes with the least effort.

And, if you have "other people's best interest at heart," you will be able to establish collaborative and cooperative relationships that benefit everyone.

When you find "Win-Win" solutions, you increase your productivity and success. You also increase the satisfaction that others have with your services. And satisfied others cooperate with you even more.

Quotes:

Like other business books that we review, just substituting the words "teacher" or "education" allows us to apply the author's concepts to our academic focus.

"You're about to begin a wonderful journey. You're going to learn that you have hidden assets, untapped opportunities, and overlooked possibilities that are not producing maximum results for you. That is going to change.
You'll be shocked at how truly easy this is going to be. Too good to be true? It's not. " (p. - 4)

"Realize this hard fact: The people above you (bosses, management, and organization leaders) want one thing most of all—they want solutions to problems. Solutions that make them look good and help them achieve their goals. They want the people that report to them to be problem solvers. " (p. - 10)

"The philosophy of this book allows you to avoid the costly learning curve in almost everything you do. And that saves you time and money…I'm referring to the process of borrowing success practices from other industries and applying them to yours." (p. - 12)

"Client: A person who is under the protection of another." (p. - 17)

"To get your prospects and clients to see you or your business as offering them a superior benefit or advantage that no other competitor offers them is the essence of a unique selling proposition (USP).
You must determine the most powerful benefit or advantage that you can possibly offer on existing or future client so that it will be totally irrational for them to choose to do business with anyone but you or your company. And here's how you do that. You identify what advantage or result your clients want the most." (p. - 19)

"You don't have to change your product or service, but you have to position you product or service as having a unique benefit they're not getting from your competitors. And you don't offer it to your clients subtly. You incorporate the fact that you are now offering them this unique advantage of benefit in everything you say and everything you do. When you do this you clearly educate them so they see, appreciate, and want to seize that advantage." (p. - 19)

"Advancing at a measured pace—step by step, from where you are to a little bit better—may seem the logical and safe way to proceed. But you can and should think in terms of skipping levels and making quantum leaps. You can move rapidly and easily, and surprisingly safely from your present level of accomplishment to a place that is several stages higher. You can do it instantly—and directly. And you can do it in virtually every aspect of your business or career activities. You can do it by not limiting yourself to following only those practices people in your industry follow.
I want you to stop accepting your present-day business circumstances as the way it has to be. You're going for major breakthroughs.
A business strategy that is common as dirt in one industry can have the effect of an atom bomb in an industry or business application where it's never been used before." (p. - 35 & 36)

"You probably spend too little time studying the most successful, innovative, and profitable ideas people in other industries use to grow and prosper.
Yet, if you start focusing on other industries' success practices, you'll be amazed at how easily you can adapt these ideas to your own business situation. Suddenly, you'll see significantly better ways to produce significantly bettered results from the same time, manpower, effort, activity, and capital." (p. - 36)

"Breakthroughs are unconventionally fresh, superior, more exciting ways of doing something. Breakthroughs are the dramatic improvements in each area that make you more powerful, efficient, effective, and productive, and more valuable or inspiring to your client." (p. - 37)

"…So you must invent and constantly be reinventing you own better future. That means becoming ethically opportunistic, looking at everything around you (in and outside you business or industry) with an opportunity-based focus and asking yourself continuously, 'Where's the big overlooked opportunity here?'
It's also adopting a possibility-based mind-set that looks for new, different, and better ways to attain a goal or solution or address a situation.
It's starting to see opportunities where everyone else sees problems, obstacles, limitations, or boundaries. It's recognizing how much you can achieve by leveraging the impact of whatever is going on around you. The most exciting breakthroughs occur when you reach beyond the traditional way of looking at or doing something and become open and receptive to new possibilities." (p. - 39)

"Most major breakthroughs are a result of looking at things with a commonsense, 'superlogical' degree of open-mindedness. And the ability to take action on what you see. They have little to do with advanced education, high IQ, or vast amounts of money. And the most dramatic breakthroughs frequently center, pure and simple, on better ways to do things—faster, easier, or more effectively or logically." (p. - 40)

"You need to reach out for ideas and answers. Examine ideas, people, procedures, and philosophies from as far outside your normal sphere of business and life as you can possibly reach. Discover a genuine interest, fascination, and curiosity for how other things outside your limited business world work and the principles they're based upon." (p. - 44)

"Stretch yourself and start examining subjects, industries, and markets you've never been interested in before. Why? Because you'll get fresh new perspective, ideas, and insights…Ask yourself powerful questions about how other people use things, do things, sell things, deliver things, make things, compete and prosper." (p. - 45)

"There are an unlimited number of breakthroughs out there…just waiting for you to discover them…So many breakthroughs, so little time to discover them all. So much to borrow from and funnel into your newfound maximizer's mind-set. That's why you need to start doing it right now. And keep doing it, forever!" (p. - 45)

"Whatever you do, if you focus on giving value and advice instead of manipulating and maneuvering, you win over many more prospects, clients, bosses, colleagues, and friends. And you will be rewarded in ways you never dreamed. " (p. - 59 & 60)

"You can't maximize your performance or make the most money unless you know how to make the best use of your time, opportunities, efforts, and investments. You can't get the best results until you comprehensively evaluate all the different approaches you have available in all your business activities…The odds are great that you are currently under performing and not reaching your real potential because you're depending on the wrong actions or approaches for your success. " (p. - 145)

"Test Everything, Starting Right Now " (p. - 147)

"Never test big if you can test small. " (p. - 151)

"When you change your sense of self-worth, you also alter the way you look at your relationships with your clients. " (p. - 191)

"If you're timid, take little steps in the beginning (you can test any of the principles on a small scale with no financial of career risk). You'll see the strategies work. You'll gain confidence in them and yourself. Then you can start to take bigger steps. But don't just sit there doing nothing. Take the first step, no matter how small it may be. Take it.
A very wise man said, 'Far more is accomplished through movement than was ever accomplished through meditation.' And while I think meditation, contemplation, and formulation are all quite essential to the success process, unless you act you'll never realize any rewards." (p. - 342)

Issues Addressed by the Book:

Jay Abraham knows how to communicate with clients, and for teachers, our clients are:

• Students


• Parents


• Administrators

So, we learn that we need to change our attitude as we continually figure out how to make life better for our clients.

The cue to this task is that we hold our clients (these groups, these individuals) "in our care."

This attitude creates a mind-set that launches cooperation and commitment from the members of these groups.

This mind-set also improves our perspective so that we begin to see mutual, cooperative, beneficial opportunities for joint benefit.

The Book's Shortcomings:

The book is a bit long-winded, although easy to read.

The author uses lots of contractions, even in the title, possibly so that the author models his belief that advertising writing is "like one friend having an intimate conversation with another friend."

There is more to the book than a pep talk and case studies, though. The book provides such extensive lists of need to take action on now" topics that a teacher would have to dedicate a year or two in developing a new repertoire of "thinking and doing" behaviors.

Comments:

Some of the sections of this book are more applicable to teachers than others. But, as teachers implement the obvious changes in improved collaboration and care giving, more of the author's recommendations will become applicable.

The author provides a lengthy list of "Action Items," mostly to stimulate thinking. The author is less helpful on providing that missing step between knowing what to do and actually doing it. I suppose that the author, writing for business folks, assumes that his readers will be motivated by major increases in earnings. (It is logical to assume that as the business person begins to make more and more money, that they will implement another strategy.)

Teachers will need to read this book and build their own checklists and action items, tailor-made to the issues that affect teaching.

Summary:

Teachers interested in a long-term, personal improvement and personal effectiveness project would do well to study this book.

But, the integration of these attitudes into best-practices, like all the side trips that we make on the road to becoming a Master Teacher are worth the challenges.

And, Jay Abraham is "right on" in his observation that we speed our creativity and boost our service genius by looking at tested and accepted practices in other fields and industries (because they have done the hard work of development), and "borrow at will."

Sidebar

Note: See our article on the tricks and traps of copying another project.

Link to the What does it Take to Replicate a Pilot or Model Program? article

Rating (Four Point scale):