A review by papidoc
Influencer : The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson

5.0

Influencer is the latest from the fertile minds of the folks at VitalSmarts. Building heavily on their former books, Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations, Influencer uses their six-cell matrix (first discussed in Crucial Confrontations) to analyze and explore methods for influencing others (or yourself) to change for the better. They identify and explain a handful of high-leverage actions that one can take that will help lead to powerful and lasting changes in individuals and organizations. They outline strategies that incorporate those high-leverage behaviors and the elements of the six-cell matrix to bring about change and that will lead to the outcomes we desire.

Along the way they use a variety of potent examples from all around the world to illustrate their methods. These examples alone are worth the time to read the book, but the methods they describe are of tremendous value. You’ll see the commonalities in eradicating a plague of Guinea worms, the successes of a halfway house for ex-convicts, the elimination of behavior that puts people at risk for contracting the HIV virus, losing weight, and the problems that organizations everywhere face in achieving consistently high performance…and how those commonalities can be tapped to effect change anywhere.

Key insights such as vital behaviors, research grounded in positive deviance, recovery behaviors, results testing, vicarious learning, and the power of stories are brought together with the six sources of influence to provide the reader with a powerful way to influence change, grounded in knowledge gained from decades of study in tens of thousands of separate research efforts. These methods can be used on oneself, in dyadic interpersonal situations, families, small groups or teams, or scaled up to meet the needs of large organizations or even entire societies. I recommend it to anyone faced with the need to bring about positive and fundamental change.