Nano Tools for Leaders XXXI

Crafting Contagious: Generating Word of Mouth and Making Your Product or Idea Go Viral

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Jonah Berger, PhD, James G. Campbell Assistant Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

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The Goal:

Make your message go viral by following six key principles.

Nano Tool:

Word of Mouth is the primary factor behind 20–50 percent of all purchasing decisions, and it’s ten times more effective than traditional advertising, according to a 2010 white paper published in the McKinsey Quarterly. The study predicts that word-of-mouth marketing will be a $5.6 billion industry by 2015.

But to get people talking about your product or idea, you need to understand why they talk and why some things get talked about and shared more often than others. Based on analyzing thousands of contagious messages, products, and ideas, there are six key principles (STEPPS) that can help get your idea or product talked about, shared, and imitated.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXX

Sell Your Ideas Through Attunement

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Daniel Pink is the author of five books on the changing world of work, including the New York Times bestsellers A Whole New Mind, Drive, and To Sell Is Human. His books have been translated into 34 languages.

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The Goal:

Increase your ability to influence and move others to action by attuning to their perspectives.

Nano Tool:

Research confirms that the ability to influence people — to engage and move them to action — is based on a complex set of skills related to attunement.  Attunement involves understanding other people’s perspectives, getting into their heads, and seeing the world through their eyes. But it is more than merely understanding what others are thinking; it also includes how they are socially connected to others.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXIX

Visionary Leadership: Creating Scenes That Change the Future

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Greg Shea, Adjunct Professor of Management, Faculty Associate, Center for Leadership and Change Management, The Wharton School; and Cassie Solomon, President and Founder, The New Group Consulting, Inc.

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The Goal:

Ensure your next change initiative is a success by envisioning the behaviors needed to implement it.

Nano Tool:

Leading successful change initiatives is an essential skill in today’s “perpetual whitewater” business environment. Yet nine studies done between 1994 and 2010 report that 50 to 75 percent of all change initiatives fail. Behind such failures you’ll often find a missing ingredient — one that may seem obvious in retrospect, but that many change leaders overlook — a clear, specific vision of the desired end-state.