• By Carmine Gallo
• McGraw Hill
• RRP $36.00 and $41.00
Dropping Steve Jobs’ name and reputation into book title is smart. It has paid handsome dividends for presentation, media-training and communication-skills coach Carmine Gallo. His first of these two books was big seller.
At heart they are strictly in the self-improvement genre – learn to sell yourself and innovate by thinking differently about just about everything.
Gallo’s personal inspiration was his decision to analyse the style and approach to business that made Steve Jobs the best and most successful salesman on earth.
Of the two, Presentation Secrets is more about Jobs than its sequel. There’s no question Jobs was an accomplished and innovative thinker, but how he sold his dream products made all the difference to Apple’s fortunes.
For the individually or organisationally ambitious these books are entertaining and insightful weekend reads. Packed with ideas and profound one-liners, it would be hard to get up from them without thinking at least little differently about bag full of different things.
According to Gallo, Jobs was “magnetic pitchman”. He sold his ideas with flair that turned “prospects into customers and customers into evangelists”. Getting to the core of Jobs’ innovative philosophies was, however, little harder.
To do that Gallo interviewed hundreds of Apple observers, users, scientists, teachers, entrepreneurs and executives to identify the personal principles that drove Jobs to think differently.
He obviously didn’t have direct access to Jobs who, he says, believed that “innovation distinguishes between leader and follower”.
In Presentation Secrets, Jobs is about creating the story; delivering the experience and, refining and rehearsing the delivery. Follow what Gallo says in his careful analysis of the Jobs’ approach and readers will capture the “passion” required to create stories that “mesmerise” people – as Jobs did.
“His passion was contagious, and infected everyone in his presence. That passion comes across in every [product] presentation,” writes Gallo.
Innovation Secrets is about Jobs’ insistence on doing what you love; putting dent in the universe; kick-starting your brain; selling dreams not products; saying no to 1000 things; creating insanely great experiences; and mastering the message.
Jobs may have been “intensely private”, according to Gallo, but he “dropped many clues” on his path to breakthrough success. Gallo implies that many of those clues lie within the pages of his second book. – Reg Birchfield
