Win The Crown
Who knows how to captivate an audience better than a magician? As Cohen, who likes to call himself the Millionaires' Magician, says: "Magicians are masters at attracting interest, holding attention, and leaving audiences with fond memories of their time together."
Demystifying the psychology of magic in lucid prose, Cohen tells us how to use a magician's tricks to make better, more winning presentations. He reveals his five "Maxims of Magic": Be Bold; Expect Success; Don't State - Suggest; Practice, Practice, Practice; and Be Prepared.
This may all sound very familiar territory, but Cohen imparts advice with the spin of a magician. For instance, he suggests that if you want to be bold, try dropping a quarter surreptitiously into someone's pocket.
He also suggest learning from a magician's preparation and presentation, including creaing a compelling character and making a powerful entrance to command the attention of your audience. Cohen also discusses the power of specific word patterns, how to discern unconscious but visible responses in listeners and the use of misdirection.
Readers gain insight on how magicians lead and read people, so that how a magician figures out what card you drew from the deck becomes clearer. This thoughtful and sensible guide should win a crowd of readers. Beneath it all, Cohen makes it amply clear that the secret to winning a crowd is savvy showmanship.
The book provides an interesting analogy between business presentations and magic shows. Magicians have an interesting job. The success of their performance depends a lot on the setting and about attention.
Strip away the sleight of hand tricks, and what you have are people who are masters of holding and impressing the audience. It's exactly the psycological secrets you need to be successful in life and business.
How do you keep the audiences attention where you want it?
How do you make them listen to you carefully so that they won't miss a word, and thus remember it better?
How do you sense what people are thinking, and perhaps more important, feeling while you are presenting so you can make them feel like they are getting your points?
Read the book and you'll get a much clearer idea of how you can do that. For some interesting tips on how to hold attention while making a presentation, this is the book.
The Pampered Chef
Christopher's multimillion-dollar kitchen tools company, the Pampered Chef, was recently acquired by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Her book documents how she turned a $3,000 initial investment into a thriving direct sales business that today employs tens of thousands of people.
The book progresses in a chronological fashion, starting from Christopher's initial idea in 1980 (to sell high-quality tools by TV infomercials), her business development and hiring her first employees, to the rapid expansion into a large international company.
Christopher shares her lessons from running the business, including tips on starting a business venture, handling an organisation's growing pains, customer service and employee handling advice.
In 1980 Doris Christopher, a former home economist and teacher, was raring to get back into the workforce after an eight-year hiatus as a stay-at-home mom. Drawing on her personal and professional expertise, and determined to make cooking easier and more convenient for families, she started selling high-quality kitchen tools through cooking demonstrations to groups of women in their homes.
Today, the company she started in her basement, The Pampered Chef, is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary and has grown into a corporation with tens of thousands of independent kitchen consultants. Now owned by Berkshire Hathaway, The Pampered Chef's Kitchen Consultants present more than a million Kitchen Shows a year, attended by more than 12 million people.
The nuggets of advice are fairly basic and is written in a very modest fashion - very unlike the 'exuding confidence' style evident with so many entrepreneurs.
Despite her tremendous business success, Christopher continuously downplays her own drive in favor of the assertion that her only desire was to put her kids through college and help her family. For those with other motivations, it will quickly become tiresome.
Still, in her defence, Christopher does keep it simple and has something to teach for anyone following the American Dream. Having a rather dry style of writing should not take away the fact that she did manage to take $3,000 and turn it into a multi-million dollar business.
She did have it in her to build a business from scratch into a top-notch organisation. Follow the simple steps in this book, and it just might happen. Overall, it's a passable read on one woman's recipe for success.
© 7Days 2005
