Maximum Influence: The 12 Universal Laws of Power Persuasion
By Kurt W. Mortensen
Amacom, June 2004
240 pages
$17.95
Consultant Mortensen, who boasts, “I love to fix people,” is out to give you more power. And if that involves having you make people feel obligated to you so they do what you want, or flattering them so that they will adopt your point of view, or representing what you have to offer as scarce so people will be more tempted to buy now, then that is the way you should go, he argues. (These techniques represent three of his 12 “laws.”) What he doesn’t offer among his dozen rules is how you can live with yourself. Most effective executives believe that manipulation as a management technique has gone the way of command and control—ideas that have outlived their usefulness.
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