Publicity, Persuasion & Life

Someone is always trying to influence what you think-and what you do. Corporations, politicians, advertisers, salespeople, employers, and even the people closest to us use persuasion every day. Sometimes their intentions are honorable. Sometimes they are self-serving. The better you understand how people try to influence your thinking and behavior, the better prepared you are to make your own decisions. Publicity, Persuasion & Life brings together more than 100 provocative essays drawn from Steven M. Stroum's 50 years of building a business, solving problems, making mistakes, and learning what actually works. The essays range widely across Publicity & Marketing, Persuasion & Influence, Entrepreneurship & Small Business, Business Strategy, Work & Success, Life Lessons & Personal Growth, and Commentary & Society. Stroum challenges familiar assumptions, explains how publicity and persuasion work in the real world, and shares lessons learned from five decades as an entrepreneur. This is not a textbook, and it is not a conventional business or self-help book. It is a collection of observations, experiences, arguments, and lessons intended to make readers stop and think. Read one essay at a time or a dozen at a sitting. Some may confirm what you already believe. Others may challenge you. All were written with the same purpose: to help you recognize persuasion, question assumptions, understand where "news" comes from and how it is created, and make better decisions in business and life. Marketing strategist and Wall Street Journal best-selling author David Meerman Scott describes Stroum's insights as "practical, honest, and hard-earned." Publicity, Persuasion & Life is for builders, thinkers, doers-and anyone who believes that experience is valuable only when we learn something from it.