I am pleased to announce that my latest book, Elements of Influence:  The Art of Getting Others to Follow Your Lead, has just been published by AMACOM books.  This book follows—and is a companion to—The Elements of Power, which was published last January.  The power book explores the eleven sources of power people have:  how they build these power sources and how they can lose power.  The influence book explores how people exercise power and use various...

The Elements of Power:  Lessons on Leadership and Influence explores how people develop the power to lead and influence others.  It describes the five sources of personal power (knowledge, expressiveness, attraction, history, and character), the five sources of organizational power (role, resources, information, network, and reputation), and the one meta-source (will).  With numerous profiles of business leaders, political leaders, and other famous people, the...

What People Want explores what employees want from the workplace and what they want in their relationship with their boss.  A few years ago, I was coaching a manager (John) who excelled at managing tasks and things but not people.  John’s turnover was too high and surveys showed that his direct reports were unhappy.  When I met with John, he said he needed to become a better people person and asked if I could help him do that.  John was middle-aged, and I...

Based on ten years of research on how people prefer to be coached and what kind of coaching is most effective, Adaptive Coaching describes a client-centered approach to performance improvement through executive coaching.  Among the most important findings is that most people want a nondirective approach to coaching, but most coaches tend to use a directive approach.  The book includes many practical tips on coaching and examples of effective coaching...

Powerful Proposals presents a step-by-step plan for creating informative, engaging proposals that satisfy your clients’ needs and feature the solutions your firm can provide.  My co-author, David G. Pugh, and I brought more than thirty years’ of experience in proposal development to this book, and it includes the tools and guidelines we’ve used to help clients win billions of dollars in contracts.  It’s an invaluable tool for winning contracts in...

This book is about behavioral differentiation—how companies differentiate themselves from their competitors based on how they behave toward customers.  Behavioral differentiation is more than superior customer service, which typically occurs at or after the point of sale.  Smart companies differentiate themselves at every touchpoint with their customers—and the engines that drive behavioral differentiation are leadership, culture, and process.  It requires...

The Behavioral Advantage is our follow-up to Winning Behavior, but in this book we focus on how business developers and companies can use behavioral differentiation to distinguish themselves during the marketing and sales process and win more business.  This book is intended for sales managers and others who are responsible for developing business in their companies.  Among the key concepts in this book is the idea that business development is like a chess...

Selling to Major Accounts is a book of practical tools, techniques, and solutions for sales managers, strategic account managers, and anyone else who manages key customer relationships.  Today, the discipline of strategic account management (SAM)  is well established and is pervasive in the business world.  When I wrote this book in 1998, however, many companies were new to SAM, and I wrote this book as a primer for people and companies that were implementing a...