But if you’re trying to get human beings to change what they are doing and act in some fundamentally new way with sustained energy and enthusiasm, it has two serious problems. One, it doesn’t work. And two, it often makes the situation worse.

the message was personalized, it evoked an emotional response, it came from a trustworthy source or respected sender and it was concise.

Both proponents and opponents found clever ways to reinterpret or set aside any contrary evidence so as to confirm their original positions.

And it works well enough when the aim is merely to pass on information to people who want to hear it.

My brain was giving itself a psychic reward for having been able to stick to its original position. The emotional reaction, not my thinking

Quickly stimulating desire for a different state of affairs is the most important part of the communication: without it, the leadership communication goes nowhere. It’s also the piece that is most consistently missing in the communications of aspiring leaders.

And if that is so, then narrative intelligence—the ability to “think narratively” about the world—is central to leadership.32 But what exactly does it mean to think narratively about the world? It means the capacity to understand the world in narrative terms, to be familiar with the different components and dimensions of narratives, to know what

Giving reasons for change to people who don’t agree with you isn’t just ineffective. A significant body of psychological research shows that it often entrenches

Human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules. ” —Malcolm Gladwell1