Dr. Frank Luntz - Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary

WHAT IS A WINNER?

The 15 Attributes of Winners

Look at it this way: if winning wasnt so hard, it wouldnt feel so good.

M IKE R ICHTER S TANLEY C UP W INNER AND NHL H ALL OF F AMER

To what do I owe my success? Three things: I came to America. I worked very hard. And I married a Kennedy.

A RNOLD S CHWARZENEGGER

Win is designed to be an unprecedented examination of effective communication in America today as told by Americas great communicators.

There are dozens of business books that offer to give you the edge or tell you to seize the moment, but they dont really tell you how. Win teaches by highlighting real-world examples of the companies, people, and politicians who achieve greatness, and examines what we can learn from what they say, how they say it, and why. Ultimately, life is a contest in which people play to win. This book addresses the philosophy, strategy, and language of winning from the perspective of Americas greatest winners inside and outside the business world.

So before you go any further, ask yourself two simple questions: First, how badly do you want to win? And second, are you willing to do what it takes to move from the ordinary to the extraordinary? If the answers are both yes, then lets begin.

THE DEFINITION OF WINNING

THE 15 UNIVERSAL ATTRIBUTES OF WINNERS

Jim Davidson, the co-CEO of Silver Lake, one of the most savvy and successful private equity firms in America, has a simple philosophy for deciding where his $14 billion fund should invest: start at the end of the process and work backward. That strategy also applies to this book. Allow me to begin at the end. If I were to summarize twenty years of corporate and political communication research and discussions with Americas business, political, sports, and entertainment elite into a single, simple checklist, what differentiates genuine winners from everyone else is the following:

the ability to grasp the human dimension of every situation;

the ability to know what questions to ask and when to ask them;

the ability to see what doesnt yet exist and bring it to life ;

the ability to see the challenge , and the solution , from every angle;

the ability to distinguish the essential from the important ;

the ability and the drive to do more and do it better ;

the ability to communicate their vision passionately and persuasively;

the ability to move forward when everyone around them is retrenching or slipping backward;

the ability to connect with others spontaneously;

a curiosity about the unknown ;

a passion for lifes adventures ;

a chemistry with the people they work with and the people they want to influence;

the willingness to fail and the fortitude to get back up and try again;

a belief in luck and good fortune; and

a love of life itself.

This book draws on more than three dozen private interviews with people who have made it to the very top of their professions, to the top of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans list and the Fortune 500 list. They have led their companies to great heights and led their teams to world championships. They are the best known and the most respected in their fields of endeavor. After combing through hundreds of pages of transcripts, a consistent pattern of attitudes and behavior emerges that applies across and throughout their careers. This book harmonizes and synthesizes their secrets of successso you can make them yours.

In my work for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, I am consistently amazed at how many people would rather be working somewhere elseor at least for someone elseand yet they dont act on it. Not lifes winners. They all love what they do. Most of them call it fun, and none of them call it work. Some acknowledge that they work hard or that theyve had to sacrifice along the way , but all of them consider themselves grateful, blessed, and/or lucky to be doing what theyre doing, and none of them would rather be doing anything else.

These 15 Attributes of Winners are fundamental to the Nine Principles of Winning (aka the Nine P s) and all that follows in this book, so lets cement them with specific examples.

LUNTZ LESSONS

Winning by communicating:

Winners focus on the outcome, not just the process. They measurably prove they can lead you to better results. For example, they emphasize wellness, not health care. Why? Health care is the means; wellness is the end. Health care is a distant, impersonal bureaucratic system; wellness is a personal, aspirational state of being.

Winning by grasping the human dimension:

Winners deliver value that solves a quality-of-life need, rather than stopping at just price and profitability. They know that their bottom lines are best served not by running the numbers but rather by understanding the person. They recognize that every sustainable relationship arises from a personal, human need. So they make products and services that meet those needsand market them to human beings, not to the amorphous masses.

Winning by focusing on the experience, not the technology:

Winners have the vision to see beyond the product and into the desires of their customers. Its not about the iPhone or the BlackBerry; its about the hassle-free, worry-free apps delivered through the phones that revolutionize how a person lives, works, and experiences his or her individual world . And its done using ordinary language for ordinary people.

Winners are self-aware. They recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, and respond to situations accordingly. Dont underestimate this. From Lehman Brothers to General Motors to Circuit City, countless companies have struggled or gone under because of leaders who stayed in their comfort zones and didnt take the right action at the right time because they were afraid to make the wrong move. Dont think Ive been here for fifty years because were a great company without having made a lot of mistakes on the way, says Rupert Murdoch from his CEO suite on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. How are you going to question yourself? Are you going to look in the mirror? When you see things going wrong, do you try to put them right? Or maybe you cant put them right. You have to say to yourself, I was wrong to do this in the first place and just cut your losses. I know when to cut my losses.

Winners are also tuned in to the needs and desires of others, and this outward focus guides them to deliver revolutionary solutions, not just better mouse traps. They recognize where their strengths meet someone elses needs and double down on delivering the greatest value while ignoring lesser distractions. In plain English, winners succeed because they foresee and pursue the biggest prize.

Winners recognize that even when they arent physically selling a product, they are always selling themselves. Every human interaction is an opportunity to connectand then to sell. So says Tom Harrison, chairman and CEO of Diversified Agency Services (DAS), the largest subsidiary of Omnicom, the worlds largest advertising, marketing, and communications company. As one of Madison Avenues most creative minds, he knows by instinct (which just happens to be the title of his seminal book on human behavior) exactly what to say and when to say it. Winners know what makes people tick by effectively tapping into our fears and aspirations. By listening very carefully and then repeating almost word-for-word exactly what theyve heard, winners know how to articulate compelling needsand products to satisfy those needsthat people didnt even know they wanted. Says Harrison, As long as I can keep my ears wide open, and my eyes wide open, and literally understand every word that they are saying, then its about them. The moment I translate it, it becomes about meand thats why others fail.