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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Dale Carnegie for the Social Media Age, 16 Mar 2011
This review is from: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions (Paperback)
Guy Kawasaki is a most successful guy and wants to share the secrets of his success with you. However, this reader has seen most of it before, having read Dale Carnegie's 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' many moons ago. For me the only chapters which had relatively new material were the ones on how to use social media such as Facebook, Twitter and of course Linked-In. The rest was rather yawn making and by the end I was totally sick of the word Enchantment as it's sprinkled ad nauseum throughout the text. To me, most of the content of this book (and to be fair this also applies to most books on how to get ahead in business) is just plain common sense. Believe whole heartedly in the product or service you're involved with; be nice to people - especially your customers, your staff and your boss; be likeable; be honest and trustworthy in all you do. Achieve all these things and employ the right tools to do the job and the world is your oyster. I'm probably the wrong person to review this book as most of the content isn't new to me, hence my lowly two stars. Someone starting out in business or wanting to harness social media more effectively will probably avidly devour everything Kawasaki has to say and give it a high five. Update: I was one of the 2,000 or so AllTop bloggers who took Guy up on his offer of a review copy of this book. In the weeks leading up to the book's launch I had many emails purportedly from Guy telling me how wonderfully the launch was going and urging me to write up my review. Just after the launch Guy was interviewed by Social Media Examiner and the AllTop reviewer campaign was cited as a marvellous example of marketing via social media. Not surprising perhaps and it shows the cynical way in which Guy was using the members of the Alltop site for his own gain. Not very enchanting at all. Note I'd written my review before I found this out and it reinforces my my original view of the book.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
mediocre, a lot of self marketing not much substance, 6 April 2011
This review is from: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions (Paperback)
Kawasaki is a great speaker who I like to watch on the stage. His writing is nice and easy to swallow, but its like watching mtv - fast and quick through to the end, but there is nothing substantial in it nor not much stays with you once you are done. This book feels like I really don't need to read it to know these things and could be summarized in a 10 pages article but it was bloated to an entire book by adding pictures, personal stories etc.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Enchantment as common sense, 22 April 2011
This review is from: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions (Paperback)
What I know of Guy Kawasaki is that usually he writes interesting and inspiring stuff in his books and on his blogs. This is, however, not true for 'Enchantment'. The book is chock-full of common sense advices, nicely categorized in twelve chapters. In the first chapter Guy describes what enchantment is, according to him, and in the chapters that follow he tries to tell the reader how he or she can become an enchanting person as well. In doing so he gives some tips on personal branding as well. There is nothing wrong with that: it would be awesome when there were more enchanting people in this world. The problem is that the methods Guy proposes are methods that change about everything of a person, except his or her heart. His advice is quite superficial, most of it is common sense (in Dutch we have a saying that goes like 'psychologie van de koude grond', which can be roughly translated as 'lay-man psychology') and the other parts of his advices are copied from the books of other authors (which he generously lists at the end of his book). To implement Guy's advice, the reader only needs to change his outside appearance. I believe that what a truly enchanting person needs is a loving heart. That is - although the subtitle of the book has the word 'heart' in it - not part of the book, though. That is truly a pity: the book would have been much better if that part of the subtitle would have been made true as well. You might ask why I bought the book. The cover has a quote from Steve Wozniak saying that by reading this book, one can create a company as enchanting as Apple. I'm highly interested in organizational science and change management, and I hoped this book would show me some new insights. That, however, was not true.
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