Page 10 - The Power to Change Anything

Authors’ Note

or more than two decades we’ve felt an obligation to
write this book. But the thought of capturing the strate-
Fgies of influence masters worldwide was a daunting task,
so we did what many authors have done under similar circum-
stances. We put off writing as long as we could.
Then three experiences convinced us that we had to write
the book. The first took place in 1997 when we were practi-
cally knocked over by the results of an influence project we’d
been working on for the previous 18 months at the Fort Worth
Tactical Aircraft Division of Lockheed Martin—home of the
F-16 fighter jet. Not only had the intervention been success-
ful, but it had been remarkably successful. We had assisted lead-
ers in attempts to influence a handful of key behaviors and, sure
enough, the behaviors had improved substantially. More
importantly, so had key outcomes ranging from productivity,
to costs, to quality, and employee satisfaction.
With the completion of this successful change project, we
had now demonstrated on over two dozen separate projects that
when leaders apply sound influence theory to vexing organi-
zational problems, they can dramatically improve results. By
1997 over a quarter of a million employees from these two
dozen companies had been touched in ways that improved not
only their organizations, but also their personal lives.
We received a second nudge to write a book about influ-
ence when we initiated a study to uncover every intervention
we could find that had successfully influenced behavior change

ix
Copyright © 2008 by VitalSmarts, LLC. Click here for terms of use.