The assault on the great books of my childhood continues.  The latest victim:  Where the Wild Things Are, one of children’s literature’s greatest one-hit wonders.  Shown here is the REAL WTWTA.

It’s not quite as bad as what they’ve done to Dr Seuss, but still pretty shameless.

There is great irony here.  Remakes have become the emblem of Hollywood’s utter lack of creativity.  And when they go after Seuss’ works or Wild Things their unimagination is juxtaposed against the tremendous creativity that enthralled our inquisitive, hyper-imaginative child minds.

I’m sure this will be a reasonably fun movie for kids, with a lot of action and loveable characters whose likenesses will be filling WalMart shelves just as the Christmas shopping season approaches.  Imagine that.  It’s all gotten very formulaic.

Kids today, if they go movie first, or movie instead of book, will be missing out.  Stories like this work best when they are read to you just as your eyelids are becoming heavy and your mind is beginning to drift.  That’s when your imagination can fill in the sights, the sounds and the action much better than any movie.

OK, first of all, without any background, this book’s title is misleading. This is especially true if you come at it, as I did, from a source on top quality business books. This is not targeted at the sale professional and It is not a “how to” on persuasion. It is a discussion of how our minds are persuaded and how the mechanisms that produce genuine, desired persuasion can be exploited.

When faced with a decision, it is simply not possible for one to objectively gather and weigh all of the relevant information before acting. Our world has become too fast-paced and complex for that. To cope, whether we are aware of it or not, we lean on a number of shortcuts. Example: Often when faced with a choice between different versions of the same good, rather than research we tend to assume that the more expensive of the options is of higher quality and the cheaper versions are lower grade.

Cialdini outlines six such mechanisms by which we are persuaded. If I were to simply list them here, you would find nothing earth-shaking. Though you’ve probably never set out to assemble a list of ways in which you can be persuaded, given the premise of each you would easily guess the resulting behavior. They make perfect sense, and as you read, many examples of having succumbed to each mechanism will quickly come to mind.

That’s the rub. Though they are intuitive and though, after reading this book, we are aware of them, they still work. (more…)