Selling Your Ideas to the Entire Organization, One Person at a Time

KNOWLEDGE@WHARTON—Former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca once noted, “You can have brilliant ideas; but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” In their new book, The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas, Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor G. Richard Shell and management consultant Mario Moussa provide a systematic approach to idea selling that addresses the problem Iacocca identified. As an example of effective persuasion, they tell the story of rock star Bono’s visit to then-Senator Jesse Helms’ Capitol Hill office to enlist his help in the global war against AIDS.

Examples such as this one illustrate what Shell and Moussa mean by “woo”: It’s the ability to “win others over” to your ideas without coercion, using relationship-based, emotionally intelligent persuasion. “The rock star Bono is superb at the art of woo because he understands what it takes to be a super-salesman, in the best sense of that term,” says Shell. “Here you have a rock star with tinted glasses and an elderly, conservative Southern senator. But when Bono had the good sense to switch from public policy talk about debt relief — what we call in our book the ‘rationality’ channel — to religious talk about poverty and disease — what we call the ‘vision’ channel — he touched Helms’ heart. He sold his idea and, in the process, created trust.”