Then he extended his work to a fascinating area, training FBI hostage negotiators. Then he transitioned to the corporate world, and NGOs.
His “people hacking” has actually been extended to hacking genius. He has recently been speaking, writing, and providing webinars on the secret of Steve Job's success, and how to think like a disruptor. Mark has worked with a number of companies and global brands, some of which you see on the screen.
Mark is also the author of the four books you see on the screen, which are all about listening, influencing, and people hacking from various perspectives.
Dr. Mark Goulston: I am so pleased to speak with all of you today. I didn’t give myself the name people hacker, but other people have said “You know, you’re a people hacker.”
What that term means is that earlier on in my career when I was a suicide specialist, and a violence interventionist I realized I needed to get into these people’s thinking. The more you try to convince people whose minds are closed to you, the more they constrict.
I discovered a way to get into their minds, into their thinking, and then line up with the way they thought. What you’re going to learn today is when you do that with event planners, speaker bookers, and anybody in your life, you’re going to create this feeling in them that they’ve gotta have you, gotta book you, or gotta invest in you.
Because this will also work if you’re a company looking for investors. It will also work if you have employees where they say gotta follow you. It’s the same four step formula.
What I’m going to do is whet your appetite, and then I’m going to give you several examples of what will turn out to be a four step formula for creating gotta book you. It’s the same four step formula that causes people to say I gotta buy from you, or I gotta invest in you.
With that in mind I’m going to give you three scenarios. The next one is a video from Steve Jobs when he visited Xerox PARC. See if you can hear four elements. Then after I go through my examples I’ll tell you what those elements are.
[Video audio] Steve Jobs: They showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that.
The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers all networked using email, etc., etc. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life.
Now remember it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete, they had done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn’t know that at the time. Still though they had, the germ of the idea was there, and they had done it very well. Within ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.
Dr. Mark Goulston: So let’s see if you can guess what those four elements are. But to whet your appetite even more I’m going to give you some other examples.
You saw the Steve Jobs example there. In the middle is a fellow named Eli Broad, and Fedex is on the right, so those will be the other examples.
Eli Broad is one of wealthiest philanthropists in Los Angeles and the United States. If you ask people about Eli Broad, what he thinks of people who are psychologists, he’s a very busy businessman, and people would say, “I think psychology type stuff is something that doesn’t interest him.”
Also, he’s not really that known for giving a lot of credit to a lot of people. I mean he’s not a bad guy, but when he constructs things or donates it’s always Eli Broad with his wife, Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, or something like that.
So see if you can recognize the different elements. Because when I ask people, what do you think the chances are that Eli Broad would quote a psychological type person, and then give them credit, anybody who knows him would say, “It’s highly unlikely.”
But if you look up Goulston Eli Broad the first link goes to this article in Forbes where Broad wrote an article directed at other billionaires. It starts out with “Wealth is what you take from the world, worth is what you give back.” Then there is my name. The article starts off in the very first sentence with, “That’s one of my favorite quotes about philanthropy.”
Here’s the backstory, and again, see if you can think of what the four elements are that will lead to creating gotta book you. i had met Eli at some informal setting, and we discussed some management issue, because he found out something about me, and I gave him some suggestions that he thought were helpful.
That allowed me to make a call to him, and have him take my call. Most of these people are impossible to get through to, but because I had had that interaction with him he took my call. This is how the call went.
I said, Eli, I don’t know if you remember me. He said, “Yeah Mark, I’m in a rush.” Now Eli really is in a rush, he does amazing things. He said, “What’s this about?” I said, are you ever going to write a book on your foundation? Because that’s what his focus is.
He said, “I don’t know Mark, I’m in a rush.” Then I said, Eli, give me seven seconds. Wealth is what you take from the world, worth is what you give back. Then he pauses and says, “Say that again Mark.” I say, wealth is what you take from the world, worth is what you give back.
Then he said, “That’s pretty good Mark. Well I’ve gotta go, thank you.” I said Eli, take the quote, and turn it into a book. If you ever write a book it’s a good title. Don’t give me credit, you do so much for the city I just thought it was something that I wanted to give to you that you could use, no strings attached.
Six months later Forbes Magazine calls me up and says, “We have a quote attributed to you in an article written by Eli Broad, and here’s the quote, and we just wanted to check to see if it is accurate.” Then I said, yes, that’s accurate. Then voila, there it was in Forbes. So there were four steps that he followed to create a gotta use that quote.
If you’re in America every day you see Federal Express trucks. Now when I make presentations, and I ask audiences how many of you have seen a Fedex truck, nearly everybody raises their hands.
When I ask audiences, do you know the secret of the Fedex logo? About ⅓ of the room raises their hand, and about ⅔ of the room doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
The secret to the Fedex logo is the white arrow between the E and the X. If you look at that logo what’s going to happen is if you haven’t recognized it before you’re going to look, and you would lean into it, and you would stare at it, and squint your eyes. You would say to yourself, my god, I never noticed that before.
Now that you’ve noticed it there’s a good chance that when you’re out in the street and you see the Fedex logo, you will always notice it now. That created a paradigm shift in you. That was disruptive to the way you look at this logo.
To take it a step further, if you were stuck in traffic, and this is in front of you, and you are with someone, and you’re out of small talk, what are you going to say to the person next to you? What you’re going to say is, “Do you see the arrow on the Fedex truck?” Because all of us like to be smarty pants.
Some of you are probably chuckling because you would do that, and some of you are chuckling because you already have done that. So those are four elements that create gotta look at it, and gotta tell other people.
Here in the next step I summarize what the four elements are to creating gotta book you. I’m going to go through all of the examples that I’ve mentioned to further demonstrate the point.
The four steps to creating gotta book you is you’ve got to trigger in the event planner, the speaker booker, or whoever is going to hire you to say, whoa, wow, hmmm, yes. I will define these words, and then I’m going to go through all the examples that I showed you.
What is whoa about? Whoa is about getting people’s attention. You know you’ve created whoa, when you’re talking to someone, they seem distracted, and they suddenly say, “Say that again.’ This means you broke through their distraction, but they weren’t really listening, so they say, “Say that again.”
If you’re giving a talk to an audience, and people are Tweeting or texting, and they hear something that causes them to go whoa, they’re going to elbow the person next to them and say, “What did he say? What did she say?”
Whoa Is basically I can’t believe what I’m reading, what I’m hearing, what I’m seeing. It’s also I can’t believe what I’m feeling.
When I used to work with suicidal patients I found a way to go into their suicidal feeling with them. I didn’t give them solutions, I just kept them company. I kept them company when they felt alone in this hellish time in their life.
They couldn’t believe what they were feeling, which is they were feeling the aloneness where they were living go away. When people feel less alone in that awful state of mind they start to feel hopeful.
Next is wow. This is when people take a second take about what they’ve heard, read, seen, or felt, and they say to themselves ‘That’s amazing, astonishing, unbelievable.” In other words, it didn’t disappoint.
When they checked to take that second hit it didn’t disappoint, and they go, “Wow! That’s amazing, that’s astonishing, it’s unbelievable.” Then the next thing they think is Hmmm, that’s too good not to use. Hmmm, I‘ve got to write that down.
I can remember a time when I met with the CEO of Harvard Business Publishing, a wonderful fellow. We were having a conversation, and as soon as I mentioned whoa, wow, hmmm, and yes, he took out a sheet of paper and wrote those words down.
Then a little bit later I met with a fellow named Art Kleiner. He’s the Editor in Chief of Strategy and Business, which is kind of a competitor to Harvard Business Review. He did the same thing. He took out a piece of paper, and he wrote those words down.
Hmmm means I’ve got to hold onto this, I’ve got to do something with this. I’m not sure what that is yet. Then yes is when people line up, and they see how the whoa, the wow, and the thinking about it led to an action, and so they take action. You need to be trying to create whoa, wow, hmmm, and yes in the minds of the event planner, or speaker booker.
If you remember the video, Steve Jobs basically said we visited Xerox PARC, and I didn’t even see two of the three things they showed me, because I was blinded by the first thing. What I saw was the graphical user interface. That was his whoa.
Then he said, “It was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life,’ which means that it was astonishing, amazing, and unbelievable. Then he said, “It was flawed, but it worked, and it worked very well.”
That’s when he thought hmmm, there’s something about this I’ve got to use. Then the final thing he said was, “Within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface I knew that all computers would work this way some day.”
When he says the word some day he’s humble. The reason he’s humble is he is reliving the moment when he saw that he could go from a hustler to a visionary. Because he saw that by making technology fun, like a pinball machine, like you’re interacting with icons, this is how we’re going to take technology away from business to business and turn it into business to consumer. We’re going to own the world, which is exactly what happened.
Something else you might want to write down that is not in the slides is there is a term now called user experience. Steve Jobs wasn’t even around when that term came out, I think he passed away before that came into the vernacular of companies and marketing. Yet he defined the five things that create the best user experience. You might want to write these things down.
They are also things that feed into creating gotta book you. The five things you need to do to create an amazing user experience that he saw is whatever your service or product, or in this case whatever your talk is about needs to be relevant.
It needs to be relevant to what the conference is about, what the person interviewing you is trying to achieve, it has got to be relevant to their wanting to bring someone in who will help them with their career. It has got to be relevant to them not bringing in someone who would disappoint an audience, and then people would come back to him or her with all kinds of criticism.
The other four elements are it needs to be simple, reliable, fun, and beautiful. Simple, reliable, fun, and beautiful. Why is that? Why does it have to be simple? Well we all live in silos. We may be passionate, and have a deep understanding of our silo, but when we’re crossing silos all other people care about is that whatever we’re sharing with them is simple.
One of the big mistakes that people in IT do is they try to teach people outside of their technology silo, in the business or sales silos, they try to teach them about technology. Basically all these other people want to know is what buttons to press.
One of my favorite quotes of all time about how limited people are in their silos comes from Jack Welch. In the 1990s when he was at GE, GE was behind other companies who were embracing the internet.
One of his quotes was, “I avoided the internet because I didn’t know how to type.” That’s a funny quote, but it says a lot. Whatever you’re coming up with has to be simple. If it is complicated, if it’s all over the place the event booker is not going to book you.
Reliability. Being reliable means it has to be consistent. You have to deliver what you say you will. One of the worst ways to hurt your speaking career is if I book you to fulfill a certain expectation, and then you deliver a speech that was way off topic.
That causes the event booker, or the person who booked you from that company to be pulled on the red carpet afterwards and hear people say, “Why the heck did you bring that person in?” That’s the relevance of it. But it needs to be, as we said, simple and reliable.
Next, it needs to be fun. Part of what Steve Jobs was experiencing when he saw the graphical user interface, he said, “This is fun, this is what consumers are going to like, and because it is fun they will try this.”
The final element that Steve Jobs knew about was, it needs to be beautiful. Maybe that came from his calligraphy background. Someone once told me that when something is fun it puts a smile on your face, but when something is beautiful it puts a smile in your heart, you’re just in awe, it takes your breath away.
Try to remember those things in whatever you deliver, whenever you’re trying to create gotta anything it needs to be relevant, simple, reliable, fun, and beautiful.
Now let’s go to Eli Broad. What was the whoa, wow, hmmm, and yes for him? He was in a rush, he was preoccupied. Then I asked for seven seconds, and I said wealth is what you take from the world, worth is what you give back.
What was his response? “Say that again Mark.” That was a whoa, I got through. Then when I said it to him again he said, “That’s pretty good Mark,” which was the wow. I didn’t know about the hmmm or yes.
But obviously he wrote down that this is too good not to use somewhere, I don’t know where I’m going to use it. Then Forbes Magazine came to him and said, “Do you have a quote?” That’s when he said, “Yes.”
Now after that if we go to Fedex. If you’re someone who doesn’t know the secret of the logo, and the white arrow was pointed out to you, you’re going to go “Whoa, I never saw that.” The wow is going to be, “That’s amazing, that’s astonishing, I’ve seen that logo every day for the last ten years and I never knew that.” By the way that logo is one of the top three logos of all logos for the last 50 years.
What’s the hmmm about? The hmmm is, well I’m not going to forget that. When I look at the logo I’m going to see the white arrow. The hmmm is, I can be a smarty pants. If I’m within someone, and I have nothing to say in the car, I’m going to point out the logo to them.
I hope you’re getting a sense of how these things work, and that you have to create the same whoa, wow, hmmm, yes in bookers.
Andras Baneth: Does this relate to the speaker application or pitch you put forward, or is it more about the content of your talk?
Dr. Mark Goulston: I think right from the get go it has got to be. As soon as they read something from you here’s what it has to be. It can’t be better than other people, it has to be different than other people.
People remember what’s different. They don’t remember what’s better, because everybody says they are better. The key is when you’re dealing with a booker or an event planner they don’t want to take a chance, because if they take a chance it’s going to backfire on them.
They’re looking for different, but different in a safe way. When they’re thinking hmmm they’re going “Whoa, wow, that’s different. I think we can take a chance on that, and it won’t backfire, and get me fired.” I think everything that people find out about you should trigger whoa, wow, hmmm, and yes.
I give talks around the country at marketing and innovation conferences, and the title of the talk there is “How to Create Gotta Have It.” At the end I say, go back to your marketing and advertising departments.
For you speakers, go back to your webpage, look at it, and put yourself in the shoes of an event planner. If they see your webpage, does it create whoa, wow, or does it create, nah, never mind, that’s nice, in which case they’re going to pass.
Something else you might want to write down is a concept called mental real estate. Mental real estate is when you come up with a term that is familiar with people. It allows you get into their mind, and then when you’re in their mind if you repurpose it you have more mental real estate, and so you have more traction.
A friend of mine told me about mental real estate, and he was the chief designer of Disneyland Tokyo and Disneyland Paris. His name is Tony Baxter. The best example of mental real estate he could think of was Pirates of the Caribbean. He said “Pirates of the Caribbean owns the word pirates in the minds of kids. When kids think of pirates they think of Pirates of the Caribbean, so Disney owns pirates.”
I’ve written a bunch of books, but the book that has the most mental real estate is Talking to Crazy. I’m compassionate, so this book is not about mental illness, it’s about the people in your life who drive you crazy, and you hope won’t show up for the holidays.
When I mention that book, “Talking to Crazy,” it’s immediately familiar to them, people smile, and I ask, what are you smiling about? They say, “I think i do that every day.” Whatever people see needs to create mental real estate.
Your whoa, wow, hmmm, and yes, should be something that is familiar, but isn’t. A friend of mine who actually wrote the foreword to my book “Just Listen,” is someone many of you may know named Keith Ferrazzi.
Keith wrote a book called “Never Eat Alone.” If you think of those three words, “Never Eat Alone,” altogether they have mental real estate. See if you can take that into consideration as you’re developing your marketing materials.
Andras Baneth: Every time I eat alone I remember that book, so he did a great job with that.
Dr. Mark Goulston: He did do a great job. Here’s a plug for SpeakerHub. One of the reasons I got involved with SpeakerHub, and I got a VIP paid profile, is it’s the best profile on me as a speaker anywhere.
My LinkedIn profile is a mess. You can go to markgoulston.com, or goulstongroup.com, and those are still messy, but they’re not a total mess. But with SpeakerHub, I’ve never been to a site, even with the Speakers Bureau to represent me, where every step made sense.
When I filled out my profile I really felt like I was following a road map to present myself in the best way. If you look at profiles, you can look at my profile, it makes it really easy for an event planner to quickly get an idea of who I am, and a sample of that.
That’s part of why I’m promoting SpeakerHub, because it can do that for you, and you should certainly take advantage of the fact that you can get a free profile there. SpeakerHub is the LinkedIn of speakers.
Let’s continue in the interest of time here. Now I’m going to take a chance, because I’m a neuroscientist and biologist. Please cut me some slack because I’m going to get educational about why you need whoa before wow.
I was a zoology major before I went to medical school. What this basically says is that we evolved from a one celled animal that didn’t have a brain into a human being that has a brain. Many of you have heard the following breakdown of our brains.
Functionally, and even anatomically we have a primate thinking brain, we have a mammalian feeling brain, and a reptilian fight or flight brain. When you’re dealing with an event planner or booker what happens is their brains are hardwired together.
Our human brain is 250,000 years old, our mammalian brain is 65 million years old, and our reptilian brain is 245 million years old. An interesting insight is mammals get stress ulcers because they have an emotional brain, whereas reptiles don’t. So you can stress out your cat or dog and make them sick, whereas with reptiles it’s just fight or flight.
What you’re up against with an event planner is they are under pressure. Imagine that pyramid that has an eye on top of it. It demonstrates looking at the world through tunnel vision. The tunnel vision is I don’t want to book someone who will get me in trouble, I don’t want to book someone that is going to backfire.
But I am on the lookout for a person who could be that special speaker where my boss would say to me, “That was an amazing speaker that you booked.” Here’s what you want trigger inside that event planner or speaker booker.
What’s the “whoa” about? You need to get in and through their overloaded and overcrowded mind. To do this you need them to have this reaction, “whoa,” stop everything, and this is worth taking a second look and a second listen.
Grade yourself, put yourself in the shoes of an event planner or a booker. Imagine what they’re looking at, whether it’s your cover letter, or your profile on SpeakerHub. Ask yourself if what they’re seeing creates whoa. Again, remember it’s about being different, not better than.
Then what you need to do is create wow. After they take a second look at what you’re about they go, wow, i can’t believe what you’re talking about.
For me one of the titles of my Steve Jobs talk is “Hacking Steve Jobs.” In fact, I went to an innovation conference that I spoke at, and a friend of mine said, “How many people are going to be there?” I said, about 500, and I’m giving this talk. She said, “Let me see your business card.”
I had a business card that said the Goulton Group. She said, “When’s the conference?” I said, in three days. She said, “Go to Fedex Kinkos, and print 250 cards, and have the card say Hacking Steve Jobs, and underneath that you can say Creating Gotta Have It, then just your name and your email, and that’s all.”
Because what she said is, “People collect cards at conferences, and they throw away most of them, but they’ll probably hold onto the cards from the big companies, because they hope the big companies will hire them.”
What she was saying is, “You’re reasonably well known, but the Goulston Group is going to be a card they throw away. But when they’re going through their cards, and they see Hacking Steve Jobs, they’re not going to throw that away.”
I hope you’re getting an idea of what you need to do. I’m giving you more of a formula than specific steps. But I’m hoping you can follow the formula, and that it makes sense for you.
After whoa what you need to create is “hmmm”. What’s the “hmmm”? To reiterate it’s this won’t get me in trouble. Someone is not going to come back to me and say, “What were you thinking when you booked that speaker?”
The “hmmm” you’re hoping for is the one that Steve Jobs had when he visited Xerox PARC, that Eli Broad had when he heard wealth is what you take from the world, worth is what you give back. It’s that Fedex novelty logo.It’s the hmmm it creates that makes you say, “This is too good not to use, and be a smarty pants when I’m in the car next.” That’s what you have to create in them.
A good exercise, even though it will be painful, is look at your materials, or look at your profile. Every time you have a conversation with someone rate yourself after the conversation on a scale of one to ten, how well did I create whoa, wow, hmmm, or yes, and what could I do better going forward to create it in them.
If you can do that of course the final thing you want to do is yes, that what they’ve learned and seen about you is such that it’s all lined up. Just like an Apple customer, or a billionaire who doesn’t have time for people like me, or you’re in traffic, and now what’s going to happen is you’re going to have a mindful relaxation.
Every time you’re in a traffic, and you’re angry, and you see the Fedex logo you’re going to look at that white arrow, you’re going to smile and say “Son of a gun, there it is again.” It’s going to put a smile on your face even though you hate rush hour. That’s what you want to do.
Finally here is your homework. Put yourself in the position of the event planner. The event planner has been given an assignment for a particular conference. Find out everything you can about the conference.
A good question to ask an event planner, if you’re able to actually speak with one, is can I ask you a hypothetical question. They may be a little annoyed, but they’ll probably say “Yes.”
What you say to them is, I’d like you to imagine that it’s a year from now, and your boss is evaluating what you did for the company, and the decisions you have made. A year from now your boss says, “Remember that person you booked for that conference we had? People are still talking about it. I don’t know how you found that person, but that was incredible and amazing. If you find us a couple more like that I’m going to promote you.”
It was that amazing. You say to them, “I think what you want to avoid as an event planner is a year from now people still being critical of you, and saying ‘why did you book that person? What were you thinking?’”
I think if you can have that conversation it will cause the person you’re talking to to look up to the ceiling to think about it, because it’s a very good question that nobody asks them. When you help people to clarify their thinking that nobody asks them about they’re grateful, and they’ll be grateful to you.
Talking about being better than, or being different than, when you can actually help the other person be successful, in a way that really gives them a filter. Their being grateful for you helping them will make you different. I think we’ve covered that in your homework. I think we have a little time for a Q&A.
Andras Baneth: Here’s one which is a nice and relevant one. Paul is asking can the whoa, wow, hmmm, yes, format work in an email, and if so how would you construct an email that goes through that thought process?
Dr. Mark Goulston: One of the things you can do is as you are going through emails, and you’re clicking through the ones you delete, click on the ones that you haven’t deleted.
When you click on them drill down in your head, why did I click on them. Then when you click on them if you click through that email then they’ve hooked you, and they are building momentum towards you.
I know there’s a lot of people who deal with anxiety by spending, and you can already see the black Friday deals ramping up. People are, at least in America, feeling so frustrated, they can’t wait to spend some money, even if they don’t have it, to make them feel better.
I am guessing the people that open an email as soon as they see Black Friday sales, and they are clicking on the links in it, it’s a mental exercise. But the way you can do that is to drill down, and use your own mind to ask yourself what created whoa, and wow for me in the emails I received.
Also, one of the things that one of my mentors mentioned to me, Dr. Warren Bennett, who is a big leadership guru. He said, “Be a first class noticer. Because when you notice something you become absorbed in it. When you look, watch, and see you’re passive.”
If I were you looking at that slide I’d notice the picture of Mark, and I’d notice, what is that on his left shoulder? What was happening is I was striking a pose, and I had a sports jacket over my left shoulder.
In the full picture you could see I was holding it with one of my fingers, but if you notice that you’d say, “That’s an odd picture. In fact, he needs to change that. I like the SpeakerHub logo much more.”
If you can train yourself as you’re going through your world, and that takes a certain discipline, but if you go to other speakers’ platforms on SpeakerHub what is it that you notice that grabs your attention. You can also use this as a filter anywhere in life.
Andras Baneth: That’s a very valid point of reverse engineering things that you find attractive, useful, that catch your eye, whether it’s a profile, an email, or anything else. Since there’s no more questions we’ll conclude here. You’re more than welcome to reach out to Mark, or we’d be more than happy to connect you with him if you have any followup questions.
Feel free to join us for our next webinar which I am going to be running not just as a moderator, but as the speaker.
Dr. Mark Goulston: I have a preview of something to whet everyone’s appetite. I hacked into Steve Jobs about creating whoa, wow, hmmm, yes. What happened is recently I hacked into how he built and created Apple.
I’m about to do a one man tour, show, presentation, where I speak as Steve Jobs. I speak about ten steps that will help anybody in any company create an insanely great company. That will probably be coming out in the spring, but stay tuned. I think I’m going to be calling it channeling Steve Jobs: ten steps to build an incredibly great company.
Mark Goulston, M.D. is the author of seven books with his book, "Just Listen" Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, becoming the top book on listening in the world and his first book, Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior, first published in 1996 being in the top 5 self-help books at Amazon for the last five years. His most recent book is "Talking to Crazy: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life."
He writes for Harvard Business Review, Biz Journals, Business Insider, Huffington Post, Fast Company and Psychology Today and appears widely in the media including CNN, Wall St. Journal, NY Times, Fortune and Forbes.
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