Pin the Credit on Someone Else

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Let loose your favorite search engine on the phrase “pin the blame.” Wikipedia alone will serve you up thousands of examples, like this, from their entry on The Bourne Identity:

While in reality it was the U.S. government who took Marie captive, it has pinned the blame on a fictitious powerful Chinese drug lord…

It’s a common enough phrase that we don’t think about it much. But on reflection, it has two implications:

  1. the verb “pin”—to narrow down, narrow in on, focus, sharpen, highlight, single out, point to
  2. the object “blame”—guilt, condemnation, disapproval, (negative) responsibility, culpability, fault, shame

Basically: to bring down on another a concentrated dose of social pressure as being the primary cause of something really bad.

Pinning the Credit.

So I’m in the car the other day (pulled over—don’t tweet and drive), in the midst of a twit-up with social media columnist Rebecca Woodhead (@rebeccawoodhead). She had quoted Chris Brogan, another social media consultant, to a client, which had the effect of convincing the client to do what Brogan had suggested–which happened to be what Rebecca herself had been telling the client for some time, to no avail

Full of good British humor about it, she jested, “I guess I should have thought to pin the credit on Brogan earlier.”

Pin the credit. I love it. Puts it right up there with “fancy a cheeky pint?” in my list of favorite Briticisms.

And higher still in my list of wisdom-bites. Pin the credit:to divert to another a concentrated dose of social approval for being the primary cause of something really good.

Pinning the Credit, Reciprocity, and Collaboration

A willingness to pin the credit on another is a deceptively simple way to achieve several goals. First, as Rebecca’s example perfectly shows, it can often get things done faster, breaking a logjam by bringing in a third party or an appeal to authority.

Second, it signals a willingness to subordinate your own ego, something as valuable as it is rare in consultative and sales and support people. The client picks up that signal very clearly.

Third, it signals something to the credited party too. It says you recognize and value them, and that you’re willing to do them a favor. And favors invite reciprocal favors.

Fourth, that whole favor-giving thing requires a time perspective longer than the transaction at hand. By showing you’re willing to play that game, you suggest a multitude of ways to work together going forward. You can collaborate.

Pinning the credit shows you are polite, you can defer gratification, you are not in the game for your own ego, you can be trusted to collaborate because you’re in it for the long haul.

A powerful three words, I’d say.

Reframing a Tough Problem

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A dear family friend mentioned to me the other day that her commute was really difficult. Three days a week she travels from Brooklyn to Princeton NJ and back.

“The trip out in the morning is fine,” she says. “I get express transport and I’m psyched up to work. It’s the trip back that’s hard.”

“The trains are not express, and I’m tired. It’s a low point in the day, it’s dark, and while I can always get a seat, I end up just sitting there, unhappy. It’s just a depressing time.”

Blecchh. I get it. But I also remember some wisdom that people have tried to teach me over the years (with some success). It boils down to this:

Reframe that sucker. Don’t think “how can I make a bad situation slightly more bearable?” Instead, think “How can I make my evening commute the absolute center of my day, a source of relaxation, rejuvenation and delight?” (Thanks David Teiger).

Dare to be great. Don’t think “there are all these impediments, I can’t surmount them, people don’t care about me, this takes too much time.” Instead, think “this isn’t a problem, this is an opportunity, and I have every resource at my command until and unless someone says definitively that I don’t.” (Thanks to Bill Gregor, who never thought he’d be in the same blogpost with David Teiger).

Please help my friend Reframe that Sucker and Dare to be Great. Here’s what I’ve got so far. Can you make it five times better, and greater, and more exciting for her?

·         Introduce yourself to the conductor(s). Say “I’ll be a regular here, my name’s Susy, how are you doing?” Find out if they like a candy, or a flower, and bring them one once a week. Always sit in the same seat.

·         Buy a $150 set of great headphones. If you can’t afford them, hit up a relative for the holidays. Use that Netflix account to order all the documentaries by Werner Herzog and watch them in your computer or DVD player. If not Herzog, then all Woody Allen movies. Or—who’d you just love to watch?

·         Take those same headphones and download atmospheric music. Read. Or sleep.

·         Learn Mandarin.

·         Forget the headphones: do seat-based isometrics.

·         Make a friend a day. Single out someone in the car who looks as bored as you were, and go make them happy. How? Ask them!

·         Write a blog about commuting, and how to turn it positive.

 
Over to y’all.

 

Trust, Security and Assurance

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(Please welcome guest blogger John Verry today).

On a near daily basis we read about data breaches that expose sensitive information and negatively impact the finances and privacy of companies and individuals alike. Clearly the efforts (as a whole) of those of us in the Information Security Community are lacking and incomplete.

Increasingly I find myself wondering “Have we failed to understand and integrate ‘trust’ into our methodologies for measuring how well an organization secures sensitive data? Or is ‘trust’ too soft and ambiguous a concept for a rigorous, technical, quantitative discipline such as Information Security?”

Leading “trust” thinkers like Green & Covey have successfully illustrated the significant value of trust in business relationships. Logically, their arguments should hold for a business relationship where one or both parties have an obligation to maintain the “security” of critical data on the other’s behalf and need “assurance” of the same.

So what is the relationship between “trust” and “security” and “assurance”? Does true assurance exist where there is no trust (even if the data is secure)? Conversely, can one (mistakenly) trust and perceive a high level of assurance where data is not truly secure? (Sadly, the answer to this rhetorical question is self evident.)

I would argue that our level of trust “magnifies” (negatively or positively) our perception of security, and therefore, the amount of (true or false) assurance that we receive. Therefore, it is critical that we base our level of trust on appropriate measures so that the assurance is indeed directly proportional to the actual level of data security.

Minimally we would need to “measure” trust:
  • In those responsible for governing and maintaining the security of your data (personal and organizational trust),
  • In the regulations and the “Watch Group” responsible for defining and promulgating “reasonable & appropriate” data security regulations/standards (market trust).
  • In the third party that performs the necessary due diligence to attest to the company’s compliance with said standard (organizational and market trust),

Currently most organizations use some measure of trust in picking business partners by seeking independent attestation of the security level (assurance). Fundamentally, this is a great approach; however, there are three issues which often denigrate the level of assurance we receive;

  • The assurance is largely defined (and constrained) by the standard to which the potential partner is aligned (we may not trust the industry watch group because its intentions are not aligned with ours and their track record is concerning); and,
  • The assurance is delivered by a third party who is not sufficiently independent from the organization being assessed and/or the watch group defining the standard.
  • There is insufficient standardization of the scope and rigor of the testing that should be performed as a basis for attestation (e.g., there is no standard definition of a "network penetration test").

Unfortunately by focusing “outside” we are missing a vital measure, perhaps the most critical element of trust, the trustworthiness of the individual, team, and senior management with whom we are entrusting our data. One could argue that a high (and warranted) trust in the organization can fully compensate for the three flaws cited above.

So what is the best mechanism to” measure” the trustworthiness of those responsible for securing your data? Can it be done via a tool like the “Trust Quotient”? Can we more directly measure the individuals (or organization’s) intent, capabilities, and results in a repeatable and/or semi-quantifiable manner?

Assuming so, how then do we leverage these measurements in a formal manner so that the assurance we receive is directly proportional to the actual security of our data and the likelihood that the risks associated with a third party processing our data have been mitigated to an acceptable level?

So often the process of discovery starts by yielding more questions than answers…

You Think Your Dog is Smart? You Don’t Know the Half of it

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Smart Dog

According to a New York Times article, your average dog “is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old-child.”  The article goes on to say:

Dr. Coren has come up with an intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the others can learn 165.

But Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition…takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.

He argues that it is dogs’ deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.

“I take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking,” Dr. Wynne said. “It’s a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do.”

What is Intelligence, Anyway?

Apparently the conclusion we are meant to draw is that dogs look pretty smart, but it’s really just behavioral training—good old stimulus and response stuff, hooking them in by bribes to get their food, treats and affection. (If I read it wrong, please correct me).

Most of us dog-owners, I suspect, find this treatment unpersuasive. But don’t believe us. Consider the far more striking information from earlier in the same article. Consider Jet:

Jet is both a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog whose owner has epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, various phobias and hypoglycemia. Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall.

Jet is not unique. Other dogs are trained to deal with suicidal tendencies, turning on lights for trauma victims, reminding owners to take medication, and so forth.

The Fallacy of Reducing Motives to Behavioral Indicators

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find it useful to describe Jet’s behavior solely in terms of fulfilling a desire for affection, much less food. It’s precisely the same discomfort I get when I hear economists describe unselfish behavior among humans.

In an attempt to preserve an elegant theoretical model about how self-serving behaviors lie at the heart of all human action, I have heard economists ascribe unselfish behavior to longer term self-aggrandizement, or to advancing the species’ interests by occasionally sacrificing the good of an individual.

But sometimes devotion to others, unselfishness, an inclination to collaborate, is best described as simply what it appears to be.

As ee cummings put it, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I trust my dog with my life—but not with my ham sandwich. Which suggests it’s highly doubtful that my dog would save my life in order to get a deferred-gratification ham sandwich. Something else is going on.

So is Jet smart? If you measure by human vocabulary, as smart as a 2 year old. Personally I’m not blown away by two-year olds’ intelligence, except in comparison to 1-year olds. That’s not what I mean when I say wow, my dog is really smart.

What I mean when I call a dog smart is that empathy thing, the ability to not hold a grudge, to reach out and touch someone.

To elevate the word “smart” (as in vocabulary breadth) to a higher level than “smart” (as in save a life and mend a heart) is to waste a good word.

November Carnival of Trust is Up

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Jordan Furlong, of Law21, is this month’s host of the Carnival of Trust.  He brings a most interesting perspective to it.

Most obviously, Jordan’s a lawyer.  Second, he has that bemused  Canadian perspective about things south of the border.  Finally, two of his interests shine through: innovation and collaboration.

These traits show in his choices, and in his thoughtful commentary linking his choices. 

Jordan has written about trust before.  Perhaps that’s why he moves easily among the various blogposts he has chosen to highlight in this month’s carnival.

Pop on over to the Carnival at Jordan’s site, and here’s a taste of what you’ll get:

– How recent thinking on the economics of law firms has affected client trust levels;

– The effect on trust of both in-court tactics and extra-court marketing;

– The ties linking referrals, trust, innovation and collaboration;

– The relationship between trust and risk;

– How contracts and trust are in some ways opposed.

Add to that a delightful vignette, and a dozen extra-credit mentions.

Good stuff, food for the heart and the brain alike.  Jordan has done fine work here for all thougthful people interested in the subject.

Many thanks, Jordan, for a most excellent Carnival. I invite all readers to go benefit from his hosting.

 

You can also look at past Carnivals, and enter your own blogposts or those of others for future carnivals by going to the Carnival of Trust homepage.

 

 

 

Keep Young and Work the Virtual Room

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Keep Young and Work the Virtual Room

Remember this question when we were kids: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? 

Here’s a modern version: If you don’t have a strong web presence, including blogging, Linked in and Twitter, do you still exist?

I’ve been thinking a lot about social media lately and even more so after reading Trust Agents, a new book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, and attending the Trust Summit in New York last week.   I’m still dipping my foot into using social media, yet like many, I’ve been reluctant to jump in all the way.  That is changing, albeit slowly. Here’s why I think it’s important to take the plunge:

AGE LOSES A DEGREE OF RELEVANCY  

I remember the days when simply reaching a certain age, one was seen as old. I think Web 2.0 changed that.  My theory is that in the world of social media, people aren’t judged by simply by chronological age, but rather by adaptability to and use of, technology. It may be true that the older one gets the less likely a person is to use new tools. But age does not prohibit one from jumping in. Chris and Julien capture this concept in Trust Agents, by describing a person who is seen as connected as “One of Us."  Age doesn’t seem to a factor by itself anymore. If my theory is right, then by using Web 2.0 channels of communication we can connect and be connected, without regard to age. And that opens new doors in business for everyone.

THE VIRTUAL ROOM IS REAL

It’s more than just about adapting to technology.  It’s also about being part of a community – one that creates trust.  I’ve watched my son play a virtual game on line and build relationships with a community of avatars representing people.  Trust is created based on how long people are there, and how people talk with, trade with and treat each other, even when they never can meet in the real world.   

 That’s not to say real world connecting isn’t important. I teach a workshop called How to Work a Room and Still Feel Good About Yourself™  This workshop is about the typical ways to network in person – conferences, luncheons and charity dinners, even in line waiting to board a plane, and addresses how to build relationships – NOT sell – in that environment.  It is still relevant to network this way in business. 

However, there are a lot of people that never get to the same physical rooms we are in.  But they are in virtual rooms.  And those virtual rooms are growing in size and number.  Those rooms include blog conversations, Twitter, Facebook connections and groups, and of course, LinkedIn.  If we’re not in those rooms, we’ll never meet the people who are, and will miss the opportunity to build relationships with new connections that “meet” there. 

And just like a connection at an event can lead to follow up, so can a virtual room connection. For example, recently, I connected with a contact I met when she commented on one of my blogs on TrustedAdvisor.com. We talked by email and then by phone.  And we’re building a relationship just as we would have had we met at a conference.   

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

Many will now have to operate in both the real and Web 2.0 worlds. Of course we still exist if we’re not blogging and tweeting. While the Web 2.0 world doesn’t discriminate based on age or any factor other than whether we enter the room and appropriately create relationships, only we can decide if we need to be there. But if we’re not in the room – whether virtual or physical, we’ll never even know what we’re missing. This is a benefit of social media, and why we can’t ignore it, whether we’re 20 or 65.

Trust Breakfast Part II Video: Q&A

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Trust Summit Part 2 Q&AMore from the TrustSummit at the Harvard Club, New York, on October 23.  The open statements, Part I, were available on yesterday’s blogpost. 

Today’s Part II of the video is all Q&A: questions from the audience, and answers from David Maister, Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, and yours truly.

There is 75 minutes of video here, so to help you navigate, here is a rough map of the questions asked and the time marker at which they are asked, plus a sample quote:

   1:11    -How do you put a number on the value of engagement and trust?  (David: if measurement drove trust, we could lose weight by standing on the bathroom scale)

11:00    -What role does the fear of failure play in shutting down trust? (Charlie: in trust, risk mitigation doesn’t just cut risk–it increases trust)

16:30    -What was the best response you’ve seen to a screwup?  (Chris: Coke hit a home run; Branson hits lots of singles, so they can risk losing a few)

21:00    -Doesn’t price beat trust at some level? (Julien: intimacy is a great differentiator)

27:00    -Isn’t customer intimacy just one strategy, and you can only pick one?  (Charlie: these days you can’t pick only one; trust is actually the way you get to scale for low-cost strategies, not just intimacy.  Chris Brogan: Vanilla Ice said: stop, collaborate, and listen.  David: if people trust you, you don’t have to do all that icky marketing stuff).

35:00    -What kind of metrics work with non-profits? (David: if companies were serious about metrics, they’d post their customer satisfaction ratings) 

41:00    -How do I transfer powerful online trust to an MBA-managed traditional business?  (Chris: Let revenue do the talking.   Julien: I’d urge a healthy level of scepticism about the social media Kool Aid. It’s an experiment; try it.) 

53:00    -How does a leader teach matters of virtue, in a corporation?  (Charlie: the doctrine of competition is essentially anti-ethical. If all you do is compete with others, you have no one left to be ethical toward. "Buddhist capitalism" works better.)

Trust Summit Part II56:00    -How do you balance privacy versus transparency?  (Chris: there are times for both).

58:00    -Can this kind of cool event actually happen outside of Twitter?  (Julien: the horizon effect, everyone gets closer to everyone else–it’s inevitable).

62:00    -What’s the generational impact of all this?  (David: We’ve talked about clients, but trust between generations is a very big issue within organizations, and we’re doing pathetically)

65:00    -Is there a danger of giving priority to squeaky wheel twitterers?  (Chris: In some ways, that’s odd.  We don’t really want to wait in line like sheep; twitter empowers).

69:00    -How can I use social media to create authenticity?  (Discussion: it varies with target audiences–reaching 5 people through social media is tough)

72:30    -Why do companies pay 4x to get new customers what they’d save in retention?  (Charlie: Stupidity in this area does abound).

73:30    -Charlie describes how Chris and Julien role-modeled all this behavior in setting up this event.

Enjoy.

You can see the video here.

 

 

 

Trust Summit Summary and Video – Part I

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Last Friday, October 23, New York’s Harvard Club was host to the Trust Summit.

Put on by myself, David Maister, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, and moderated expertly by Robin Carey (CEO of SocialMediaToday), it was a breakfast, panel discussion and Q&A session with 300 of our closest friends.

OK, maybe "Trust Summit" is a little grandiose, but I think the 300 didn’t mind much. And after all, Chris and Julien did write the very hot Trust Agents. And David and I (and Rob Galford) did write The Trusted Advisor, which has proven to have legs.

And we all, very much, talked about the same thing. Trust is vital in a new economy, just as it was and is an old economy. In fact, if anything, new social media are making trust even more central to successful business.

Robin asked at one point how many people there were on Twitter; about 99% raised their hands (excepting David, I think). More tellingly, when she asked how many signed up through the Twitter channel, the answer was remarkably similar.

Big thanks to Marvin Bzuro for making the video available to us. Thank him yourself, at marvin "at" b2bvid.com.

Today, we’re posting Part I of the video: it consists of opening remarks by Robin Carey, and by we four panelists. It runs to about 25 minutes. Tomorrow we’ll post the (lively!) Q&A session.

To see Part I of the video, click here.

The Twittersphere was hugely active before the session. And after. And during, for that matter. You can see the entire twit-fest on Twitter with a hashtag search: look for #trustsummit. And while you’re there, check out @chrisbrogan, @julien, and @charleshgreen

If you don’t want to do that, several twitterers did yeoman’s work summarizing for the sake of the rest of us. At the risk of ticking off all the others, I’ll single out @amandarykoff as the most re-tweeted summary. You can find it here. But honorable mentions also go to Fred Abramson, Andrew Marshall, PRBrew.com, and Articu-Blog.

And if that doesn’t satiate your appetite, then go watch the video again. And come back tomorrow for the Q&A.

 

 

 

Bank Credit Cards: Not-Illegal Does Not Equal Ethical

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The bloated pig...This past May, the US Congress passed, and Obama signed into law the credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure act (CARD, of course, for short).

It provides for significant consumer-friendly reforms, due to take effect in February 2010.

These regulations are going to cost bank card issuers some significant chunks of change, as they’ll no longer be able to do things like apply your payments to the lowest-interest part of your debt, charge rates like 29.99% and hit you with large fees for slight transgressions. 

That is, when the law takes effect.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the CARD Act Effective Date

Something happened between May and now–something that has caused many bank card issuers to raise their rates, accelerate their payment terms, and increase fees for those who can’t comply.

Now, why would that be happening?

The obvious deduction is that the banks just couldn’t resist getting in a last feast on their already burdened consumers by jacking up rates until they are forced to behave in a way society, through its duly elected government, has dictated they must.

Oh, what to do?  Bend to the will of the people?

Nah.  How about one last feeding at the trough, while it’s still legal.

That’s how Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, sees it, and he’s not alone. Last week, the committee passed legislation to move up the CARD implementation to December 1.   And yesterday, he proposed freezing rates in the interim.

Sometimes, the obvious conclusion is the right conclusion. But that doesn’t stop some banks, and their industry spokespeople, from trying to argue the opposite.

Says Scott Talbott, SVP for Government Affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable:

…the bill was based on the faulty premise that credit card interest rates were going up because of legislation.
Instead, he said, interest rates were rising because of risks posed by the unsteady economy and by card holders themselves, who are defaulting on their payments or paying late more often.

In other words, we’re raising your rates because interest rates are going up in this recession, and because you greedy customers are abusing us poor folks at CitiBank and BankAmerica by withholding your money from us.

(Just to be clear: these actions are being taken by the banks who issue the cards, not by the MasterCard and Visa folks who create and brand them).

This is not a function of US culture only–it seems to be endemic in the business.  Over in the UK, where they’re presently considering US-like regulation, we get a similar argument from the banks:

One senior credit card executive pointed to the United States, where the supply of credit is already shrinking and its cost rising as a result of similar reforms, which are to come into force in February 2010.

In other words, if you restrict our profits, we’ll yell and pout and gouge you and generally behave badly; consider yourself warned, you’re responsible for our bad behavior.   

Responsible Business Behavior? Or Merely Not Illegal?

Most people can intuitively understand the difference between ethical and legal, and between unethical and illegal. Most of us want to live in a society where laws are ultimately derived from a sense of ethics—not the other way around. Just because something is not illegal hardly implies it is ethical.

But it seems increasingly that business is becoming deaf and blind to this simple distinction. Consider the Congressional testimony by several health care executives this past summer.

When asked whether they would voluntarily forego rescission (cancelling policies in effect) except in cases of intentional fraud, the executives one after another said they would not. Why?

Because, they said, what they were doing wasn’t illegal.

You have to ask the question, are these people stupid? Or venal?

In favor of the argument for stupidity, one can point to a modern penchant to substitute process for judgment. How else to explain a school principal suspending a 6-year old child for eating with a cub scout knife’s spoon? Or mechanical SEC procedures that Madoff and his whistle-blower Markopolis both called stultifying? 

While I think stupidity is the more usual culprit, in this case I vote for venal.  How arrogant do you have to be to insist that raising rates is the fault of economically challenged customers?   To tell your PR people to stand down?  And to argue that not being a crook entitles you to a seat at the table of responsible businesspeople?

I was privileged to share a platform this Monday morning with an entirely different kind of leader. I wish the heads of credit card operations in some of our major banks would take a look at this CEO, Aaron Feuerstein, in a 60 Minutes video.  And to hear him on Monday describe in the simplest terms why good corporate citizenship must be rooted in a sense of personal values. 

Not being illegal is nowhere near close enough.

 

 

The Book You Sold Me Is Not the Book I Bought

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iStock_000007343809Small.jpgDharmesh Shah  and Brian Halligan  have written a book called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs.

At the risk of over-simplification, it says stop trying to push out your message; instead, make it easy for others to find you. To find you: in order to buy from you, tweet you, link to you, find out about you, advertise for you, recommend you.

In their clever phrasing of it: stop doing outbound marketing, start doing inbound marketing.

So the story of how I bought their book is perfectly appropriate.

Last Friday morning, I shared a stage with Chris Brogan, Julien Smith and David Maister. Later that day, I got Chris’s daily blogpost, called Inbound Marketing Is For You.

Turns out it’s an unabashed advertisement for the book, leading off with all the reasons Chris is conflicted and hence the buyer is warned (unless, as he puts it, you want to learn some great stuff).

Well, what’s a body to do? I had just spoken with the guy, I believe he’s high integrity, and here he is pitching someone else’s book, with nothing in it for himself. I have to buy it.

So I click on the link, which goes to Amazon. I pick the Kindle edition (thanks Brian and Dharmesh) and select download to my iPod Kindle reader (which is so good I didn’t bother to buy the new Kindle, by the way).

Three minutes after reading Brogan’s blogpost, I’m reading Chapter 1 of Inbound Marketing, and I realize that I’m now living proof of precisely what they are writing about.

Did publisher Wiley advertise it? I don’t know; if they did, they wasted their money, at least on me (though Brogan did publicize them). But Wiley got a sale, the authors got their royalty payment, and Amazon got its ounce of flesh.

For me the customer, I got a book I was confident I wanted, I felt good about the purchase because I trusted the recommender, and I got it fast and easy. Really easy.

Second best of all, the book has already had an impact on me—I’m seriously thinking about how to use it in my business. The authors should be proud.

Best of all, Brogan, Shah and Halligan all get free shout-outs from me; and not only did they not pay me to do it, I paid them!

So, who got screwed here? Who got left holding the bag? No one that I can see.