The Art of Woo

Selling ideas inside organizations is the skill G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa set out to teach, drawing on their work advising thousands of executives at Microsoft, General Electric, Google and other companies, as well as the World Bank and the FBI's hostage rescue training program. They present a systematic four-step process for winning over skeptical bosses and colleagues through relationship-based persuasion. Two self-assessments help readers measure their Woo IQ and find the persuasion role that fits their natural strengths. Examples include Charles Lindbergh assembling backers for his flight and Nelson Mandela leading a revolution, along with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Andy Grove and Bono. The authors treat persuasion as a mix of psychology, rhetoric, politics and emotional intelligence.

Winston Ma, a managing director at China Investment Corporation, was listed as a reader of it in a What CEOs are reading feature.