I visited. It turned out to be a long-form sales letter. You know the type: they mix testimonials with sincere-sounding stories and revelations of how the writer was poor, destitute, and reduced to eating their own belt in an attempt to find protein as they lived out of their car. Then suddenly they discovered the secret to everything and now you can have a little bit of their juicy goodness by attending their wonderful seminar for just $X hundred dollars. (Even though they’ve enjoyed a seven figure income for years, they are charging you for the information for your own good, of course.)

Halfway through reading her site, I began to feel the urge to attend the seminar. I realized that I’ve never made seven figures a year. Looking at all the pictures of the people who have attended and now blow their nose into genuine, gold leaf toilet paper made my knees quiver with a mixture of jealousy and painful feelings of inadequacy.

Then I noticed what I was feeling. I noticed the longing to attend her seminar. I noticed the inappropriately intense emotional reaction I was having. I closed the page, added her phone number to my voicemail spam box, and am adding her email newsletter to my spam filter list as well.

Psychologically manipulative long-form sales letters work really well. I highly recommend developing a knee-jerk reaction to them: delete them and consider the seller totally and completely discredited in your mind. If someone has something of value to offer, refuse to listen until they show you in a non-manipulative way. Ask for a sample. Ask for statistics. “How many of your students are now enjoying a 7-figure income? How long did it take them?” Ask for references. “Please give me their phone#s so I may call and verify.”

Anyone who claims to be a multi-gazillionaire who is generously helping you out if you pay them just a few hundred dollars is a scam artist. If you’re rich and want to give back, give. Don’t sell, give. You don’t have to do it as formal philanthropy, just offer your stuff for free. Coach Marshall Goldsmith, one of the most successful and highly paid coaches in the world, gives away everything he does for free at http://www.MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com. As he once told me, “I have more money than I could ever spend, why should I charge people when what I care about is helping them?”

If you’re using long-form sales letters in your own business, try seeing if you can resort to selling your product on its own merits. If the answer is “No,” improve your product until you can.

It’s important to note, however, that if I send a long form sales letter, you must buy my products, make me a billionaire, pay for mansions for me, lots of  Rolls Royces, and scantily clad models on both arms. I may be outraged, but I’m not stupid…

Shelle Rose Charvet points out that most people already know the method. Now, when they hear positive feedback, they simply bypass it and wait fo the shoe to drop (then they ignore the final piece of positive feedback, which is obviously just there to soften the negative feedback). She advocates giving feedback in a way that avoids direct negative statements yet still accomplishes the goal, to stimulate behavior change. You can read Shelle Rose Charvet’s “The Feedback Sandwich is Out to Lunch.”

What do you think? If I were to include a “giving feedback” method in the Get-it-Done Guy book, which do you think would be best to include?

The article gave me pause. Upon reflection, I believe he’s right. Ten years ago, usability expert Jakob Neilson was doing studies that showed people skim online, they don’t read in depth. And it’s pretty clear from anyone who’s spent five minutes in a browser that we jump from topic to topic pretty quickly.

I know that my own writing has changed. I used to love writing longhand in a lined pad, and now can barely form a sentence without having a text editor where I can cut and paste. And as for reading? My tolerance for reading long non-fiction books went away years ago. I inch my way through them now. So do I absorb complicated new information that requires Thought and Contemplation? Er, not nearly as much. Maybe it’s simply that I’m older and busier, but it’s true that the Net has habituated me to sound-bite style reading.

That’s one big worry for my upcoming Get-it-Done Guy book, in fact. Part of the reason it is organized as many, many small micro-chapters is that I don’t believe anyone’s going to read a 200-page book straight through. And if I want to give readers value, it has to come in a form they can use.

How about you?

If so, do you have specific examples, questions, stories, etc. that you’d like me to elaborate on? This could be done as a pretty brief topic, or as a pretty big one…

I was thinking: what would you do if you were going to spend $1 bn on a Presidential campaign?

Rather than spend it on vapid attack ads, I might spend it revitalizing a community, or doing something to make a concrete difference in the lives of many people, and then saying, “That’s the kind of thing I want to see happen as President.”

Would it work? I don’t know. But I’d rather see the money directly creating good than going to yet another round of media buys so we can all be inundated with the meaningless drivel that is campaign advertising.

In that moment, it struck me: we all live in a world of our own making. Oh, I don’t mean literally, though fans of The Secret may disagree. But our experience of the world is so deeply tied to our interpretations that what most of us call “truth” is nothing more than our own made up stories.

I look at the world today and see more than 6 billion people surviving. Many don’t have enough water or health care, but they’re surviving. It fact population continues to rise. That doesn’t sound like a dangerous world to me; that sounds like a world that’s provided us pretty much everything we need to thrive. Heck, we’ve even exterminated or controlled all of our natural predators.

To the extent we live in a “dangerous” world, that danger comes from other humans. For example, investment bankers and financial managers who deal in collateralized debt obligations. And yes, the occasional human being kills others. Sometimes it’s in war, or for political reasons, or whatever. And the media focuses on those events precisely because the violent, dangerous events are the exception, rather than the rule.

Most Americans have never suffered pain worse than a stubbed toe. We’re surrounded on the east and west by oceans so broad that no one can cross them without ample warning. We have Mexico and Canada to the south and north. The greatest danger there comes from having too much cheap labor and better ice hockey teams, respectively. As for the rest of the world, we have more intercontinental warheads than everyone else put together and then some.

In short, we’re the most dangerous thing in the world, and in the absolute scale of things, even we aren’t doing much damage. (Except unintentionally, to the environment, but that’s not what Chris Matthews was talking about.)

So Chris lives in a dangerous world because he finds the danger and then calls the world dangerous. He could also look at all the good things and call the world safe, secure, and happy. His choice.

And what is your choice? Which world do you live in?

If you want to bring this into a business context, since this is a business BLOG, let me ask you: when you look at your competition, your industry, and your trends, what stories do you tell? How do you explain the actions of others? The actions of markets? Do you tell a story of luck? Of skill? Of timing? Are you a victim of the market (“the failure of our initiative was because of a bad economy”) or are you a driver of the market (“we did everything we could think of and found the combination that let us become market leader in a mature market”)?

Examine your stories. They’re only stories, and they dictate your every perception, your every decision, and your every action. Choose your stories well.

He suggests that a consultant’s nonverbal response is essential and advocates practicing non-silence responses until they can be delivered smoothly. I disagree. Here’s what I wrote:

If the CEO hasn’t bought in to your presence, the meeting won’t accomplish much, so I would be willing to change gears to address the problem. Silence seems way, way too risky. It’s the one response where I have no control over or knowledge of what’s being communicated.

You seem to want to respond from a place of integrity. Rehearsed responses, as you note above, aren’t integrity. Your intentions may be good, but integrity is being true to your real responses. If you’re caught off guard, a high-integrity response could be, “Wow. I’m taken aback by that comment and unsure of your intention. Could you help me understand?”

You interpreted the comment as questioning your ethics. Maybe you were wrong; maybe the CEO was just stating the truth as he saw it. If so, add it to the discussion. “A change recommendation will give me business, so I may be biased. Others here may have biases for or against change. How can we as a group insure our solution isn’t unduly influenced by those?”

Or, if he was right (and you never say outright that he wasn’t, only that you were offended), you could stay in integrity by removing the conflict of interest, “Let’s agree here and now that change management consulting will go to other consultants.”

You could also defend your integrity and bring it into the discussion, saying courteously, “That’s not how I work. If, however, you fear consultants at your firm give advice for the sole purpose of generating new fees, perhaps we should add that to our strategy discussion?”

At worst, they’ll ask you to leave. But maybe this consulting CEO considers biased recommendations perfectly good business practice. Wouldn’t you want to know that? It’s relevant to the strategy discussion and may be relevant to whether you want to keep them as a client. It could also suggest he doesn’t know how to establish a trusting client/consultant relationship, which becomes another topic for the strategy discussion.

From your discussion, I get the impression you were more afraid of losing your fee than of standing up for your integrity. Which, by the way, means that the CEO’s implied “You’re willing to sacrifice integrity for income” might have hit home because it was true, as you demonstrated by sacrificing your self-integrity to preserve the income from that client.

The problem here is that you weren’t confident in the moment. Why not take some assertiveness courses, and/or improvisation classes, so you learn to generate confident, flexible responses on the fly? Joining a comedy improv troupe–which I did as a hobby–was possibly more useful than my Harvard MBA in terms of usable business skills. I know I can always respond with confidence, and then I need only concentrate on my integrity, knowing the nonverbal part will be there when needed.

And P.S. this stuff IS learnable. I was a socially inept MIT geek for years. If I can do it, anyone can do it.

Actually they sound like fundamentally friendly people who have been given a really awful script to read. The script made me feel oddly … unclean. Like someone I was just meeting had been told to insinuate themselves beyond my boundaries so I would think well of them. Even really friendly people reading scripts sound like people reading scripts. And when a script says, “It’s my pleasure to serve you,” I don’t believe it for an instant. The subtext is, “I’m scared spitless I’m going to lose my job unless I read this godforsaken quote from a Harlequin Romance word-for-word.”

If you hire truly people-oriented people, let them go off-script. They’re people-oriented, they’ll figure out what to say. Believe me, we customers can tell the difference. And we appreciate it! It’s nice to have a real conversation with a real person who really cares about helping me out. At least, that’s why my script says I’m supposed to say here…

“Bomb hoax” implies intent to deceive people into believing a bomb was present. People who engage in hoaxes (“perpetrators”) aren’t nice people. Just the phrase smears the characters of the men who placed the ads around Boston.

In a real bomb hoax, someone calls a building and says “There’s a bomb!” In this ad campaign, they put boxes with lighted cartoon characters around the city, where they stayed unmolested for a couple of weeks before being noticed. The same boxes in a dozen other cities produced only calm amusement. That doesn’t sound much like a bomb hoax.

A more accurate headline would be, “$2MM paid to Boston to compensate for ad mistaken for bomb.” Or, if you want the language to correctly specify who did what, “Turner pays $2MM to compensate for Boston Mayor and Police mistaking ad campaign for bomb.”

The Mayor, Governor, and emergency response people kept saying that “in a post-9/11 world, [Turner] should have known” that police and bomb units would mistake glowing cartoon characters for bombs. That’s absurd. In a post-9/11 world, police and bomb units should be well-trained to notice something wrong, investigate it, quickly identify what is and isn’t a threat, and only shut down the city if there’s danger.

I live in Boston. It took the city’s emergency response team a couple of weeks to discover brightly-lit ads that were designed to be noticed. Is this supposed to make me feel more secure? Once they noticed the ads, it took them hours to figure out the difference between a light-bright and a bomb. And in an oft-overlooked postscript, while investigating the cartoons, they found two real pipe-bomb hoaxes that they’d not have found if they weren’t looking for the Turner ads. Oh, boy. I feel like they’re really keeping me safe in a post-9/11 world. Not.

Our emergency response team screwed up, big-time. They’ve successfully shifted the blame using words like “hoax” and “perpetrator” so they needn’t take the responsibility for their slow response, their extraordinarily inept discovery of the real situation, and their missing the real hoax pipe bombs. Now, they’re showing the same lack of skill in identifying and fixing their contribution to the problem. All so they needn’t say “we screwed up.” I only hope they perform better if we ever have a real emergency.