Sell or be Sold

Mr Cardone shares some truly brilliant information in Sell or Be Sold so the book is definitely worth reading. At the same time Grant disparages techniques promoted by Dale Carnegie and NLP practitioners as “garbage,” “la la land,” and “whack.”

To Grant's credit he appears to loath any technique aimed at manipulation, but he'd have to take up the case of whether the aforementioned methods have any merit with Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins (NLP's poster person), both of whom's net worth far surpass Mr Grant's, Carnegie's by way of adjustment to today's dollars. It's also ironic that while knocking so called “manipulative” techniques, he recommends reading Dianetics, a book by master manipulator L. Ron Hubbard. Mr. Cardone is also a very high-level member of Scientology, an organization that feeds on greed and coersion while presenting itself as a charitable organization.

While Grant bemoans becoming a “chameleon” to communicate, it's ignorant to suggest there isn't profound value in matching the personality and mannerisms, to a reasonable degree, of persons you wish to persuade. If you've never tried it, simply do one thing, adjust the tempo and pitch of your speech to match your partner and watch how magical this can be; it isn't manipulation—it's respecting the other person's preferred style of communication. A good metaphor is a manual transmission, ever tried starting from stop while in high gear?

There's real treasure to be found in SOBS, but just as with about any book, it requires discernment and common sense to filter out the “bath water”.