Hacking Charisma

An anonymous reader writes: "Steve Jobs had it. George Clooney has it. So does Don Draper. Charisma is intangible but powerful: the personality trait that's used to win friends and influence people. Olivia Fox Cabane wasn't born with it. She was a high-school outcast, a socially awkward teenager baffled by the nuance of social interactions. But she was also an analytical thinker. She believes she has reverse engineered the secret of charm, and is so successful that executives now pay her to do the same for them. Cabane's self-help spiel comes with a dose of science. In this article, Teresa Chin examines the science of charisma, and asks why exactly Silicon Valley needs a charisma coach in the first place."

Comments

Bah!

[jones_supa]

I want more honest, nerdy and deeply technical guys. Types like Tim Sweeney. We have enough superficial bullshit-speakers already.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[VorpalRodent]

You joke, but that was my first thought when I read this gem about 2/3's of the way down:

Her executives are tutored in techniques like “responsibility transfer” [...] and “rewriting reality,” which involves undoing the anguish of a painful experience by coming up with alternative scenarios that transform the event from distressing to excusable.