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

"hacking charisma"

[Anonymous Coward]

otherwise known as "learning sociopathic manipulation"?

Re:"hacking charisma"

[fustakrakich]

In today's world it's a very rewarding trait. The sociopaths are top dogs. Somebody needs to teach how to resist "charisma".

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.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody needs to teach how to resist "charisma".

Otherwise known as "critical thinking".

Re:"hacking charisma"

[DNS-and-BIND]

If you want to go through the rest of your life unarmed in a socially violent world, go right ahead. The smart people will be learning charisma, and you'll be wondering why they get ahead.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[MillerHighLife21]

It's not complete BS, but I think it's more learned by observation than taught. I was very socially awkward growing up but I also just sat back and observed people. When I got to college I made a point to modify some of my habits around people based on those observations and my college experience was a whole lot better than my high school experience. The short of it was that I just realized what type of things that I was doing that made people react badly and stopped them. It also didn't hurt that I lost 40 lbs, worked out every day, got contacts and got rid of my braces.

Seriously though, the #1 thing that I learned to do was just stop talking so much. I geek out with programmers on programming stuff. People run away when you do that in other settings.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[gl4ss]

just read con man guidebooks.

I would think silicon valley has plenty of coaches for that shit.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[jellomizer]

If you need to resist it, you have already failed, as it had already affected you.

In short, we live in a world which people have an increasing voice in the world. This post alone will probably be read in many countries. Most likely this post will last only a few seconds in your memory and go away.

Now resisting charisma will require more work, because we have so much more information static in our lives and really not to many good ways to filter out a nonsense such as an internet post while someone is taking a break from work, vs. some more valuable information.

Now charisma, is by no means perfect it does show that the person really seems to really care about the information they state vs. the normal static. Thus we naturally will give it more attention. Sure this information can be complete B.S. but they have gave it in a way to get your attention. They got your attention you listen to what they said, then you will need to make a decision to accept or reject that idea. a 50/50 shot! However if you lack charisma your views will be ignored and washed away from the static, and there is no decision to accept or reject that information because it never got your attention.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[modecx]

If you need to resist it, you have already failed, as it had already affected you.

Charisma, like the old tree branch that scratches your window at night, and the drive to eat and fuck, primarily affects the old lizard brain. It's near the same biological level as the autonomic nervous functions. Unless your name is Spock or Jesus H. Christ, of course you've already failed. That doesn't mean you're done for though.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[BobSutan]

Otherwise known as "reframing". This isn't a new concept, but it is interesting that it's being taught to executives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

http://changingminds.org/techn...

http://stress.about.com/od/pos...

http://www.psychologytoday.com...

Re:"hacking charisma"

[ShanghaiBill]

Otherwise known as "critical thinking".

"Critical Thinking" is a meaningless phrase. The Wikipedia page contains nine different definitions, some directly contradictory. So whatever "critical thinking" means, those that use the phrase without saying what they actually mean, are not doing it.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Critical Thinking" is a meaningless phrase. The Wikipedia page contains nine different definitions, some directly contradictory.

The word you're looking for is ambiguous, not "meaningless". And none of those definitions are directly contradictory.

So whatever "critical thinking" means, those that use the phrase without saying what they actually mean, are not doing it.

There are multitudes of ambiguous words and phrases. Usage of any of them without "saying what they actually mean" does not in any way suggest lack of critical thinking.

In fact, your inappropriate attribution of that error does suggest lack of critical thinking (by most definitions on the linked page) on your part.

Re:"hacking charisma"

[Sentrion]

Thank you for your excellent example of rhetorical technique. You've built an impressive straw man from an ad hominem buried into a loaded question, with implied phony refutation, slanter, and appeal to ignorance tossed in just for fun. All in less than 20 words. Posting as Anonymous Coward just adds to the touch. Brilliant! You're catching on to how this social manipulation thing works. I see great things in your future.

cool

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need to read a book to tell you how to be cool, you're not.

Re:cool

[Charliemopps]

I'm cool. The problem is, the general public is just too God damned stupid to notice. Reading a book that tells me how to dumb down my interactions with the majority of the idiots that surround me so they can understand what I'm talking about doesn't make me any less cool. Did learning English make Antonio Banderas less cool? No. It just made stupid Americans capable of understanding just how cool he is.

Here's the key phrase

[korbulon]

"[Olivia Fox Cabane] is so successful that executives now pay her to do the same for them."

Ever been to an offsite while working for a large company? And did they have an invited speaker who basically talked a lot of entertaining bullshit, which was nonethelss bullshit? Ever wondered how that speaker managed to con a bunch of supposedly savvy and high-powered executives to get the gig? Me neither. Then again, management consultancy still continues to thrive as an industry and I still don't know what they really do.

It's almost as if most executives have no fucking idea what they're doing...

Re:Here's the key phrase

[Anonymous Coward]

The moment I realised that most people in this world are winging it, and don't know what the hell they're doing, that's the moment I knew I had grown up.

Re:Here's the key phrase

[arth1]

It's almost as if most executives have no fucking idea what they're doing...

Oh, they have a good idea. They know they're smiling figureheads. They've shown teeth all their life, but before landing the top position, the teeth were used on those safe to bite. Now the blood has been brushed off, and they smile warmly while watching their backs.

Re:Here's the key phrase

[L4t3r4lu5]

From what I can fathom, they sell the ideas of CxO's for whom they have consulted to the CxO's of other companies. The more companies you consult for, the bigger your war chest of good CxO ideas.

Re:Here's the key phrase

[NotDrWho]

Ever wondered how that speaker managed to con a bunch of supposedly savvy and high-powered executives to get the gig?

Speakers like that prey on clueless managers that have nothing tangible to contribute to what the company is actually doing, but want to LOOK like they're providing valuable leadership in exchange for their overinflated salaries. It's a symbiotic relationship of bullshit. The speaker pretends they're offering valuable advice, and the manager(s) pretend that their brilliant idea of bringing the speaker in is going to somehow help the company. Meanwhile the real brains behind the company lose a day of productivity listening to a bunch of useless, vacuous crap.

Re:Here's the key phrase

[NotDrWho]

The old Socratic rift: "Intelligence is realizing that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Wisdom is realizing that neither does anyone else."

Re:Here's the key phrase

[csnydermvpsoft]

I'd turn that around: "Intelligence is realizing that nobody knows what the fuck they're talking about. Wisdom is realizing that you don't, either."

Re:Here's the key phrase

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

Also, bring donuts.

Re:Here's the key phrase

[Pope]

Hence "know thyself" :)

UGh

[period3]

I'm halfway through the article but so far all I've read is "blah blah blah". Atrocious website that requires a cut-and-paste into a word processor to make the narrow article even readable, and as utterly devoid of content as the reader's digest article I read at the dentist.

Honestly do editors even try to read these submissions?

Re:UGh

[fustakrakich]

Honestly do editors even try to read these submissions?

No, they pick popular headlines and post them. This is an advertising site now. If you don't believe me, look at what has happened to the journal section. Spam ratio is over 500 to 1.

Re:UGh

[jones_supa]

What is also interesting is that the Slashdot Q&A section skips answers occasionally. For example, do you still remember the Richard Stallman and Theo de Raadt question sessions from some weeks ago? Where are the answers?

If you keep an eye on the Q&A section, it's not that unusual for the answers to disappear.

Charlatan

[rumpledoll]

Much like the psychic who never seems to be able to hit the lottery numbers and become wealthy, Olivia appears to have none of the qualities of which she purports to teach, besides being a charlatan that appeals to the pointy haired bosses of the world looking for that silver bullet.

More power to her, but...

[rmdingler]

Charisma is merely the equivalent of a Doctorate in social interaction.

Everyone isn't ideally suited for it, just like other specialty degrees.

And sociopaths generally excel in this vocation.

Ob.

[grub]

Hitler had charisma in spades. He loved dogs and even had a girlfriend.
People always forget about the good things he did.

Olympic

[rossdee]

Mark Todd had a horse called Charisma, he won gold at the Olympics equestrian

Bah!

[jones_supa]

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

Bah

[cmdr_klarg]

Charisma is a dump stat...

She discovered nothing....

[Lumpy]

It has been known for decades and the single book that is the bible in such things has been out forever now..

http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-...

How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie

She may have came up with a better presentation, but it's the exact same thing.

Funny thing

[DNS-and-BIND]

Isn't it odd when "learned charisma" like this is presented as fact as long as it is used for business purposes, but when the exact same techniques are used by dorky men to get girls, this "learned charisma" is decried as false and a total lie. The things that make you go hmm...

Why is everyone being so negative in here?

[HnT]

Let's not focus on the website layout, the unnecessarily long article, her looks or what you might think you know about "sociopaths" and all managers clearly being manipulative swindlers.
She is not teaching people to "mind fuck" others, she is not some "NLP" pushing sociopath. Essentially she is offering a pragmatic approach to overcoming your own anxieties or to calm down a competitive temper. She helps to make certain situations more pleasant for the client and is not pushing tools how to "one-up" conversation partners.
So she suggests meditation and a mental exercise of focusing on a relaxing situation (the puppy, or kayaking) and she successfully sells that to some people? Well, good for her! You might think there is little information or "skill" there and you might be right, the point is it can still be damn hard to make a transformation of habits and ways you might have had for a long time and what a good coach does is help you along the way.

I really do not understand the negative responses in here. Yes her message might be pretty simple and "duh!" but at least she has some interesting connections to scientific theories and like I said above, transformations like that are not only about identifying and then "simply" fixing what's wrong.

I would much rather be coached by someone like her instead of some bullshit NLP training where you are taught how to mind-fuck your victim into scratching his left ear with his right hand, literally.

Re:Why is everyone being so negative in here?

[Zatchmort]

Exactly. Wow, Slashdot unimpressed by an article about management and social skills? In other news, sources close to the Pope say he may be Catholic...

It looks like most of what she's teaching is pretty straightforward stuff - stand up straight, look people in the eye, and think about something calming before a big meeting or presentation so you're less nervous. Also, most people don't appreciate being interrupted unless they've specifically signed up for it (and maybe not even then). It's not "mind control", it's just how to be polite and assertive at the same time. A few years ago, I realized that the reason they're called "social SKILLS" is because they can be learned, and my personal and professional lives have both skyrocketed.

The fact of the matter is, if more tech folks looked at dealing with people as a (solvable!) challenge, we'd have more technical ideas being listened to. Instead, they say "it doesn't come naturally to me, so it must not be worth learning at all" and management is dominated by clueless BS artists, reinforcing the stereotype of the socially clueless engineer and the technically clueless boss. Doesn't the alternative (engineers who've put in the work to learn how to deal with people) sound better?

what the hell?

[slashmydots]

Everyone who worked with Steve Jobs said he was impossible to work with, obsessive, and not remotely charismatic. Who wrote this nonsense?

Re:what the hell?

[unimacs]

I think one his "gifts" is that he could switch between being charismatic and an asshole in the blink of an eye. And I think a key to his success is that over time he mostly figured out when he could get benefit from being an asshole (or at least get away with it) vs when he needed to be more charismatic.

Black Magic.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

otherwise known as "learning sociopathic manipulation"?

An occultist I knew (now on the "other side", unfortunately) considered charisma to be a form of Black Magic: mind control of others to get them to do things for the charismatic that would not be their reasoned choice and might be enormously harymful to their own interests.

Having said that, it's clear that a lot of nerds are so far at the other end of this arms race that they need substantial help to be able to hold their ground against the Pointy Haired among the boss class. It's refreshing to find that it is learnable, and that nerd/tech techniques can be applied to understanding and controlling it.

Look out world: After a few years of application of the psychological equivalent Moore's Law, you might see an explosion of technocrats from the tech incubator enclaves like Silicon Valley.

And look out techies: If the above meme starts circulating among the current powers that be, you might see a burst of government interventioin in and suppression of the tech enclaves.