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"

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody needs to teach how to resist "charisma".

Otherwise known as "critical thinking".

cool

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

[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: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.

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.