The book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff is a secret weapon in our arsenal of senior and executive level career coaching. But before you add it to your basket on Amazon, let us just warn you: it’s a terrible book. The author is unlikable and his tactics range from bizarre (taking a bite out of someone else’s apple) to outrageously aggressive causing many of our female clients to ping us halfway through the book and say “interesting read Laura, but I would never be able to pull this off.” The point of course, is not to necessarily mimic the author, but to absorb his disturbingly clear-eyed assessment of how power in its most raw form, works. Power-blindness is a trend we have been tracking for the past many years among senior level professionals seeking to get promoted or land a new role. Clients vary in the severity of their blindness, but most need help navigating -ever more strategically the political landscape they exist in. Our first attempt at resolving this blindspot with you, our client base, was our founding concept: apply political campaign strategy to your career goals. This worked with resounding success as many of you can attest to with your promotions, senior level interview rounds, increased public influencing, all the many strong outcomes from the strategies we have developed together. But what book to pair with this success? After hunting for the perfect, pocket sized book that would help us to remove the blinders worn by even the most resistant-to-power-clients, I discovered Pitch Anything. We assign books like mad to our clients because the adult brain needs to learn through multiple channels not only through experiential, hands on campaign execution. So it was with great pleasure that we recently received this book review/note from client Charles Eliot, now head of Engineering at the Institute for Disease Modeling, who so delightful sums up his reading experience of this book. Charles sent this to us, ‘as posted on Goodreads’:

“Oren Klaff tells us that the “frame control” approach to pitching he describes in Pitch Anything was motivated by his distaste for the earlier approaches that focused on putting maximum pressure on the person you’re pitching to. But throughout Pitch Anything he uses violent and combative metaphors, like “crushing your target’s frame”. This dissonance is grating and distracting. Here’s my advice: – The book is short, so read it quickly. – Don’t listen to the audio-book: you’ll just be distracted by the obnoxious delivery. (Note from Laura: The author live on video is even worse, stick to the book) – Focus on the core message. Pitching is about appealing to the emotional, reflex-driven parts of us (what Klaff calls the “crocodile brain”, and Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1”). You can’t make an appeal to the slow-thinking rational parts of the brain until you’ve convinced the crocodile brain that you aren’t a threat and what you have to say is interesting. – Klaff has a lot to say about generating “local star-power” when you pitch. Much of the time it sounds like he’s describing phallocentric pissing contests to gain situational social dominance. This is where the disconnect between his style and his motivation is most glaring. You might, like me, find these parts of the book grotesque but ultimately not essential to his bigger message. – The discussions about “beta traps” and neediness (“validation-seeking behavior”) will sound like a prescription for being an obnoxious jerk. But once you wash off the encasing slime, the core message is important: neediness is not attractive. If you seem needy, your credibility will collapse and your pitch will fail. This won’t be because you lost social dominance, although that’s certainly one way to frame it, but as a consequence of basic human cognitive wiring. – Finally, ignore all the neuroscience. It’s simplified almost to the point of being gibberish.”

Thank you Charles. We work with a client base of voracious readers, futurists, technologists, former academics, and business leaders. We rely on them to use the word phallocentric so we don’t have to. Our clients rely on us to sharpen their edges, resolve their blindspots and escalate their outcomes through intensive thought partnership, curated resources and process driven road maps.

For inquiries related to custom executive and senior level career strategy engagements, email Laura@lauraclose.com.