From my introduction to Dan Pink through his book Drive I was amazed at how he could write a book about business that pertained so much to what educators do. It was not in the sense of how to create widgets, which is often a business approach to education, but rather what incents people to do what they do in the best way possible. It was more than just the best way to drive students, but the best way to drive educators to their highest potential as well. For that reason Dan has been recognized and engaged by national and international education organizations to address their memberships. I have listened to several of his keynotes with never a disappointment. In personal conversations I have found him to be a really nice guy. I sought him out at a recent trip to D.C. to ask him about his new book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others . I was hoping to find his latest book to be as educator-friendly as Drive.
1. You say that today, like it or not, we’re all salespeople. Is that true even of teachers?
On the first question, the answer is “yes.” When you look at what white-collar actually do each day, it turns out they spend a huge portion of their time persuading, influencing, and convincing others. It’s what I call “non-sales selling” or “moving” others. Money isn’t changing hands. The cash register isn’t ringing. And the transaction isn’t denominated in dollars, but in time, effort, attention, energy commitment and so on.
This is what teachers do much of their day. Think about, for instance, what a good algebra teacher does. At the beginning of a term, students don’t know much about the subject. But the teacher works to convince his or class to part with resources — time, attention, effort — and if they do, they will be better off when the term ends than they were when it began.
2. You also say that sales has changed more in the last 10 years than in the previous 100. How have the forces causing that change affected education?
The biggest change in the buyer-seller relationship. One reason that selling has a bad rap because most of what we know about it arose in a world of information asymmetry — where the seller always had more information than they buyer and therefore could rip the buyer off. But today, information asymmetry is giving way to something at least close to information parity. That’s changed the game in ways we’ve scarcely recognized. In conditions of information asymmetry, the operative principle is “buyer beware.” In a world of information parity, the operative principle is “seller beware.”
This has affected teaching in some interesting ways. One hundred and fifty years ago, we began to have schools in part because that’s where the information was and teachers were the mechanism by which students accessed that information. Those conditions prevailed for a very long time. But now — thanks to the Internet, mobile phones, social media and so on — students have the same access to information that teachers do. That means that a teacher’s job isn’t to transmit the information, but to equip students with ways to analyze the information, make sense of the information, evaluate the information. What’s more, it has begun to change what happens inside the classroom itself as more teachers move to flipping the classroom — providing the lectures electronically and use class time for hands on work that computers can’t replicate.
3. What are the underlying principles of this new approach to selling — whether you’re selling your product, your idea, or yourself?
The result of the change I just described is that sellers — of anything — need a new set of skills. There is a rich body of research — in psychology, economics, linguistics, and cognitive science – that reveals some systematic ways to become more effective in moving others on a remade terrain of information parity. The old ABC’s of sales were Always Be Closing. The new ABC’s of Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. These three qualities are the platform for effectiveness. Attunement is perspective-taking. Can you get out of your own head and see another’s — a student’s, a colleague’s, a parent’s — perspective. Buoyancy is staying afloat in an ocean of rejection. And clarity is helping students move from accessing information to curating it and from solving existing problems to identifying hidden problems.
4. On your concept of attunement, what is something a teacher can do to become more attuned with his or her students?
It’s important to understand at the outset why attunement matters so much. All of us today have less coercive power. It’s tougher for bosses, teachers, parents, and so on simply to command something and expect compliance. The better approach is to understand another’s perspective in the hopes of finding common ground.
But that can be a challenge. One sturdy finding of the social science is feelings of power and acuity of perspective taking are inversely correlated. That is, feeling powerful tends to degrade our ability to take another’s perspective. This is important because teachers are often in a position of relative power with regard to their students. So being effective often requires beginning from a different position: Assume that you’re not the one with the power. This of it as persuasion jujitsu, where you enlist an apparent weakness as a strength. Start your encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the student’s perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them.
5. What is one other tip teachers might glean from your book?
One of my favorites comes from a technique know as motivational interviewing. With this technique, you can deal with resistance by asking two seemingly irrational questions. So imagine you’ve got a student that simply doesn’t do his homework. Instead of threatening him or punishing him or pleading with him, use the two-question strategy (which I learned from Yale psychologist Michael Pantalon).
The first question is this: “On scale of 1, with one meaning ‘not the least bit ready,” and 10 being ‘totally ready,” how ready are you to begin doing homework.
Chances are, he’ll pick an extremely low number — perhaps 1 or 2. Suppose he answers, “I’m a 2.”
Then you deploy the second question: Why didn’t you choose a lower number?
The second question catches people off guard. And the student now has to answer why he’s not a 1. “Well, he might say, if I did my homework, I might do a little better on tests.” “If I did my homework, I might learn a little more.” “I’m getting older and I know I’m going to have to become a little more responsible.”
In other words, he moves from defending his current behavior to articulating why, at some level, he wants to behave differently. Equally important, he begins to state his own autonomous, intrinsically motivated reasons for doing something. When people have their own reasons for doing something, they believe those reasons more deeply and adhere to them more strongly.
So on a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to use Pantalon’s technique? And why didn’t you choose a lower number?
My Island View 
Does it bother anyone, at all, that business-speak, marketing-speak, and sales-speak is becoming so insidiously pushed into education?
I thought education was about showing people how to make sense of their culture. And to be good to each other. Not about “selling”.
Great post. I have been a fan of Dan Pink for a while. I find that most good business books have good lessons for educators. As there are more business books than education books, many of the books I summarize are from the business world. Check my book summaries which includes “Drive” and “To Sell is Human” at http://DrDougGreen.Com.
While I genuinely appreciate your outreach to Dan Pink, and your sharing his ideas with your blog’s readers, I’m left only with this impression: that nobody is working harder than Dan Pink — except, perhaps, Tom Friedman — to foist clunky market metaphors on the discourse of teaching and learning. He is obviously brilliant and well-meaning, and highly influential, but that doesn’t make him ‘right’ or helpful, except to the narrowest subset of educators starved for new metaphors, and willing to settle for this one.
As an educator I resent the suggestion that I’m in the business of ‘selling,’ whether or not ‘selling’ or ‘the world’ have changed in the ways — reputedly and duplicitously, in the first case, and obviously and tiresomely, in the second — that Pink suggests. Educators worth their salt don’t need to ‘persuade’ or to ‘sell’ so much as they need to ‘engage’ and to ‘hear’ and to ‘give.’
As a parent I am incensed that anyone should be invited to misunderstand my child as someone to whom ideas or skills need to be ‘sold’ — whether or not the coercion is of this gentler, kinder version (hah!) or not.
And as a citizen I reject the notion that that ‘buying’ and ‘selling’ are primarily driven by empathy, or ‘attunement,’ regardless of Pink’s claims to the contrary: that is simply, and factually, incorrect.
As Mike Thayer intimates in a previous comment, I am also stumped by our collective desperation as educators not just to ogle, but to distribute, the neoliberal smut peddled by Pink, Friedman, and others of their ilk. I don’t think it’s Dan Pink’s intent, and I’m certain it’s not yours — but this is demeaning to children, to teachers, and to our schools.
Chris, isn’t this a textbook example of confirmation bias on your part? It almost seems as though you are bent on trying to “sell” us on your point of view without actually trying to “hear” what was said in the interview.
Can you truly say that as an educator, you never try to “persuade” a student to expand her horizons or to look at the world in a different way? What does it mean to “engage” and “give” to a student? Are you just befriending them or serving as a therapist, or are you actually leading them to a specific body of knowledge or skills?
Certainly, business language can be inappropriate in the classroom. In fact, I’m very skeptical of treating students as consumers or employees. And I’m even more skeptical of the whole Neoliberal paradigm. However, Pink seems to be pointing to a different, more respectful typing of “selling” that Socrates might even recognize.
And “factually incorrect”? If you are saying that it is *impossible* to use empathy in a situation where you are trying to persuade? He didn’t argue that all instances of selling are driven by empathy or attunement. I believe he is trying to say that the persuasive efforts that educators already engage in can be done better by, for instance, trying to understand the perspective of the student.
Wayne,
The problem with this discussion and Pink’s “discoveries” is: none of it is new. Educators have known for millennia that empathy is critical to connect with students. They know that “trying to understand the perspective of the student” matters to achieving their goal, which is increased understanding of a particular topic by the student. Good teachers spend time trying to create emotional bonds with their students that allow a flow of information, of knowledge, to take place more easily.
To place that kind of relationship into the context of something so mundane as “buying”, “selling”, and “marketing” demeans not only the teacher and the student, but the process of education as well.
The real issue at heart is not everything is a market. Not everything that has value is “bought” and “sold”, even metaphorically. That is my complaint.
-Mike
If we were talking about ‘persuasion,’ it would seem sufficient to use the word ‘persuasion.’
Mike,
I agree with you that the “selling” language is kind of a forced fit. After all, he’s a business writer.
As Abraham Maslow said, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Pink’s hammer is the business model.
I guess I was trying to see it from a glass-half-full point of view (to mix metaphors). At least he is promoting a less coercive relationship between “buyer” and “seller.”
[…] "From my introduction to Dan Pink through his book Drive I was amazed at how he could write a book about business that pertained so much to what educators do. It was not in the sense of how to create widgets, which is often a business approach to education, but rather what incents people to do what they do in the best way possible. It was more than just the best way to drive students, but the best way to drive educators to their highest potential as well. For that reason Dan has been recognized and engaged by national and international education organizations to address their memberships. I have listened to several of his keynotes with never a disappointment. In personal conversations I have found him to be a really nice guy. I sought him out at a recent trip to D.C. to ask him about his new book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others . I was hoping to find his latest book to be as educator-friendly as Drive." […]
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[…] From my introduction to Dan Pink through his book Drive I was amazed at how he could write a book about business that pertained so much to what educators do. It was not in the sense of how to creat… […]
[…] From my introduction to Dan Pink through his book Drive I was amazed at how he could write a book about business that pertained so much to what educators do. It was not in the sense of how to creat… […]
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Dan said: “Assume that you’re not the one with the power. This of it as persuasion jujitsu, where you enlist an apparent weakness as a strength. Start your encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the student’s perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them.”
That might be true, except that in reality the teacher IS the one with the power, in the case of a high school teacher a great deal more power when compared to the student. The additional life, social and communications experience that teachers have make them much more powerful as well. I can visualize that by taking this approach, you as the teacher might become more aggressive than you might otherwise be, and as a result intimidate or bully the emotionally defensive and still maturing student. Take for example, the teacher with the well-meaning but unskilled student who, perhaps, also has an abrasive personality that the teacher finds annoying. It would be very tempting for said teacher to take it upon themselves to embarrass this student in front of his classmates in a misguided attempt at providing feedback. Tempting as well to enter another teacher’s classroom to deliver that message in this way. Dan’s theory reads well on paper (or the screen) but in reality it falls apart like so much internet gobbledegook.
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