 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is Knowledge 17, hashtag No17. Daniel Pink is here, best-selling author, speaker at the CIO Forum here at Daniel. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. It's great to be here. So we were telling us about an audience of 100 CIOs, hanging out, kicking back, listening to you. Give them the love on the persuasion, the art of persuasion and selling. You wrote a book to sell as humans. So share with us the premise and what you were talking to the students about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the premise was that a lot of persuasion, influence, and selling is more science than art. There's this rich body of social science that gives us some clues about how to be more persuasive. Whether we're persuading up, whether we're persuading down in an organization, whether we're persuading side to side, and these CIOs are persuading in multiple, multiple directions. They're talking to their CEO. They're talking to their board. They're talking to their team. They're talking to other business units. They're talking to vendors. And so I was a look at what does the science tell us about how to persuade effectively? Well, I mean, typically you don't think of, now maybe this is different, a little bit different for CIOs, but IT people generally are not great salespeople. That's what we think, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And yet if you look at some of the data that we have, we find that in general, this is a whole swath of the US workforce, people in a variety of functions are spending about 40% of their time persuading, influencing, and selling in general. They might not necessarily be, they're not necessarily selling a product or a service and a cash exchange, but they're doing things, they're at a meeting and they're trying to persuade someone to do something different or do something in a different way. They're a boss trying to get their employee to do something. They're an employee trying to get their boss to stop doing something. They're dealing with people, they need to get enlist help from someone in another department. You need to recruit someone to come and work for you rather than for a competitor. And so if you look at the content of a lot of white collar work, a huge portion of it is this thing that's kind of sort of like selling. It's just, it's not denominated in dollars, but the transaction is, and the denomination is time, effort, attention, energy, zeal, belief, whatever. And it's a big part of what we do. And as I said, you don't have to go with your intuitions about what's effective and what's not. You can actually look to this rich body of social science for some clues about how to do it more effectively. So why does selling have the black eye when it's really persuasion? And as you said, we're all persuading all the time. Not only to work, but also at home with our kids, our spouse, everybody. Well, I would say it's a black eye and a bloody nose. I mean, it's looked at. People really, really look at sales in a negative way. It's quite remarkable. I think that that's, I'll give you the reason, and I'll tell you why the reason is outdated. The reason is that most selling and buying for most of our lifetimes for most of human civilization has been in a world of information asymmetry, where the seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller had more information than the buyer, the seller can rip you off. All right, when the seller has more information than the buyer, the buyer doesn't have many choices. The buyer doesn't have a way to talk back. The seller can really rip you off. Information asymmetry is why we have the principle of buyer beware. Buyers have to beware, because they're at a disadvantage because of information. All right, this is basically the history of commerce until like 10 years ago, when all of a sudden, we went from a world of information asymmetry to a world of information parity. And so, and this is true in every domain. It's true for selling a product, selling a car, selling B2B services. It's true in the dating market. It's true in the hiring market. It's true at a meeting where it drives baby boom managers crazy. They'll be at a meeting and they'll say something and some 28-year-old sitting in the back will say, oh, excuse me, and hold up her phone and say, no, what you said isn't right. All right, and so the reason it has this black eye and bloody nose is because we're used to this world of information asymmetry. One of my points was, okay, we're in a totally different era now of information parity, and that's a different terrain. And so, again, you can use the science to navigate this terrain. So people ask me, you know, what's this digital transformation all about? I say, well, it's attempt by brands to achieve asymmetry again. I mean, listen, if you are a seller, asymmetry is awesome, all right? I mean, you want to do everything you can to preserve it. What I'm saying is that the tide is so ferocious here that it's a very difficult thing to hold back. So it's possible in certain kinds of industries and certain kinds of products and services, you can do some things to kind of hold back that tide. My view is like holding back tides is difficult work. And usually in the long run, it doesn't work very well. So my view is like, okay, what do you do in this world of information parity? And this world, you know, the old world was buyer beware. I think this new world is seller beware. And I think that today, you know, what sellers have to do is they have to take the high road. I mean, you want to take the high road because it's the right thing to do. But now there's a very pragmatic reason to take the high road is because the low road doesn't lead anywhere. Right, well, the other thing that you're touching on, which is, again, in the last 10 years, is instinct versus database. Very good point. And that's the decision making and process. So as you said, you don't have to make this up. There's plenty of science to support this effort. And the instinctual guy in the corner is no longer necessarily the authority. Absolutely right. And what's interesting is some of this research confirms our instincts. Some of this research doesn't. For instance, we tend to believe that strong extroverts make the best salespeople. Not true. It's an absolute abject myth. Strong extroverts in general are terrible salespeople. Now it doesn't mean the strong introverts are better. People who are the best, and I was talking to these somewhat more introverted CIOs, the people who are the best, and there's some good research on this, are what are called ambiverts, which are people who are in the middle. Not heavily extroverted, not heavily introverted. And what the great thing about the ambiverts is that they are ambidextrous. So they know when to speak up, they know when to shut up. They know when to push, they know when to hold back. So even though the mythology, our instincts to use your word is that, oh, strong extroverts make better salespeople. If I want to sell more, I got to be more extroverted, and the evidence doesn't say that. The evidence says, in fact, to the contrary. The evidence points to ambiverts as having an edge in selling. So what's the formula for the high road? Is transparency as part of that? Well, on a personal level, yeah. I think transparency is getting to be not even a choice. It's basically like, transparency is no more a choice than say oxygen is a choice, you know? So yeah, exactly. So if you look at the research, there's three personal qualities that seem to be important. Attunement, which is, can you get out of your own head into someone else's head? Understand their perspective, okay? Because you don't have any cores of power today. Boyancy, they're ABC. Attunement, boyancy, total luck. Attunement, boyancy, and clarity. Boyancy is in any kind of persuasive effort, there's a huge amount of rejection. And human beings don't like rejection. I don't like rejection. Nobody likes rejection. So one salesperson who I interviewed described his job as looking out into an ocean of rejection. So boyancy is, how do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection? How do you deal with rejection? And there's some good science behind that. And then clarity has two dimensions. Clarity is, it used to be that if you had access to information, you had an edge. But now everybody has access to information. So the edge comes from being able to curate information, being able to make sense of information, separate out the signal from the noise and information. The other thing is, you guys, you were talking again, this goes directly to your point about instinct versus data and machines. A lot of salespeople like to say, old fashioned salespeople say, oh, I'm a problem solver. And that's cool. Which is that problem solving is becoming less important. Because if your customer or your prospect knows exactly what their problem is, they can find a solution without you. They don't need you. And so the premium is shifted from the skill of problem finding. Can you surface latent problems? Can you look down the road and anticipate problems? Can you see around corners? And that's going to be incredibly important in this world of machine learning and AI where simply expressed problems will be solved that way. And what we human beings have to do is figure out the right problems to solve, anticipate problems, really see around corners and do that kind of thing. So you basically advise the CEOs to tune in, deal with rejection and make things more clear, curate, gather it. Absolutely, absolutely, right, right, right. And the information thing is big, because in anything, not only the CIOs, but in any realm, it used to be that expertise came from having access to information. So the thing about in the world of finance, like at a certain point, only stock brokers could figure it, could find out what the stock price was. Only stock brokers had certain kinds of information about how a company was performing, okay? So I'm an expert, why? Because I have the key to where the information is locked up. Now everybody does. So what do you do if you want to be a financial professional? Well, you better be pretty good at synthesizing information, making sense of it, separating out from the signal, separate out the signal noise from the information. What were some of the more interesting questions you got from the CIO audience? There were some, a couple of interesting questions about, well, there was a couple of questions about introversion, extroversion and how much you can change your personality, which is minimally. I mean, you can make a small move to, you can make a small move to the middle. There was a question about, very good question for these CIOs in particular, because most of them are dealing with multinational firms and employees and customers all around the world, is how much national differences make a, how much national differences are important. And there is some, there's some very interesting stuff on that. For instance, if you look at, it's not a shocker, but if you look at, like, if you're selling or persuading, say, in a Japanese East Asian culture, much more hierarchical than it would be here. You guys would not be Jeff and Dave from the get-go. You know, it would be like, oh, wait a second, wait a second, these guys have earpieces and ties. Whoa, wait a second, I better be much more hierarchical in how I deal with them, or in certain Latin cultures. Brazil is a good example. If you and I were to do, we were to do business together, we wouldn't even talk business in our first meeting. We would go out to dinner, we would have a meal, and so there's that kind of cultural nuance stuff. There's one thing that I tried to explain to them that Americans stink at. It's one of the biggest cognitive errors that Americans make, and it's this. When we Americans try to explain people's behavior, predict people's behavior, we almost always overstate the importance of someone's personality and understate the importance of the context that they're in. Jeff did that because he's a jerk. Dave did that because he's a nice guy. Frida did that because she's mean, you know? And we disregard what context they're in, and when we look at our own behavior, we behave very differently in different contexts. If you were to drive with me, you would think I was the worst person on the planet. I mean, truly, it's like in that context, I'm just miserable, I'm mean-spirited, because I can't stand doing it. Other realms, I'm okay, you know? And so, a lot of them, and so, again, if you go to East Asian culture, East Asian cultures will look at the entire fish tank rather than the fish that's in the foreground. And so, as a consequence, they'll say, oh, well, Pink Son was, you know, maybe he was having a bad day, or maybe Pink Son doesn't like to drive, or when Pink Son's with his family, he's a nicer guy and that kind of stuff. Americans say, that guy's a jerk! All right, well, we got a wrap on what Jeff really, and I want to know is, does this work on our kids? That's- The short answer? Absolutely. I did, but thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. I appreciate it. All right, keep right there, but we'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is Knowledge 17. Right back.