The book “Generating Buy-In” by Mark S Walton is a book on mastering the language of leadership. Leaders know how to paint a “big picture” that generates action by tapping into people’s emotions. He also conveys that leaders are the persons who knew how to ask for a commitment and inspire their listeners to take steps toward the goal.
Mark conveys that however well positioned, intelligent we may be, we all need some body to buy in. Buy in means understanding, commitment and action in support of our goals. Followers need not take our lead but they should buy what we sell, accept what we say. There are different step by step processes explained in the book to achieve this.
He strongly emphasizes that strategic stories of a positive future have been the most powerful language of buy-in and the most effective way to influence the human mind is to communicate a story.
He also conveys that strategic stories provide us a framework to fill the gap between the future we want and future our audience or customer wants. Then he explains how to develop a strategic story with setting up a generating buy in goal as initial process. Goal is followed by three processes, they are establishing a strategic story line, develop the story line with audience in mind and call for audience actions. So he explains with dozens of examples of individuals who excelled at persuading people to believe, do or buy from Abraham Lincoln to John Welch. Thus he speaks the language of buy in with great personalities to mold powerful thought and emotion in our listeners. In the final part he speaks about applying this language in our life to achieve our goal, what ever the goal might be.