Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down

You believe in a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it, hoping for enthusiastic support. Instead, you get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets. Before you know what’s hit you, your idea is dead, shot down.

It doesn’t have to be this way, say John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead. In Buy-In, they reveal how to protect good ideas and win the support needed to deliver valuable results. The key? Understand the unfair attack strategies that naysayers, nitpickers, and handwringers deploy with great success time and time again:

• Death by delay: Endlessly putting off or diverting
• discussion of your idea until all momentum is lost
• Confusion: Presenting so much distracting information that confidence in your proposal dies
• Fear mongering: Stirring up irrational anxieties about your idea
• Character assassination: Undermining your reputation and credibility

Through the device of a fresh and amusing fictional narrative, the authors vividly show how avoiding or attempting to quash attackers doesn’t work. According to their counterintuitive approach, it’s far better to respectfully engage these adversaries and stand your ground with simple, convincing responses that save the day. By “inviting in the lions” to critique your idea, and preparing yourself for what they’ll throw at you, you’ll capture busy people’s attention. You’ll help them grasp your proposal’s value. And you’ll secure their commitment to implementing the solution—winning their minds and hearts.

Smart, practical, and brimming with useful advice, Buy-In equips you to anticipate attacks and turn them to your advantage—so your good idea survives to make a positive change.