Charming Your Way to the Top – Michael Levine

Learn how to succeed by turning on the charm

Charm is good business. It can increase your income, boost your status, and establish and maintain your reputation. It can mean the difference, in many cases, between success and bankruptcy.

Most businesspeople don’t fully understand the concept of charm. It ought to be a reflex, a conditioned response, to “turn on the charm” when dealing with customers, clients, associates, and employees—but it isn’t. Yet, research has proven the value of charm, and it’s been made clear through opinion polls, scientific studies, and just plain old real life. It’s true in politics. It’s rare to hear Bill Clinton mentioned, for instance, without a comment following on his charm. And it’s certainly true in entertainment, a whole industry based on the moneymaking potential of charm.

This is true for the small businessperson as well. Charm draws customers, whether to a garage, a dry cleaner’s, or an investment bank. Charm gets noticed. When a customer contacts a firm for the first time, charm can seal the deal. But charm is only partly innate. Much of it is learned, from your parents, from your friends, and from people like author Michael Levine, who has made a lifelong point of paying attention to charm. And you can learn how to make it work for you. How to succeed in business without really trying? By charming your way to the top.

Levine has repped the likes of Sandra Bullock and Demi Moore (as well as Pizza Hut), and written 10 books, including Guerrilla P.R. His lesson here: people who learn how to “charm” to show genuine care and a ready willingness to go the extra mile are more likely to succeed than others. Thank you notes and birthday cards should be consistent; remembering someone’s birthday just once ends up insulting, not charming. Levine even evaluates the everyday behavior of 50 A-list celebrities to show readers which stars are really charming. (Cary Grant gets his own chapter.) Adjustments to affect (“Don’t smile an artificial, cynical smile”) and lists like “10 Commandments to Charming Your Way to the Top” and “10 Ways to Calm Down Before a Business Meeting” take the place of situation-specific war-gaming. Chapters on “The Dark Side of Charm” and “Exceptions that Prove the Rule” go a little bit beyond appearances. The Hollywood stuff often feels more like padding than context, but it serves as enough of a hook; readers entering the job market for the first time will find the glitz makes the mechanics of nice go down more easily.