THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO POWER & INFLUENCE

A public relations executive and strategy consultant provides his thoughts on how to build, wield, and retain power and influence in an everchanging world in this advice guide.

Dilenschneider helmed Hill & Knowlton from 1986 to 1991 and now leads his own public relations firm, The Dilenschneider Group. In this book, he details how to develop personal power and influence while interacting with others in order to achieve one’s desired life and career goals. Its first part focuses on self-examination: discovering what one’s passions and abilities are and collecting feedback on how one is perceived by others. This analysis, Dilenschneider asserts, is critical in informing and guiding one’s future actions and decision-making. The book then segues into offering tips regarding more specific activities, including networking (starting by cultivating three people as part of an ongoing process); effective communication (which, he says, is less about style and more about being clear in one’s messaging); and what Dilenschneider terms “memorable” management, which focuses on having respect and enthusiasm for other people’s opinions. Dilenschneider dedicates the final part of the book to a discussion of how to maintain one’s power and influence while handling crises and dealing with everchanging trends in the industry, workplace, and society. He recommends having a team and plan in place for when crises occur, and assessing what are truly “hard trends” of lasting impact in one’s personal life and workplace. Dilenschneider concludes this book with a recommendation to help and advise others—and thus pay one’s power forward.

The author’s latest offering is a well-organized work that not only provides readers with valuable, evergreen core advice, particularly regarding self-assessment, but also useful commentary on hard trends, including how the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed the workplace. In the early pages of this book, Dilenschneider acknowledges there are countless other business books on these topics available to readers, but he can correctly claim that his “comes to you from decades of experience working with some of the most successful companies in the world—and the people who lead them.” The author certainly demonstrates a distinct and authoritative viewpoint on his subject matter, even if some of the examples that he provides along the way may be quite familiar to some readers. One of them, regarding recognizing when to pivot in one’s career, tells the story of James Patterson’s moving from a career as an advertising professional to a much more successful one as an author, which is an oft-told tale. Still, Dilenschneider also offers plenty of timely strategic pointers in this book, including recommendations to stay abreast of what’s happening on social media platforms, given their power in the business world, and to recognize that the hybrid workplace is indeed the new reality. Most of all, Dilenschneider provides readers with an important and inspiring ethical directive, demonstrated through examples in his career and others’, to have an element of the “commonweal” in one’s quest for personal influence and power.

An inspiring primer on navigating one’s life with self-knowledge and integrity.