Sally Hogshead

Sally Hogshead believes the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself. Hogshead rose to the top of the advertising profession in her early 20s, writing ads that fascinated millions of consumers. Over the course of her ad career, Sally won hundreds of awards for creativity, copywriting, and branding, and was one of the most awarded advertising copywriters right from start of career, including almost every major international advertising award. She frequently appears in national media including NBC's Today Show and the New York Times. Hogshead was recently inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, the industry's highest award for professional excellence. Her advertising work hangs in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The science of fascination is based on Hogshead's decade of research with 250,000 participants, including dozens of Fortune 500 teams, hundreds of small businesses, and over a thousand C-level executives.

Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination

How the World Sees You

Nick Gracilla

In a similar vein with Myer Briggs, or with Strengthfinders, Hogshead sets out an online survey and report that helps to identify communication strengths — and equally important, how others see you, at your best. She prods the user to ask some interesting, hard questions, like how to describe yourself not merely as what you happen to do ("I'm a software developer") but rather as what unique value you bring to a project ("I'm an incisive planner; I bring genuine, reliable insights to every project."). 

Having said that, this book is largely a printed support brochure for the website product. It was still in selling mode 1/3 of the way into the text ("soon, you'll learn how to...") and the amount of redundant content was enormous. It seems to be collated from the website, where the upsell happens. It's also the case that, without a great editor, some of these personal value "anthems" read like so much LinkedIn flimflam. If I ever said, out loud, "I provide sure-footed influence," please wake me from my mumbo-jumbo marketing-speak slumber. 

So, while I think there's the kernel of some great thinking here, and have incorporated into my own work, the quality of this text is very low and reads like a bad conversion focused blog post. Recommended, with many reservations, if you're willing to find the good in it.

Omar Fernandez

It's an interesting topic and concept, but not enough substance for a long book. After answering the questions in an online poll, you learn about your natural strengths when communicating. You can then read the section related to that particular persona, there are 42 possible options, and read the others only if you're interested in learning more about the strengths of others. 

I found it interesting but probably would have preferred an article similar to those in HBR to a book. That would have condensed it to the most useful content.

How the World Sees You Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination

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