Author: Ross Lovelock
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Reviewer: Richard K. Durden, owner/lead writer at Carbide Marketing
At first glance, the book appears to be a user manual to the author’s SCQuARE method, a step-by-step technique for selling ideas to your bosses. The selling point of the method is the ability to create alignment between you and your superiors to help good ideas get through.
The book begins with an overview chapter of the method, a justification for the use of the method (i.e. good ideas get lost in the corporate maze) and a quick breakdown of each step of the SCQuARE acronym.
The rest of the book contains chapters that go into each step in more detail, with activities, examples and guidance to walk the reader through using the method. There are a good number of fill-in-the-blank charts and diagrams in the book to assist in the process as well. The final few chapters introduce a separate, but related, method called BREAKER, a creative thinking technique used to enhance the use of SCQuARE.
While the method itself is useful and definitely a good tool to have in your business arsenal, the book seems to be more of a marketing tool for the author’s company, which teaches the method to businesses, than a stand-alone book. The author gets the point of the method and the steps across, but often strays off into anecdotes and asides and makes the book a little difficult to follow. It almost seems as if the author took the lecture notes from the course and added filler until the book was long enough to publish.
With that in mind, this book is a great tool for those working in a corporate setting who have an idea to pitch. I feel that the book works better when used as a reference guide to develop the pitch than when read cover-to-cover.
Star rating:
3/5
