“Selling in all its dimensions — whether pushing Buicks on a car lot or pitching ideas in a meeting — has changed more in the last ten years than it did over the previous hundred.”

You probably believe you have a job that isn’t sales (unless you are in sales). Perhaps you think you’re a university professor, a doctor, a machinist, or an electrician. That’s all well and nice, says Pink, but you’re kidding yourself. Almost all of us spend a large chunk of our time convincing other people to do things – as teachers, we convince students to learn, or as office workers, we convince our coworkers to help on our projects or our bosses to listen to our ideas. Despite the bad name of sales, says Pink, this isn’t a bad thing. In the modern world, salespeople can no longer rely on asymmetric information to bamboozle their clients: instead, in an age of free information, they have to rely on actually working in the client’s interest.

It’s an interesting point, and an interesting book. I’m not quite convinced, though. I agree we all spend a lot of our time convincing others of things, but I’m not sure that’s a modern phenomenon: I suspect that’s been true in almost any age. Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal, after all. I’m also not sure sales doesn’t – in part – still deserve its bad name. It’s true, the internet means you can look up a used car as well as the salesman, but even when the information exists, finding it isn’t easy given how much else is out there. Salesmen still have an advantage because they curate information, even if they aren’t the sole holders of it.

The book also has a bunch of cute stories, as these books often do. The first ‘elevator pitch’, for example: the man who figured out how to make elevators safe for people needed a way to convince them it worked, so he built an elevator at a world fair, hoisted it up, and cut the cable. To the gasps of the crowd, it plummeted…until the automatic brakes kicked in and stopped it. I’m not sure I agree with the book’s thesis, but for a quick summer read, it’s light, entertaining, and interesting.