Influence Is Your Superpower

Influence Is Your Superpower

It is the fall of 2009, and Ellen DeGeneres has just introduced a new product to her studio audience. The item is called the Shake Weight. It is a dumbbell that vibrates. The promotional video plays on the screen behind her, and Ellen does not say much. She does not need to. The audience erupts. Ellen picks up the Shake Weight, holds it at waist height, and gives it a single shake. The building comes apart. Within forty-eight hours, the clip is everywhere. The Shake Weight segment becomes one of the most shared pieces of television of that year, and sales of the product -- which had been respectable but unremarkable -- skyrocket to $40 million.

The company that made the Shake Weight did not plan that moment. They sent a product, Ellen responded to it the only way anyone could, and the world did the rest. But Zoe Chance, who was working in marketing at the time and would later spend years at Yale analyzing exactly this kind of phenomenon, noticed something that most people missed. The viral moment had nothing to do with the product's actual fitness claims. It had everything to do with the fact that Ellen, and the audience, and eventually the entire internet, found the thing genuinely funny and genuinely fascinating. They were pulled in, not pushed.

That distinction -- pulled in versus pushed -- sits at the center of Chance's 2022 book, published while she was a professor at the Yale School of Management teaching what students consistently rank among the most popular courses in the building: Mastering Influence and Persuasion. The course sells out every semester. Students from finance, law, medicine, and the arts compete for seats. They come expecting to learn negotiation tactics and leave with something they did not expect: a different model of what human beings actually are and how they actually work.