Burned: About Human Behavior and the Commitments We Make.and Break

In Burned author Clifford Brody asks and then answers these three tough questions:

 

1)   Why do we make commitments and then break them?

 

2)   Why does it hurt so much more when others break their commitments to us than when we break our commitments to them?

 

3)   And why, after all the hurts, do we then make even more commitments without any assurance that things will work out better the next time around?

 

People all over the world have lived through the pain of commitments that have failed. They want better answers to these questions than they've gotten up to now.

 

Burned provides them. Blending elements of the traditional with outside-the-box creativity in his own answers to these three questions, the author takes the reader on a fast-paced journey that speaks to what commitments are and aren’t.

 

Each chapter begins with a short personal vignette driving home why, more often than he wanted, Brody’s own commitments didn’t work the way he thought they would, why other people’s commitments to him failed and hurt him a lot, and how, after “Commitment Bankruptcy”, he uncovered commitment success which he overlooked … and believes we all have had but all too often goes unrecognized.

 

Burnedis the first book in a new market category best described as “anti-self-help”. It takes direct aim at the core logic of self-help and of behavioral therapy, both of which begin with the premise that people have to change how they are thinking and what they are doing. The author offers “behavioral delivery” as the much-preferred solution: centering first on the many things people do well in behavioral decision-making—making commitments, for example—even if the outcome is not the best or even desired.

 

The author is up front in explaining why he is glad that he made commitments even when they failed miserably…and why he believes that others will be happier doing the same thing. To explain why, Burned whisks its readers back through a very selective, sometimes humorous, and a few times grim history of marriages, movies, rock music, the onset of World War II, the 1988 and 1992 U.S. presidential elections, Twitter, ice cream, Broadway shows, even computer chips—things that no one would likely ever believe could fit together in any story.

 

But they do in Burned. The book offers up a unique recipe that enables readers to discover why people actually get ahead not just when commitments succeed but also when they fail, and why it is smart to trust others to deliver on their commitments … even when there is no concrete proof that they ever will!

 

Born and raised in New York City and a long-time resident of Washington, D.C., Clifford Brody has lived the life of an Army officer, U.S. diplomat, C-level entrepreneur, business and marketing consultant to big and small companies alike (including Citibank, HP, and Avon), and husband, father, brother, and uncle. Not all of these jobs, he is quick to admit, worked out quite the way he or anyone else expected. And like many others, he believes, the failures he encountered along the way taught him far more valuable lessons than did any success. Brody has been spotted in his driveway all too often doting over his two aging wannabee-collector BMWs even when it is below freezing outside, probably because they won't start despite his tinkering, or maybe because of it! He also spends a fair amount of time working with Washington D.C. area not-for-profits to advance their missions in improving water resources, childhood education, and health services for the less fortunate.