The Platinum Rule: Discover the Four Basic Business Personalities--And How They Can Lead You to Success

In today's highly competitive and ever-changing business environment, it's not enough to treat clients, associates, and staff the way you would like to be treated. You have to know what they want - and be able to deliver it. To a large extent, your success with others depends on how well you respond to their individual needs.
Now Dr. Tony Alessandra teams up with master human resource consultant and trainer Dr. Michael J. O'Connor. Together they share their insights into the exciting field that is attracting billions of corporate research dollars: human personalities. The Platinum Rule offers two effective tools that Alessandra and O'Connor developed. First is The Platinum Rule itself, the breakthrough principle that sensitizes you to the differences among people. Second is the authors' unique classification of the four basic personality types: Directors, Relaters, Socializers, and Thinkers. Alessandra and O'Connor reveal the characteristics of each one and how to apply this vital information to The Platinum Rule.
The Platinum Rule is part psychology, part common sense, and pure business gold: a guide designed to play a lasting part in your successful business life.

The Golden Rule is limiting in one sense, say Alessandra and O'Connor, who last collaborated on People Smarts, because it assumes all human beings are alike. The authors propose instead a Platinum Rule, "Do unto others as they'd like done unto them," and concentrate on how to read people better so as to use the rule to succeed in business and industry. At the start, they posit four behavioral styles: directors, who are forceful, competitive, decisive; socializers, who are outgoing, optimistic, gregarious; relaters, who are genial, stable, eager to please; and thinkers, who are self-controlled, cautious, analytical rather than emotional. The book continues with a checklist so readers can determine their own personality types and then advises learning to identify and adapt to the styles (or combinations of the styles) of others so as to advance, whether in peer groups, management, sales or interactions with other businesses. The book is simple, but it may help those who want to increase their sensitivity to others and their power to communicate. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two veterans of the motivational chalk-talk circuit demonstrate how managers can better direct underlings by identifying their basic personality types.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.