I’m pleased to share the good news about Social Gravity, the newly released book by Joe Gerstandt and Jason Lauritsen.
These guys are smart. They are articulate. And, importantly, they are passionate about anything they focus their gray matter towards. To our benefit their first (and certainly not last) book explores the importance of establishing, developing and nurturing relationships, creating what they call “social gravity”.
Mother Nature did her snow thing and left me home bound this weekend, and reading Social Gravity was just the ticket for the winter doldrums. Social Gravity is 150 packed pages of good stuff about what social capital is and how you can become more inter-personally effective. At the end of most chapters they give you some questions to ponder, which were helpful in validating that, in some cases I’m doing pretty well but in other situations I need to do better in my gravity efforts.
What I like most about this book is what is isn’t– a “how-do” manual that gives glib, trite tactics to manipulate others to fall in love with you. They challenge you to do this important work with authenticity. What they are asking us to do is much more difficult and requires more thinking and elbow grease on our part, but will pay far more dividends in initiating and nurturing authentic relationships.
So buy the book, and also check out the always interesting, provocative ongoing conversation at www.talentanarchy.com.
P.S. Part of the social gravity case is built on research Jason and Joe conducted in collaboration with my pals at www.quantumworkplace.com— kudos to them for supporting this effort.
Mark Hirschfeld 
Leave a Reply