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The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

–Peter F. Drucker

What do you want that you don’t have?

Where will you learn how to get it?

If you are like most people, you only want to consider information that’s narrowly focused on your issue. If you want to lose weight, you want to read about that. If you want to make more money investing, you want instructions on that subject. If you want to get a promotion, you’ll read and watch videos about applying for jobs.

What if someone wants to teach you one thing that will give you everything else? You won’t pay any attention. Why not? Because that’s not what you’re looking for.

I learned that lesson the hard way and want to share it with you.

With the experience of promoting our global business bestseller behind us, I felt confident that the next book could be launched with a smaller, more focused effort. I was boldly assuming that the bulk of those who had read and liked the first book would be hungry for more.

I must have forgotten Peter Drucker’s point about few people reading business books. If hardly anyone had read the first book, just getting all those people to read the next book wasn’t going to generate a lot of sales. The rest of the sales would, in fact, have to come from people who were fascinated by the new book’s title or concept.

From the time that the book was conceived, we began to speak about managing to take advantage of irresistible forces just as often as we did breakthrough solutions. But a funny thing happened when we did: The audience for breakthrough solutions would be ten times larger than for irresistible forces. As you can imagine, that reaction didn’t bode well for book sales from those newly exposed to this work.

The ratings we got from those who heard both messages were similarly high. Unfortunately, we had picked a subject that wasn’t as appealing as creating breakthrough solutions. We were up against the irresistible force of executive indifference.

What was the lesson for your intrepid irresistible force authors? Use your new management process to pick future book topics. Knowing how fruitless it is to do local publicity for a book that’s not in distribution, we decided to focus on markets where we got strong distribution.

Unfortunately, that was nowhere other than our offices and our publisher’s warehouse. Favorable reviews didn’t exactly pour in either.

Speaking with Peter Drucker about the modest interest in the book, he was full of explanations. In addition to not following his advice about waiting until the market further developed for our first book, we had written a very sophisticated book that would not appeal to everyone. In fact, Peter confidently reported that it might take 50 years before The Irresistible Growth Enterprise would be fully appreciated by readers and applied broadly.

His advice: Don’t write any more books for a while and focus on making our best ideas simpler and easier to understand rather than developing more sophisticated methods and ideas. Now I followed his advice. I hope you will learn from my experience and do the same.