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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Justin Fox and I'm talking

today with Daniel Pink, writer, thinker, speaker, and it turns out, salesman. He wrote a piece for

HBR last year called A Radical Prescription for Sales, and now he has a new book

out, To Sell is Human, The Sur surprising truth about moving others.

Dan, welcome to Ideacast.

Justin, it's great to be with you here in the studio.

So, Sales, you begin the book describing your own realization that you spend a big chunk of your time selling. How so?

Well, what I did is I unpacked my calendar, went back and looked at what I had done for the previous two weeks, and so I'm obviously selling books because that's

part of my business but if you go beyond that I am trying to no offense to the

people this is not anybody at hBR but I mean I spent part of that time trying to convince an editor to

abandon a stupid idea for a story. I tried to get an airline gate agent to switch

a seat. I've got kids so I'm trying to persuade my kids to do things. I have various people I do

business with and I'm trying to get them to see it my way rather than their way to

go my direction rather than their direction and when you actually tease it all

out I'm spending an enormous amount of time selling now

it's selling in a broader sense on the cash register isn't necessarily ringing money's

not changing hands but it's I'm persuading and convincing people to make a transaction.

But you say this in the book, there's still this, when you say the word sales, there's this

...