FOCUS

FOCUS is a short, prescriptive, and accessible book that--by introducing the two basic motivations driving everything we want and do--gives us a powerful tool to spread ideas, attract customers, influence others, and reach our own goals. Halvorson and Higgins will show us how these motivations--prevention (where we focus on minimizing loss) and promotion (where we focus on what we can gain) work.

We all want to experience pleasure and avoid pain. But there are really two kinds of pleasure and pain that motivate everything we do. If you are promotion-focused, you want to advance and avoid missed opportunities. If you are prevention-focused, you want to minimize losses and keep things working. And as Tory Higgins has found in his groundbreaking research, if you understand how people focus, you have the power to motivate yourself and everyone around you.
Showing how promotion/prevention focus applies across a wide range of situations from selling product to managing employees to raising children to getting a second date, Halvorson and Higgins show us how to identify focus, how to change focus, and how to use focus exactly the right way to get results. Short, punchy, and prescriptive, Focus will help you see not just what’s going on around you—but what’s underneath.
Heidi Grant Halvorson is a social psychologist, speaker, and author of Succeed (HSP, 12/2012--this book sold in 6 territories, listed below). She serves on the Board of Advisors for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School, and is a popular expert blogger for Fast Company, Psychology Today, and the Huffington Post as well as a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and BBC World Service's Business Daily.
E. Tory Higgins revolutionized the filed of motivational science with his discovery of regulatory focus theory. He is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology at Columbia University and Professor of Management at the Columbia Business School, where he also serves as Director of the Motivation Science Center.