Three Star Leadership

This is a book to use, not a book to read.

Sam Horn tells you early on that the book has two purposes. It will help you quickly capture interest and it will help you "break out, not blend in." But that will happen only if you pick a project or idea and then apply the suggestions in the book to improving it and creating a message with POP.

POP stands for Purposeful, Original and Pithy. The book is organized around those three standards.

First comes Purposeful. To help you boil your idea down to its essence the author asks you to answer the 9W questions about it. Answering those questions give you a foundation to build on.

In fact, you'll find yourself going back to those nine questions and your answers time and again. You'll probably change some of your answers. That's a very good thing.

The second, and largest main section helps you make your communication Original. The ideas here will help you turn your idea around so you can see it from the others side and massage it into different forms. You'll learn about the power of alliteration, doing your own take on common sayings, advertising slogans and pop culture phrases.

The third section has ideas for helping you be Pithy. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "pithy" as: "having substance and point - tersely cogent." If it's short and carries a big message, it's pithy.

This was the most helpful section for me. You'll learn how to use alliteration, rhythm and rhyme to make your statement more powerful and more memorable. I've seen all this before, but never in a single place.

The book closes with "Seven Secrets to Keep Their Interest Once You've Got It." This seems to me like a bunch of good ideas that were too good to leave out, but didn't fit anywhere else.

I got incredible value by working through the exercises as I went. As advertised, they helped me craft a POP statement. More importantly, for me, this was a powerful exercise in understanding my business offering and what is unique about it.

I recommend this book to you if you want to craft POP statements that present you or your business or idea to others. I also recommend it if you want exercises that will help you think creatively about what you do.

I've been a professional speaker and writer now for over a quarter century. I found help and ideas here that will help me tell my story and the story of my business more effectively. So will you.

To see what other folks thought of this book, or to purchase it from Amazon, click here.