PMISV Monthly Book Club | Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger

PMISV Monthly Book Club | Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger

 

The Monthly Book Club is a forum for talking about books that touch on the widely varied challenges of project and program management.

 

 

 

About the Book

Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger

In Invisible Influence, the New York Times bestselling author of Contagious explores the subtle influences that affect the decisions we make—from what we buy, to the careers we choose, to what we eat.

“Jonah Berger has done it again: written a fascinating book that brims with ideas and tools for how to think about the world.” —Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit

If you’re like most people, you think your individual tastes and opinions drive your choices and behaviors. You wear a certain jacket because you liked how it looked. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong.

Without our realizing it, other people’s behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous. Even strangers have an impact on our judgments and decisions: our attitudes toward a welfare policy shift if we’re told it is supported by Democrats versus Republicans (even though the policy is the same). But social influence doesn’t just lead us to do the same things as others. In some cases we imitate others around us. But in other cases we avoid particular choices or behaviors because other people are doing them. We stop listening to a band because they go mainstream. We skip buying the minivan because we don’t want to look like a soccer mom.

By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it—and learn how we can use this knowledge to exercise more control over our own behavior. In Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger “is consistently entertaining, applying science to real life in surprising ways and explaining research through narrative. His book fascinates because it opens up the moving parts of a mysterious machine, allowing readers to watch them in action” (Publishers Weekly).

 

About the Author

Jonah Berger is a Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an internationally bestselling author, and a world-renowned expert on word of mouth, social influence, consumer behavior, and how products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. He has published dozens of articles in top‐tier academic journals, teaches Wharton’s highest rated online course, and popular accounts of his work often appear in places like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. Over a million copies of his books, Contagious, Invisible Influence, and The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind are in print in over 35 countries around the world.

 

Registration

• Required and limiting attendees. First come first serve.
• Zoom link to be distributed to registrants on the day of the event. Look for a Zoom invitation the day of the event from scotchlas@gmail.com. Feel free to set that not to go to your junk mail.

 

About the SV Monthly Book Club : 

 

List of Books for 2025 and prior years : Click Here for more information

The SV Monthly Book Club is a no-cost forum to discuss books and publications that touch on various topics about project and program management. It recurs on the 3rd Thursday each month, virtually. There is no club membership, and anyone can join the discussion forum of the month. To attend the forum, please pre-register (for free) and be sure you have pre-read the book of the month. Registration is necessary as we are limiting the number of attendees, so that everyone has a chance to express their opinion and listen to others.

This is a professional event. While we are open to opinions from all angles during the book discussions, please be respectful to the host and all attendees.

About the Event Leader

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marc Scotchlas - Event Host (Contact Marc)

Serving at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Marc completed a career in the Navy and after retiring in 2018, joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as Shot Director at the National Ignition Facility. After managing operations at the world’s premier laser facility that has achieved ignition, he has taken on several other challenges including recapitalizing more than twenty thousand square feet of laboratory space, saving more than $330,000. Residing in the Bay area, he is perpetually expanding his horizons.

  

Additional Information

PDU: Up to 5.0 PDU to complete the pre-reading; 1.0 to participate in the monthly meeting. PDU claim code available to attendees at end of event.

♦PDU claiming instruction

 

Recognize that PDU credit may be partial if you've read only the part of the book that you will read, or that full credit can be taken later after the discussion event is complete and you have completed the entire book.  There's no drop-dead requirement by the discussion date for reading, but the discussion is much fuller if you've read the entire book.