The Art of Profiling: Reading People Right the First Time [Hardcover]

Dan Korem (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

It has been well established that people are not very good at assessing the personalities of strangers. Journalist Korem claims to have invented a system that improves one's ability to create an accurate personality "profile" upon meeting someone new. Unfortunately, aside from the statement that workshop participants move from 25 to 75 percent accuracy after a day of training, this system has not been subjected to outside evaluation. The system is based on carefully observing the subject's communication and performance traits (e.g., displaying or controlling emotion, asking or telling when communicating, behaving confidently or fearfully), then comparing them with certain extreme types. However, readers are not given enough information about how to elicit data in the first place, e.g., the questions to ask in job interviews or specific actions to look for. This would seem to be a subject far better taught in a multimedia format such as a videotape set or computer program. Not recommended.?Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, Wash.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 261 pages
• Publisher: Intl Focus Pr (October 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0963910337
• ISBN-13: 978-0963910332
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #153,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It's just a classification system, January 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Art of Profiling: Reading People Right the First Time (Hardcover)

This book only teaches you a way to classify different people. You ask yourself 4 questions about a person, and based on the answers you can put him/her into one of 16 profiles. The main problem is that once you have classified the person, you haven't really gained much. Each of the 16 profiles are basically amalgamations of the traits deciphered from those original 4 questions which you asked yourself. So, for instance, you would ask the question "is this person generally fearful or not fearful?" Then, you'd combine the answer (let's say he's not fearful) with the answers to the other 3 questions. Then the profile would say something like "may be confident." To me, this is just a synonym of what you originally measured which is that he is not fearful. There is only about 2 pages on each profile - not nearly enough about motivation or persuading each profile. Korem also does not give enough practical techniques on how to answer the basic 4 questions that he says will help you profile people. For instance, there are no examples of how a fearful or a not fearful person would act in a given situation. For example, I know that fearful people sometimes act overconfident in order to mask their fear. Korem does not give us any way to distinguish this. Finally, the book doesn't offer insight into the fact that people act differently in different situations. For instance, an insecure person may act really tough around subordinates, but will become sickenly sweet to his superiors. Another example: how many people do you know who act completely different at home than at work? Here are some better book recommendations: "Reading People" - for a general intro "Words that Change Minds" & "Selling the Way Your Customer Buys" - Both these books tell you how to ask the right questions in order to discover what makes a person 'tick.' "Secrets of Sexual Body Language" - It's aimed at the dating scene, but it has full color glossy pictures and is actually a very good intro book for studying body language.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Art of Profiling : Reading People Right the First Time, December 28, 1999

By 

Flavio Mota - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Profiling: Reading People Right the First Time (Hardcover)

This is an excellent book for beginners who are interested in the art of profiling. It is good because it gives the reader the understanding of how to evaluate people and how to deal with them. That is very important when one is working in big organizations. This book will help you advance on the job. It will do that by giving you an intuition on how to deal with people. With that being said, this book includes exercises to improve one's intuition on the behavior of people. Moving away from all that, I gave it three stars because the book falls short in that it claims that the methods in the book are enough to classify just about any person. I think that the methods are pretty good. However human behavior is much too complex to allow us to classify people into just a few categories.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid book, May 12, 2010

By 

Frank Delgrasso - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Profiling: Reading People Right the First Time (Hardcover)

i enjoyed reading this book. It's not light reading, but the author is a clear expert in his field and I think this book is a welcomed addition to anyone's library.