Customer Reviews

The Art of Profiling: Reading People Right the First Time

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

An interesting and informative book so far (I'm still reading this and another book on a similar subject).

This book basicly tells you to study a person and ask question about this person. This is another good starter book but not for someone that has any knowledge on the subject already. Its starts a weak profile on a person then stops.

I have started using this book for interviewing people and learning more about people and making general observations. The book is not an exciting read but the material if used properly will change the way you view the world.

Bought this for my boyfriend for Christmas. He says he loves it and there's these assignments inside that are pretty cool. He likes these kind of books, and says this is a good one!

When I bought this book I knew Dan Korem worked for the F.B.I. so I thought this maybe would have a lot to do with his cases. It had very little but more on the process. It mainly depends to on what you're looking for in this book. If you want to know the process of profiling this is all you. If you're interested in the jobs that have been done find another one.

Great if you want to learn how to read people, profile your friends and family. A perfect starting point