Published by HBS, 2006.

Last week, a copy of this book appeared serendipitously at my front door. Oprah's O magazine boldly proclaimed on its cover: 'How to get anyone to agree with you'. So I agreed to read it, and ploughed through it cover to cover this weekend.

Gardner is perhaps best known for his theory of multiple intelligences. Changing Minds is a brave book, in that it attempts to answer a difficult question to answer. Unfortunately, by and large it fails to deliver on this promise. Coming from a Harvard professor and given the book's claim to a scientific approach, I expected experiments and data, or a reasoned approach. For example, the author could have used the richness of online communities and social networks to try an unbiased test of the success of several ways of trying to convince someone to do something. Instead, it contains little more than a series of anecdotes of mind changes in the public record and a list of seven factors --Reason, Research, Resonance, Re-descriptions, Rewards, Real World Events, and Resistances-- said to influence mind-changing. Unfortunately, little evidence save for the fact that they all start with 'Re' is given for this. Not that it is hard to believe that those seven have an influence, but it's hard to figure out if or why those seven above any others, or to use them in a way that is not self-evident.

Perhaps the best part of the book is Chapter 8, which deals with mind-changing up close and contains two entertaining accounts, one of Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' fateful meeting with Professor Cornel West, the other of the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

If nothing else, the book might make a lasting contribution by pointing out an interesting question, which science will hopefully eventually answer.