FIGHTING WORDS

Persuasive Strategies for War and Politics
MILLER Richard
SAVAS BEATIE LLC
ISBN: 9781932714784
Published: 2010-06-01
382 pages

In Fighting Words, award-winning author Richard F. Miller (In Words and Deeds) looks to some of history’s most successful battle speechmakers to answer the age-old question of how. How did Pope Urban II’s speech convince tens of thousands of Europeans to wage the First Crusade, a dangerous, and for many, a one-way journey to Jerusalem?  How did the words of General David Petraeus resurrect a losing effort in Iraq and in the process, retrain his soldiers for a new kind of war?

For those who manage-whether a convenience store or a Fortune 500 company-motivating, instructing, and preparing your people to perform their jobs is, for the competent manager, Job One. And for those who recognize that in this partisan age, politics is just war by other means, Fighting Words applies the insights of battle speeches to politics.

Miller doesn’t speculate about « what works » on the public podium. Rather, he analyzes real historical examples and extracts their lessons-from Alexander the Great to General David H. Petraeus and President Obama. As Miller aptly demonstrates, persuasive strategies based on love, hate, duty, patriotism, comradeship, fear, and shame are as widely used today as they were in antiquity.

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