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How do you gain influence for an idea?In Breaking Out, idea developer and adviser John Butman shows how the methods of today’s most popular “idea entrepreneurs”—including dog psychologist Cesar Millan, French lifestyle guru Mireille Guiliano (French Women Don’t Get Fat), TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and many others—can help you take an idea public and build influence for it.It isn’t easy. Butman argues that the rise of the “ideaplex” (TED, Twitter, NPR, YouTube, online learning, and all the rest) has caused such an explosion in the creation and sharing of ideas that it has become much easier to go public—yet much harder to gain influence. But it can be done.Based on his own experience in advising content experts worldwide, Butman shows how the idea entrepreneur breaks out—by combining personal narrative with rich content, creating many forms of expression (from books to live events), developing real-world practices, and creating “respiration” around the idea such that other people can breathe it in and make it their own.



About the Author

John Butman

John Butman is an author, editor, and collaborative writer who focuses on issues at the intersection of social and business change. He is the co-author, with Simon Targett, of NEW WORLD, INC. The Making of America by England's Merchant Adventurers (Little, Brown 2018) and BREAKING OUT: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) and other books. He has helped leading thinkers and strategists around the world develop their ideas and create and publish their books.

Butman's work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Economist, Financial Times, Forbes, Huffington Post, Inc.com, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Publishers Weekly, Big Think, 33 voices, The Independent, Times of London, Kirkus Reviews, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, and many other outlets and venues.

He has been involved in the development of some thirty-five books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages, and include New York Times, Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, and Toronto Globe and Mail bestsellers.



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