REVIEW: Paul Cowan — Connecting with Clients (BOOK)
Paul Cowan wants to help. There’s no sense of him looking to bask in the glories of a successful career when reading his book Connecting with Clients: For Stronger, More Rewarding and Longer-Lasting Client Relationships. He isn’t angling for applause or laurel leaves. Connecting with Clients is, instead, a natural outgrowth of his long career as both a relationship specialist focused on buttressing connections between individuals, clients, and customers. It is informed by his experiences as a psychotherapist. Moreover, it’s an altruistic move designed to pay back what he’s learned during his professional life so readers can better realize their own professional ambitions.
It is written in a relaxed conversational style that stays on the reader’s level rather than lording its superior knowledge. The most successful and enduring non-fiction works, particularly those related to the business world to a greater or lesser degree, share several commonalities, but high among them is personality. The academic world produces treatises with an assortment of citations, graphs, charts, and number crunching, but all too often it reads like an instruction manual rather than a work composed by someone deeply immersed in the how and why of a specific topic. There’s no danger of that with Cowan’s book.
He keeps things light at all the right times. Concluding each portion of the book with a list of top tips is a relaxed way for him to drive home the points he tries to share with the reader and he relates his personal experiences from a variety of emotional points of view that keep readers interested and, occasionally, entertained. This is especially important when you consider the book’s length. It is likely to run over three hundred pages in hardcover form, perhaps even longer in paperback, but the connection Cowan makes with readers and his prose style come together to make Connecting with Clients a fast-paced reading experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: https://paulcowan.com/
Examining the subject through lists, steps, and other devices is indicative of how Cowan approaches resolving issues and each instance of this is easy to follow. Some sections of the book are longer than others, but Cowan deserves kudos for keeping things brief, for the most part, and you never feel like you’re walking across familiar territory though, by necessity, many topics overlap. Connecting with Clients reads like a book that Cowan planned out to the last detail before he ever set a single word down.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Connecting-Clients-rewarding-longer-lasting-relationships/dp/0857198599/
Giving back in this way is, really, what it is all about. We have an image, largely media-formed, of individuals in the business world living on a predatory plane far removed from normal every day life. The bottom line is the bottom line. Cowan, along with others, upends that stereotype. This isn’t a book you’ll see on the New York Times bestseller list. It won’t be water cooler chatter in the workplace. Instead, it’s a perfect example of someone who has learned much during their time dealing with people and wants to share what they’ve gathered with the widest possible audience.
Colin Jordan
