The video shows Bono accepting the Chairman’s Award at the NAACP Image Awards ceremony. The first thing the star does when he mounts the stage is to express his admiration for presenters Julian Bond and Tyra Banks and for the NAACP. Then he builds a bridge between himself and the audience by linking their experiences: “I grew up in Ireland,” he says, “and when I grew up, Ireland was divided along religious lines, sectarian lines. Young people like me were parched for the vision that poured out of the pulpits of Black America … ”

“What is Bono doing that Aleksey wasn’t doing?” Shell asks the class. “He’s connecting with the audience. He’s immediately acknowledging his social space. He’s Bono, but the first thing he makes clear is that he’s not as important as they are.”

The camera flashes from Bono to his audience, and you can see their expressions change as he speaks. At first they’re skeptical. Then their features begin to soften. At the end of the speech, when Bono reaches the climax, when he actually climbs into the pulpit and speaks in the cadence of a preacher—“The poor is where God lives, God is with the mother who has infected her child with the virus that will take both their lives, God is with … ”—they are with him completely. They’re on their feet cheering and screaming. The execs in the conference room are impressed.

Shell came across this footage of Bono at the NAACP awards soon after he and Moussa finished the book. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He said, “This is my book!” Bono does everything in his speech that the co-authors advise doing in Woo. Then again, it is believable, as these ideas have been around since Aristotle and Cicero. The concept of persuasion is reinvented by every generation, but it’s been practiced since Ancient Greece. What the Art of Woo hopes to contribute is a means of application and of helping people find their personal Woo sweet spot. “It’s just a matter of finding your style,” Shell tells the class. “Once you’re successful at persuasion, the steps are the same. You’re not necessarily going to use Bono’s steps—he’s a visionary, you may have a different style.”

When the workshop breaks for lunch, everyone seems deep in thought as they make their way down a long hallway and up one flight of stairs to the lunchroom. Marie catches up with Shell at the elevator to talk about her problem. “What you need to do,” he tells her, “is give people an incentive to want change.” The woman from the Berkeley nonprofit is waiting to share her observations with Shell—her problem has been not spending the time to build relationships and to plan out an idea campaign. She’s been hasty. “You have to be patient,” he counsels her. “It takes time.”

Aha! moments are dawning all around, and Shell, finishing up his lunch, hurries back to the conference room to hear about more of his students’ scenarios. “People come here from all over the world with the most interesting problems,” he says, “and Mario and I learn a tremendous amount about organizational cultures, about different persuasion mistakes people make. That just makes us more effective the next class we teach and the next time we edit the book. We’ll have a whole new set of stories. So, there’s this wonderful loop between the teaching and the writing and the learning. It just goes round and round.”

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Caroline Tiger C’96 is a freelance writer in Philadelphia.