Success Book Reviews - "Crucial Conversations" Part 3

This is Part 3 of my review of Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, a landmark book on using dialogue to solve “high stakes’ and “high tension” problems between people. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.


The authors use the concept of “Path to Action” to describe the route from what we see and hear to the eventual emotions and actions we associate with an event. In the later part of the book, after encouraging us to explore our own paths, they encourage us to explore how others got from “what they saw” through “what they felt” to “what they did.

The authors guide us carefully through this “crucial” phase of delicately uncovering other peoples’ emotional response strategies. To navigate this perilous journey, the authors supply a host of tested strategies:

The other person has to know we have the right motives .
They have to know we really care .
They may need a bit of “priming” (as in “priming the pump”) so THEY know that YOU are ready to listen .

Once everything is out in the open, the authors suggest ways to compare divergent views, and they move on to discuss varieties of “deciding” on action once all views have been aired. When do you “command”, when do you “vote”, when do you use “consensus”?

Later in the book, the authors generously provide over a dozen “mini-case studies” of how to conduct some “crucial conversation” work with friends, children, employees, etc, as well as a variety of hints on how to begin embedding the skills into your life. One of their techniques, “think about the rewards”, is a time-tested rule that the best motivators have used for decades. If you concentrate on how good the changes can be once your dialogue skills are upgraded, the incentive to change is heightened.


I find the methods in this book so compelling I may go ahead and sign up for a training course. I strongly recommend this book.

Part 1

Part 2

Tech Tags: Crucial Conversations Interpersonal Skills Management Relationships

Success Book Reviews - "Crucial Conversations" Part 2

This is Part 2 of my review of Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. You can read Part 1 here. I continue to believe this is one of the finest books on interpersonal communications I have read. In particular, the authors avoid any notion of "Pop Psychology". When the stakes are high with another person, you need to show your true honesty and be totally devoid of manipulation of any kind. Those of us with low levels of Emotional Intelligence (and I count myself in this camp) desperately need a reliable guidebook through the minefield of interacting with other people in a highly-charged environment. This book is that guide.

In the middle part of the book, the authors make some crucial points.

In a Crucial Conversation, the first directive must always be “safety” i.e. the person we are talking with must feel safe about talking with you. They cannot be made to feel you are demeaning them or attempting to destroy them

Mutual Purpose means that both participants are working towards a common goal. In a corporation, that might mean a project being on track, in a relationship, a more loving interaction. The authors reiterate, if there is no mutual purpose, we cannot expect “buy in” from the other participant.

Mutual Respect needs no definition. No one will work with you willingly if you don’t show you respect them.

The authors give several brilliant techniques for “making it safe”, one of which , called “contrasting”, involves first demonstrating that you have no intention of hurting them, and then confirms your high valuation of them. Several other techniques are presented.

In another breakthrough chapter, the authors present penetrating insights on mastering our own emotions. They present a technique, "mastering our stories", that allows us to take a microscope to our own emotional responses, so we can move past our instinctive “flight or flight” impulses, to our real goals: positive outcomes for all. This involves following the history of “what made us mad” so we can let in some sunshine and rationality.

Once this technique is learned, we can engage with the other party by checking our “stories” against input from the other party. This allows for openness, respect, and additions to what the authors call the “pool of shared meaning”. Assuming we are willing to let go of our self-focused aims for the good of the relationship, the possibility of positive outcomes seems immeasurably increased. Two excellent techniques stand out for me as methods for “turning down the heat” in an engagement.

If we see someone as a “villain” we can ask ourselves: "why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?” That is not to say there are not bad people that we must deal with, but, assuming we are focused on ridding ourselves of unnecessary anger and bias, this technique will enable us to be at our best in the interaction.

Another major “defuser” in an engagement is to stay focused on the facts. For instance, if you are discussing a delicate issue with your spouse, “You cur!!! You were having an affair last night!!!” is a lot more destructive than “I noticed you came home late last night. Can we discuss this?”.

From time to time, I have had the opportunity to discuss management techniques and challenges with several executives I admire, and I have always been impressed at how they were able to rid themselves of an irrationally personal bias, enabling them to get the real job done and move forward. This book really gives me insights into how these "masters" do it.

There are a lot of books on success out there. But success truly begins inside ourselves. To make progress on this path, read this remarkable book. More in Part 3.

Back to Part 1

Techtags:Crucial Conversations Interpersonal Skills Management Relationships

Success Videos - Larry Keeley on Innovation

Humanity usually gains a great deal when a science progresses from the realm of anecdote to the realm of a rigorous theory bolstered by validating research. The germ theory of disease led to innovations such as vaccination and sanitation, saving billions of lives. The progressive understanding of physics led to radio, television, the computer, and, alas, the atom bomb.

In this brilliant video by Larry Keely, president of Doblin.com, Keeley takes the emerging science of innovation from the obscure, “hit or miss” landscape of accident and luck, towards the goal of reproducible, coherent, scientific results. Indeed, his talk centers on “The Science of Innovative Effectiveness”.

What tells us we are in the “dark ages” of innovation? Simple. His vast statistical studies have determined that current innovation practices have a 95.5% failure rate. In many respects this statistic is reminiscent of the drug-discovery methods that had to be employed before people had a theory of what drugs needed to do and how they did it. Immense research needed to be done on DNA, receptor sites, etc before a coherent body of theory could be leveraged to produce faster and more accurate results.

Keeley has studied decades of innovation in all fields, on all continents, in order to build huge statistical databases of how innovation works, and how it fails. In this video he gives a riveting account of his findings.

A few of my favorite points:

• As opposed to the “breakthrough” model of innovation, the vast majority of innovation is “sustaining”, i.e. incremental improvements.



• Innovation, while perceived to be about “new products” actually occurs in 10 domains, all of which are rich fields for profitable advances. An innovation in a delivery method can be as profitable, or moreso, than an innovation in product design.



• Great innovations innovate in more than one of these domains (think iPod for instance).



• Innovation via intent will produce more focused results than innovation via brainstorming. He calls it the Innovation Discipline Model.

I plan to view this video over and over again, and to get my hands on as much of Larry Keeley’s work as possible. This is the starting gate of a new era. By the way, many of the images on the video are available on the Doblin website.



Related Links :

Jack Welch Video

John Chambers Video

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Techtags:Larry Keeley Doblin Innovation Business Model Core Competency

Success Books - "Crucial Conversations" Part 1

I learned about Crucial Conversations from the remarkable collection of books put together by Josh Kauffman in The Personal MBA. This book has key insights into one of the most important questions of personal and business success: What really differentiates the person who gets things done from the rest of the pack? The answer? The super-effective person gets results where it counts: where the stakes are high, where emotion is involved, and where opinions differ, in otherwords at Crucial Conversations. The examples the authors give are the scariest, toughest encounters we face: Asking a friend to repay a loan, critiquing a colleague, a delicate issue with a spouse.

Frankly, I believe that even a 10% improvement in communication at these crucial times would lead to 1000% improvement in one’s life. I also believe that it only takes a few failures in thse areas to relegate careers to a backwater, relationships to a dying ember, and a community to a ghost town. This book is important.

So, how do we go about improving our Crucial Conversations? The authors (who spent 25 years in exhaustive research) contend that the free flow of relevant information is the key, and that dialogue is the master skill. To dialogue, we first must address our own inner selves, especially the “fight or flight” reflex. We need to find that key avenaue of dialogue and avoid the twin detours of "flight" (avoidance and withdrawal) or “fight” (debating so hard that the other party shuts down).

I found as I read the first part of this book, that my own, ineffective reflexes were blindingly obvious to me. I also got equal or better insights than many full-day seminars and multi-CD programs that I had gone through.

More in Part 2

Related Links:

12 negotiation Tips

The Five Essential People Skills

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Techtags: Crucial Conversations Interpersonal Skills Management Relationships

Success Secrets - My Success with Written Affirmations

I consider myself a student of success techniques, and when one of them is working particularly well, I want to pass it on. Currently, I am finding that the technique of written affirmations is working particularly well.

Here is my story. Two and one half months ago I began writing down two affirmations on a daily basis. I wrote each affirmation 10 times. One of these affirmations, concerning bringing people into my life, is working particularly well. The question is, is this an unusual outcome, or could it be expected? I would, at first, try to determine if the outcome (a whole lot of people entering my life) is expected. After all, I am a big fan of networking, and I follow Keith Ferrazzi’s teaching of regularly “pinging” a number of people in my life. But here’s the interesting part: the people calling me and emailing me are not the ones I was pinging!! In fact, they are people who I had “let go of” because it didn’t seem like they wanted to hear from me. I find this particular side of it to be less explainable.

All I know is, it is working, and working consistently.

I will definitely keep writing down affirmations. By the way, I got my idea for returning to this practice (which I had neglected for a while) from a post by Scott Adams, which I reference here.

Techtags: Law of Attraction Affirmations Success

Success Secrets - Jamie Dimon Video

Great video of Jamie Dimon, currently CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase. A video like this one is one of the huge advantages of the Internet Age. The opportunity to listen, for an hour, to a dynamic and capable CEO telling us exactly what he does and how he does it, is probably unparalleled in history. Similarly, I recently linked to an extended video of Warren Buffet. These videos are pure gold. Endless food for thought. Most of us will never sit in a room with these giants, and yet we can get a sense of the essence of their success, and certainly we can apply much of what we learn from them. Dimon, incidentally, was a protégé of Sandy Weill, whose recent book I reviewed here.

Lessons from the Jamie Dimon interview:

Running a company is a hard job. Days, nights, weekends, even on vacation. This is a common precept of successful people. “Balance” is not something generally practiced at the highest levels of success.

Acquire deep knowledge from all sources, including print sources and “people” sources. Quantity matters. Expect to read virtually every important periodical in your field virtually every day. Have drinks with anyone who might possibly have important knowledge about your chosen field. Think in terms of dozens of people.

Bad companies are bad for obvious reasons. Dirty stores. Redundant systems. Suppliers who rip them off. “Good old boy” networks of inferior managers.

Compared to execution, strategy is near-total B.S.

Be relentless. Battles are not won in a day. Costs are not slashed in a day.Have the energy to fight the important battles over and over and over.

There’s a lot more in this magnificent video. Well worth taking notes.

Related Links:

Jack Welch Video

Jack Welch: “Winning: The Answers”

Warren Buffet Video

John Chambers Video

Sandy Weill: “The Real Deal”

Tech Tags: Jamie Dimon Management Leadership Sandy Weill

Success Books - Sandy Weill "The Real Deal" Part 3

This is Part 3 of my review of Sandy Weill’s autobiography The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy Part 1 is here and part 2 is here Sandy Weill came from undistinguished beginnings to rise to a midlife peak when he sold his business to American Express. He then “crashed” (going from a hugely prestigious post to virtual anonymity) and then came back again in a magnificent “Act 2” to acquire company after company, ultimately merging his company with Citbank, to create Citigroup, the world’s leading financial services firm.

The last part of the book deals with the Citibank acquisition and also contains Sandy Weil’s own views of some of his success factors. Here are a few:

Optimism
Repeatedly, Weill describes his optimistic attitude: his belief that “setbacks don’t last long”. This is a true “talisman”, a master skill that drives other skills. If one develops the habit of believing things will work out, that the solution is “out there”, that “I generally win in the end”, it removes a huge impediment, for , imagining the opposite, it is hard to initiate any action at all!

Play “Your Game”
Sandy Weill had a particular leadership style, and learned to surround himself with those who could work productively in that style. This does not mean “yes men”. It means that everyone, leader and staff, was able to “buy in” to how Sandy wanted to do things. In any organization, the difference between those who buy in and those who don’t is pretty obvious. One can choose to have an uphill battle every day, or smooth sailing. It depends on who the leader chooses to have around him or her. I am guessing that the resultant outputs would be exponentially better with a group who harmonized with the leader’s style.

Get lots of data. In real time
Sandy Weill knew his “back office” inside and out. The nuts and bolts. And he got lots of data, on a daily basis, from each business unit. A lot of disasters can be averted by getting real-time information. It’s a lot harder to let things get out of hand. You have to love the data, and be comfortable acting on it fast.

In conclusion, the book can be used as almost a “management companion”. It is hard to argue with sound fundamentals: get people around you who harmonize, know the business inside out; be on top of the data on a daily basis, and stay optimistic: believe that setbacks don’t last forever.

It is also hard to argue with Sandy Weill’s unprecedented success.

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Tech Tags: success factor Sandy Weill business success

Audio Program: The 5 Essential People Skills

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"The 5 Essential People Skills" is a 5-CD set from the Dale Carnegie organization, available through Nightingale-Conant.

I have listened to it over and over, and even outlined it for easy review. Two areas that I found particularly helpful were the areas on assertiveness and effective listening.

In this conflict-filled, "in your face" world, the skills of assertiveness are hugely valuable: all adults have an equal right to express their views calmly and respectfully, and to treat others' views the same way. The CDs spell out numerous methods for getting your assertive message across in spite of many obstacles presented that a listener might present such as anger, denial, etc.

Regarding effective listening...I quickly learned that I had miles to go before I could consider myself even a moderately effective listener. The core skill is getting your own preoccupations out of the way and truly empathizing with the speaker.

Other topics on the CD were equally insightful, especially the areas on dealing with various personality types (I think I’m a “Secret Agent”), and the area of conflict resolution.

With a little understanding, empathy, praise, and, of course, assertiveness, we can all be more effective in our work and personal lives. This CD set has hours of great tips on how to increase your People Skills.

Tech Tags: people skills interpersonal skills assertiveness negotiation conflict resolution