A holistic and refreshingly human approach to interpersonal communication.
A briskly presented program for improving the ways individuals speak—and how they’re heard by others.
CEO Harbridge (Your Professionalism Is Killing You, 2008) produces a management handbook with far broader applications, a manual for interacting that stresses sensitivity over pronouncements. “Influence is not only based on how we talk,” she writes, “but also on how we listen and how we make people feel understood.” This axiom is at the heart of her Context Model, a method of carefully gauging how you speak by meticulously evaluating your listeners. One of the central tenets of the Context Model is honesty, which Harbridge recommends in both ethical and practical terms. “Most of us just aren’t good enough at being fake in the long term,” she points out. “We call this natural inclination our ‘operating system.’ ” Mapping this system onto the values and viewpoints of others is key to the Context Model—the realization that a person’s core message radiates outward in steadily thinning and simplifying waves, moving from the isolated and specific to the general. This model—and the many stories Harbridge uses to illustrate her points—emphasizes the overriding importance of context, both sensing it and providing it. Harbridge repeatedly reminds her readers that mastering the nuances of context in order to increase your influence on others is a gradual process of trial and error. “Do not expect rainbows and unicorns to suddenly appear around you,” she writes. “Influence is iterative: The results will be inconsistent because every human is different.” By reminding her readers of clear-minded actions like “be a student” or “stay open,” Harbridge actually broadens the applicability of her precepts beyond the business world that is her obvious main concentration. Her writing is clear and full of easy, readable dictums. Perusers of business manuals should find some old paradigms offered in vigorous new ways. And general-interest readers will likely find much in these pages to improve their own daily dealings with colleagues and others.
A holistic and refreshingly human approach to interpersonal communication.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9972962-4-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Nothing But The Truth Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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