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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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