Will help those who want to untie their tongues and avoid the hazards of miscommunication.
In this self-professed consolidation of popular communication, assertiveness, career and leadership-training best practices, Friedlander bridges the gap between business and personal communication by offering a synthesized approach that can be used at the office or home.
Friedlander’s comprehensive handbook is designed to guide the reader through a step-by-step, broad-based methodology for improving personal and professional communication. Starting with the basics, she organizes the material into functional sections that gradually build on a logical progression of ideas, with each of the 13 chapters ending with a five-point summary meant to maximize knowledge transfer. Context-sensitive anecdotes, practical exercises, illustrative examples and clearly highlighted takeaways fill out a user-friendly presentation that delivers what it promises–self-awareness, self-expression and enhanced communication. The “world of work” is the primary context for examining the nature of good communication skills, but Speak Easy effectively widens its net to pull in a varied target audience composed of diverse roles and lifestyles. The book approaches its topic in a balanced yet unexpected way. The author brings together the nuts-and-bolts of communication, but then connects this to the emotional component of human interaction, illustrating the pitfalls, potholes and dead ends that can result from a badly chosen word, or worse, an uncontrolled verbal meltdown. As obvious as these hazards might appear, helping the reader to see that words, actions and feelings work together to create successful communication is a strategy that unifies the book. In a marketplace glutted with self-help guides, how-to tomes and handbooks for dummies and idiots, Speak Easy rises above the cacophony of business and personal-growth gurus who promise the moon to offer clear, practical and actionable personal change that can actually make a difference. Easily readable, visually presented and impeccably organized, this work will provide valuable reading for any business, family or individual.
Will help those who want to untie their tongues and avoid the hazards of miscommunication.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3192-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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