An incisive primer on workplace communications that mixes sharp insights with hands-on advice.
While you may intend to convey professionalism and warmth, your audience may hear sloppiness, inauthenticity and callousness, cautions this savvy business self-helper.
Pryor, a workplace performance expert, keynote speaker, and Inc. Magazine columnist, argues that digital technologies have changed how we communicate and understand each other, a fact that has profound implications regarding corporate speeches, business emails, Zoom meetings, press releases, and stray Facebook posts. The result, she contends, is often a yawning “signal gap” between what we mean to say and what others hear. The author observes that every claim and statistic can be instantly googled and fact-checked, and even minor slip-ups can permanently trash credibility. A perfectly polished delivery, once a marker of competence, now reeks of AI and suggests that the speaker spent three minutes thinking about a topic before handing it off to a chatbot. Communications to a specialized audience can now easily spread to other audiences operating within different, possibly hostile contexts. (Pryor cites an insurance executive whose clip on “acceptable loss ratio” went viral when viewers interpreted it to mean that it’s acceptable to him when your house burns down.) Formulaic email verbiage can clash with a message’s substance, making the sender look brainless and heartless. (The ubiquitous salutation “hope this email finds you well!” should not open a layoff announcement, Pryor suggests.) And communications from decades prior can now be searched for contradictions to demonstrate what a lying, muddled hypocrite the speaker is. Pryor offers tips for achieving “Communication Congruence,” encouraging communicators to nail down facts; forthrightly discuss with the audience the weaker aspects of a message and the conceptual barriers they may have to accepting it; show your work so that people can follow the speaker’s reasoning to its conclusion; read the room by acknowledging the emotions that listeners bring to a message; think through how a message might land in different contexts; and craft a convincing correction/apology to extract foot from mouth.
Pryor’s shrewd analysis of workplace messaging and its discontents deftly combines sharp observations of office culture, tech-centered communications theory, and illuminating dashes of psychology. (Your talk is going wrong, she notes, if “you feel a subtle urge to speed up when you hit a particular claim. The part you want to move past quickly is often the part you don’t fully buy yourself.”) Written in elegant prose studded with pithy aphorisms (“Every vague message is a tiny tax on the other person’s energy”), the book serves as a revealing study of how everyday rhetoric functions and malfunctions. (“When someone says, ‘Let me play devil’s advocate,’ they’re trying to signal ‘I’m just stress-testing your idea,’ even though they’re not poking at your arguments to find weak spots. They’re poking holes because they want to criticize it without saying they’re criticizing it.”) It’s also a handy guide to finding the right words, with concrete examples for managers to emulate. Readers will find much useful advice here, along with a deeper look at the importance of honesty, clarity, and sensitivity in our speaking and thinking.
An incisive primer on workplace communications that mixes sharp insights with hands-on advice.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2026
ISBN: 978-1646873098
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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