Product Description

When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation badly and suffer the consequences; or read Crucial Conversations and discover how to communicate best when it matters most. This wise and witty guide gives you the tools you need to step up to life's most difficult and important conversations, say what's on your mind, and achieve positive outcomes that will amaze you.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12528 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Financial Times, September 2006
Offers an approach to handle difficult conversations with confidence and
skill

Edge, September 2006
The book helps you talk honestly to anyone about anything, resolve the
problem and build relationships at the same time.

Synopsis
When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation badly and suffer the consequences; or read crucial conversations and discover how to communicate best when it matters most. This wise and witty guide gives you the tools you need to step up to life's most difficult and important conversations, say what's on your mind, and achieve positive outcomes that will amaze you.

Customer Reviews

A brilliant book that should be common sense
Every chapter of the book teaches you new things. You can pick up the book and read a few pages and feel slightly enlightened.

The book does an excellent job at teaching one how to look at conversations as a vehicle for getting things settles and solved, without hurting anyone, or not getting the full message across. Highly recommended!

When the stakes are high
This book was a most enjoyable read but left me with a touch of ambivalence. As a handbook for communicating more effectively, it's helpful but perhaps a bit simplistic.

"Crucial conversations" are defined as those in which opinions vary, the stakes are high, and emotions run strong. The book targets situations in business and personal life, and is extremely readable with its many illustrative dialogues from both sectors. An extensive vocabulary is introduced and I've had some of the terms floating like a ghostly subtext under my own conversations: Sucker's Choice; Safety; Salute and Stay Mute; Silence or Violence; Freeze Your Lover; Pool of Shared Meaning. It's all useful even if reductionist.

The techniques offered for effective negotiation are generally quite obvious, yet they bear repeating and codifying. They are, however, techniques, and as such they probably won't give earth-shaking results without an understanding of what's making people tick. Conversation and negotiation are so much more than technique.

CRUCIAL CONVERSATIONS is an ideal offering for the best-seller market and would be a great springboard for leadership development workshops.

My two picks for the best advice in this book:

(1) Stay focused on what you really want.
(2) If you give this book to a partner or business associate, don't take a yellow highlighter to the parts you think they need before you give it; better to work on your own side of the crucial conversations.

Linda Bulger, 2008

Mostly brilliant - sometimes boring
The best part of it is that it really helps, it doesn't read like your classic self-help book either. The analysis comes off as scientific and intelligent, not your average "I think it's like this" book. The downside is that it also gets a bit boring and lengthy at points - once you've gotten the point it often continues five more pages. Some points in the book I found hard to apply, but around 80% of the advice is directly applicable. It is full of examples - but they are served exactly the same way everytime : short and heavy handed. I'd rather see some more real-life examples with all the subleties we use in our language.