Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

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!

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

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.

Very good book for succesful managers, but also for amateurs interested in improving their communication skills. Of course, for some professionals that one may be "just another one".

This is as close as mere mortals get to performing a Jedi mind-trick - on yourself... It's very instructional and practical and presented in a manner that's actually very easy to read. If you follow these concepts you will not have those unproductive conversations where people get emotional, angry or go silent and nothing really gets sorted. Instead, you will enter difficult conversations about touchy subjects confidently and emerge the other side getting what you want and leaving the other person equally satisfied they got what they wanted too - it may very well change your life.