曹竹BOOK REPORT:Crucial Conversations

BOOKNAME： Crucial Conversations

AUTHOR： Kerry Patterson and his co-writers

Here is a Chinese version of the book online:
 http://wenku.baidu.com/view/e241c1ec102de2bd96058870.html

This business book emphasis that people who know how to communicate dominates the world. With knowledge, skills, manipulation, strength, it's not work. Course, these things counts, but the critical thing is commnication. People who can change the situation from teammates distrusting each other to reaching final consensus will always have power. The bad thing is, it's incredibly difficult.

The book defines crucial conversations as those where stakes are high, opinions different, and emotions become strong. In both working and leasure time, everyone has some kind of crucial conversations. However, the interpersonal changes at play are seldom noticed and most people are unskilled in how to respond differently. The book explains first what need to be understood of the principles involved in "crucial conversations"  and also how to develop real skills and abilities to choose or change their communication patterns. There's a much bigger idea behind simple communication, it's all about effective human interaction and getting results with and through people.

This book identifys the behaviors that help and the behaviors that hurt when building consensus. This book also identifys hindering behaviors. When confronted, a human's instinct is fight or flee. In a conversation, the fight instinct comes out in argument, sarcasm, and etc while the flee instinct comes out as keeping quiet and doing nothing, or totally ignoring what the other person said.

In this book, which raises me up is the exercises about keeping a cool head, communicating clearly, and getting things done despite customed bad habits. Pessimistically speaking, human beings are poorly designed to get along with each other. Instead, human brains are wired for competition. I'm not saying competition is bad, but it does affect ideal cooperation. At most time, we cooperate with genetically similar groups with ideas bounded to a small scope. With the reason that anyone who work together with people too different from himself is risking his own survival. These things are always underconscience. I do not dare say that after reading this book, I abandon all things hinding communication and become highly successful in crucial conversations; but it does help me making a possiblly better choice.