Review: Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust & Get Extraordinary Results

Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust & Get Extraordinary Results by Judith E. Glaser
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This really didn’t feel right as a book. It felt as if the author wanted to write a typical business communications book, similar to many that have already been written, but wanted to differentiate this book from the crowd. The choice was to add content that related in scientific terms what might be happening in your head and body when you are happy or when you make decisions. So you learn some science. But knowing this doesn’t really help you communicate, or at least if it does it isn’t explained here.

Strangely for a business communications book, as I read it I kept thinking of things my Mom would tell me, like “put yourself in other people’s shoes”, “people like hearing their own name”, and even “nobody likes to get yelled at”. This is a book that provides guidance that can be summed up with these kinds of platitudes. The author represented a person’s thoughts while communicating as passing through 3 layers:
- an “animal brain”, handling the basic needs, fight or flight, limbic brain.
- What I’d call a political brain, looking for angles to better a person’s standing
- What I’d call a cooperative brain, working for the greater good
The author thought that leader’s communication could be categorized as coming from one of these levels, with that coming from the top level tending to have better outcomes. I’ve run across this concept in many business communication and sales classes over the years, so it ended up being quite familiar. Adding to the familiarity, the book was written with noticeable repetition. Overall, I found this book a reasonable review, and I found the author's voice and choice of examples were good, albeit repetitive at times. But for me it did not tread new ground, and the added science seemed more for show.


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Review: Illinois State University

Illinois State University by April Karlene Anderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A historic photo book covering Illinois State University. The pictures are of three basic kinds. The first are pictures of people, mostly of the presidents of the university (and, because this is ISU, there’s a picture of basketball star Doug Collins). The second, and most common type of picture is the building picture. The history of the school is, in this case, broadly a history of the buildings of the school. The school has grown over the years, and many buildings were built, then torn down, to be replaced by other buildings that may also have been torn down. The various plans for additional buildings, plans abandoned over the years, are also documented. The third type of picture I would consider candids, pictures of students in their dorms or classrooms being the most common. Each picture includes a paragraph or two of descriptive text, and there are short essays starting each chapter. You can learn a lot about the history of the school. My daughter attends ISU, but I am not that familiar with the many school buildings. I found a weakness of the book is that it assumes you know when describing some of the demolished buildings where they were based on current buildings that replaced them. Including campus maps from the various eras would have helped this Normal visitor get his bearings. There was also very little on the college circus, which I also found surprising, although it is well covered in a separate book.

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Review: Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance by Bob Buford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A good life planning book. I found the thoughts interesting, but really the advice offered was focused on those that have been “successful” in their existing careers but felt that there was something more to do to have lived a complete life. As I consider myself a partial success, perhaps with schlub-ish tendencies, I felt this book spent a lot of time talking over me, to the golden boys that run large businesses. If you can put yourself in the target market’s shoes, you will read some good advice, with plenty of interesting examples of how people have taken a new path for their career when they’ve gotten beyond the value of their first one. The author describes ways to change your career to what you are interested in, as well as ways to support those interests while continuing existing jobs. This is very much a mid-career book – it is not aimed at questions of retirement. I found it of interest, similar to other career books but with a more spiritual/Christian tact, and focused on the winners.

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Review: Awakening Your Ikigai: How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day

Awakening Your Ikigai: How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day by Ken Mogi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author describes ikigai, your reason to get up in the morning. He illustrates this concept by tying it in to five pillars, or aspects of ikigai. These are very simple traits, like starting small, and being in the here and now. They are so common that this seems like new age mantras, repeated in many different self-help books. Here the author includes some interesting examples, mostly from Japanese culture, but also including stories from many well-trodden sources: the book “Flow”, for instance. I liked the Japanese stories, but the bulk of the book felt too generic.

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Review: To Sir, With Love

To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’ve seen the movie, you know the story. The movie was pretty close to the book, really only adding Lulu and her great song, and downplaying the author’s romance with another teacher. I hadn’t seen the movie in a couple of decades, so I found the details of the book brought to mind many scenes. I really enjoyed this – it is a very good story on dealing with prejudice. I wish there was more to it, especially about Braithwaite and teaching. I wanted to read more about how Braithwaite learned to be a teacher, and about how he learned on the job. Here, this goes from bad to good with one anecdote.

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Review: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very readable history of the plague, with caveats. The author includes many personal stories from around Europe. The book is divided mostly by country, with descriptions of the advance of the disease over time in each area, along with details of many cities and individuals. This doesn’t read like an academic book. The disease becomes a character, invading new territory, lying in wait in others. Unexpected, but I thought this choice helped the long text. The author does have a problem with the word “however”, however. On audio, the narrator plays along with the word when it first is used, over emphasizing it with pauses before and after. But the narrator, like the listener, soon gets tired of the use of this word, so by the end of the book, the narrator is quickly saying it. It is used here most times unnecessarily, where an “and” would have made more sense. I’d guess “however” appears, unnecessarily, more than 100 times in this book, mostly in the second half. I also noticed some text seemed duplicated within a few paragraphs of where it is introduced. I’m not sure how that happened, but listening to this produced a case of déjà vu. I did learn a lot listening to this book, but perhaps a bit more editing would have made it even better.

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Review: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pink describes a wide variety of research that relate in some way, directly or tangentially, to timing. You’ll find as you read through this book that pretty much everything that has been researched has a time element – things don’t happen unless time passes. That means the opposite of a book called “When” would be a book called “Is” with a bunch of definitions in it. So, given the wealth of research that could fall into a book with this moniker, Pink finds some entertaining topics, some with interesting research, some with stories that aren’t so well known. This is very much a pop science book, with Pink providing the humorous and knowing consistent voice collecting these writings into a mildly cohesive whole. I have a soft spot for pop science books that are readable, even though the information presented is obviously simplified, and often, like here with the audio version, presented without the backup information you would need to check sources yourself. There were statements made here that just seemed incorrect, more than the recent pop science books I’ve read/listened to. Or perhaps I’m just getting more cynical in what I believe. I did like that Pink broke out after each chapter a description of the research presented and suggestions on how a person could put that research into action in their own life. While much was obvious, it was a kind of tincture of self-help added to the book, providing something extra. Again, the book is a well-written example of pop science, and if you are interested in a relaxing non-fiction read, this is it.

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