Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

The New York Times Bestseller!

Learn how to keep your cool and get the results you want when emotions flare.

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. Crucial Conversations 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 the positive resolutions you want. You'll learn how to:

• Prepare for high-impact situations with a six-minute mastery technique
• Make it safe to talk about almost anything
• Be persuasive, not abrasive
• Keep listening when others blow up or clam up
• Turn crucial conversations into the action and results you want

Whether they take place at work or at home, with your neighbors or your spouse, crucial conversations can have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you'll never have to worry about the outcome of a crucial conversation again.

I just finished Crucial Conversations and the first thing that I did as I laid down the book, was to log on to Amazon and order 30 copies to give to the managers within my company. I am the owner of my company of 600 employees and I am constantly searching for better ways to improve communication among our staff and employees. I am going to make sure that my HR team includes these principles into their training.

As I read through this book, I found that so many of our issues within the company would have been eliminated or diminished if we had embraced and utilized the tools laid out within this book. I could have avoided a costly lawsuit if these principles had been utilized when we were disciplining and eventually terminating an unproductive employee.

The authors have blended the humor of Dilbert, with the vision of Stephen Covey, with the practicality of consultants who have been down in the trenches of some of the biggest corporations in the US. It is an easy and enjoyable read.

I also found as I read the book that I kept thinking about how to use these tools to improve the conversations in my personal life, with my wife and with my children. I would love to see a second book that focused on Crucial Conversations at Home.


Best of the "Conversations" books   July 14, 2003
Matt (Silicon Valley)
33 out of 33 found this review helpful

Of the three books with similar titles: Difficult Conversations, Fierce Conversations, and Crucial Conversations, I find this the best by a longshot.

Fierce Conversations is a great read and a real pick-me-up, but it was more of an oh-yeah-i-should-do-that "reminder" than it was a wellspring of new insights. I'm sure the author would be an outstanding 1:1 coach, but the book didn't leave me with as much of a useful/memorable framework as did Crucial Conversations.

Difficult Conversations, by comparison, is heavy on frameworks, research, theory -- but it ends up reading like a dissertation. Though I'm an avid reader, I found it difficult to get through. I found the other Harvard Negotiation Project volumes much more accessible -- e.g., Getting To Yes, Getting Past No, etc.

Crucial Conversations is for me the happy medium between the two. It has the right balance of analysis, frameworks, and coaching. It's very accessible yet deep where it needs to be. It also carries a Coveyesque tone that any Seven Habits fan will find refreshing.

Certainly you can't go wrong reading all three of these books. But if I had to choose one, I'd go with Crucial Conversations.


These techniques really work!   August 22, 2003
50 out of 53 found this review helpful

I bought this book after undergoing a first, miserable mediation session with my soon-to-be-exhusband. The stakes are high--it's our property settlement, and my husband had been cashing out the savings and spending them, while leaving me to take care of the 2 mortgages and other obligations. It was easy, but not very productive, to point out where I felt he was wrong.

I started reading Crucial Conversations and using the tools as well as I could, while watching our mediator model them. I stopped participating in the accuse/counter-accuse game, and focused on bringing information to the table, while I used the crucial conversation tools to keep our discussions productive.

The book starts out with a self-assessment to determine your own communications strengths and weaknesses.

My biggest faux-pas with my husband was to cause Respect violations. The CC tools gave me a usable set of actions to take to set things back on track:
* Apologize (I'm sorry if that sounded disrespectful.)
* Contrast (I don't want to make you out to be the bad guy, I'm just concerned that I won't have any funds left to cover the emergencies.)
* CRIB
- Commit to seek mutual purpose (I'll stay in this process as long as it takes for us to reach agreement.)
- Recognize the purpose behind his strategy (It's understandable that you're unhappy with our situation and that you're trying to do something to feel better.)
- Invent a mutual purpose (I want us both to be happy and secure after the divorce.)
- Brainstorm new strategies (Maybe we can just focus on the numbers for now, and put off worrying about how we're going to divide things until later.

Using these tools has kept the dialogue moving forward, and we're very close to agreement, after just two more sessions.

The Crucial Conversations tools won't change another person who's determined to be unreasonable into a perfectly cooperative person, but they will give you a sane way to stay in dialogue and still hold the other person accountable for his or her own irrational attitudes and behavior.

I think this book is a must-have for anyone who has had a hard time dealing with conflict. I'll be reaching for it again, I know.


Worth its weight in gold in terms of avoiding conflict!   March 26, 2006
Patrick D. Goonan (Pleasanton, CA)
33 out of 34 found this review helpful

This is a great book on communicating and conflict resolution. It is well-written and the examples communicate the intended points without distracting from the flow of the book.

The concepts in here are invaluable. They are presented in a way where one can start using them quickly in everyday life. For example, the author talks about that good communicators are always scanning to see if the listener feels safe. This sounds easy enough, but is that really something in the forefront of most people's minds? By contrasting what the average person does with what a good listener does, the finer points of emotional intelligence are called out in a way that the reader can can digest and be specific around with respect to goal setting.

This book also presents the basics of a cognitive model of how emotions get triggered and how these emotions are related to needs. This is very important to understand when feelings are running high and the way it is presented, one can apply it to difficult conversations to get at essential needs.

Overall, this is an excellent book and I recommend it without reservation. I also think Difficult Conversations is a nice compliment to this book, but if I had to get one or the other, I would probably get this one.