Thursday, January 2, 2025

Review of "Supercommunicators," by Charles Duhigg

There are two possible books between the covers of this tome.  One is an enjoyable collection of anecdotes, exploring some of the aspects, weaknesses, foibles, problems, and possible solutions, in interpersonal communications, but with no value other than the enjoyment of reading the stories.  The other is a text about how to improve your own communication skills.

As far as the first goes, it succeeds admirably.  The anecdotes are quite readable, and most of the characters quite sympathetic.

As to the second, that is considerably more problematic.  Duhigg proposes a number of categories of conversations, and then breaks these down into subcategories, and even subsubcategories.  Talking broadly, all of this boils down to listen to people, and be honest, even if only to yourself, about your feelings about the discussion in question.  And, if at all possible, gain some understanding about the other party's feelings about the discussion.  But with all the categories and subcategories, it is hard to pick out which ones will be particularly useful for improving the conversations you might have.  It is also extremely difficult to extract the actual effective techniques, for improving your own communication, buried in the anecdotes and stories that make up the bulk of the text.

In other words, the author could use some additional skills in communication himself, and this book is unlikely to provide you with the techniques that you will need to improve your own communication, unless you put an awful lot of work into it.

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