Customer Reviews

Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Though the collection of articles may at first seem sort of old (the oldest is from 1957), the content is very apropos for today. While building a Training Roadmap for our company, I found articles that I think will be extremely useful for a wide range of positions.

What first attracted me was the article on "Listening to People", where I found the clearest presentation on why our listening fails. Even better, it tells how we can improve our listening as a skill that has to be learned.

The next article on "How to Run a Meeting" was enlightening, almost literally! I rushed into my boss' office with new insights on why certain meetings had to be held and how they should run.

I haven't read word-for-word the whole book, rather I've read some others and skimmed some others. That sampling seems to indicate they're all of the same quality.

Talk about efficive. This book has increased my comunication effictiveness 110%. The articles are very inciteful. Before I read this book my meetings went terrible. I was rarely a project lead. This book showed me how terribily incompetant I really was. The book Effective Comunications completly undressed me. Then, I let its articals dress me with confidence. People pay attention in my meetings and they are productive in a new way.

Didn't get five stars because some of the articles are a little dated. Updates from a time after e-mail was invented would be helpful. Fernando Bartelome's article is worth the price of the book all by itself.

I already own five of the paperbacks in the Harvard Business Review series. The articles in it are really state-of-the-art in the field the book is about. And so it is in the case of the Harvard Business Review on Effective Communication. I appreciate the chance to read what the most important authors have to say in short articles, not in long books. The articles are long enough to understand and give many good ideas worth working on.

I believe the "How to run a meeting" article included here, published in 1976, is a timeless piece of advice that talks about something most other books don't: meeting politics. It provides sound advice on how to run a meeting, and explains issues like, for instance, that establishing the pecking order of a group is one of the functions of a meeting, whether we like it or not.

Sometimes it helps to have a little refresher on the basics and this book is a wonderful one.

Absolutely uninteresting, I'm returning it. Over the years, I've bought, oh probably like a dozen of these books (from this series, I mean) and, with the exception of Managing High-Tech Enterprise, found them completely unhelpful and uninteresting. Always self-contradictory, unintelligent, and droning, they remind me of the "self-help" book genre -- which is to say, politically-correct, vapid tripe that the publishers probably believe will sell in any quantities and no matter how bad, simply because people look forever for advice and will probably buy and keep buying. Very disappointing; I'm through with this series.