Chris spoke at the Agile a couple years ago, and I really enjoyed his talk. He explores many themes: teamwork, feedback, commitment, collaboration, trust. His perspective is that individual skills make these possible. Almost every section has personal and team challenges that give you areas to work on. Highly recommended. (Reviewed June, '07)

(Reviewed March., '03)

Rules of thumb from a key player on the Visual C++ team: how to ship great software on time. Similar in tone to The Pragmatic Programmer, but aimed more at managers and team leads. McCarthy structures 53 rules, organized as opening moves, middle game, ship mode, and the launch. He considers the dynamics of team creation, of the marketplace, and of getting software to ship. My favorites: "Don't flip the bozo bit," "Don't go dark," and "Every milestone deserves a blame-free postmortem." (Reviewed Jan., '03)

While targeted at group leaders in professional practices (e.g., legal firms), this book has a lot to teach coaches and managers in XP teams too. Discusses how to clarify your role and set group expectations, how to coach individuals and teams, and how to build the group for the future. (Reviewed Dec., '02)

Their model is that a difficult conversation has three aspects: "what happened," "feelings," and "identity." When these are mixed together, it can be hard to address one thing without confusing another. By switching the goal from "get my message out" to learning, a real conversation can occur.

If we focus on hearing the other's story, and trying to understand impact rather than worrying about intent and blame, we can better understand what happened. By letting people own and express their own feelings, we can affirm what they feel rather than reject it. By accepting that we can be good AND bad, effective AND not effective, and so on, we can talk about who we really are.

The last half of the book suggests techniques we can learn to make conversations better for everybody involved. For example, we can talk about how something affects us without requiring that others see it the same way; we can acknowledge the we don't have "the" truth; and we can avoid exaggeration. The story to focus on is the "third story" of our different perceptions. We can reframe one-sided statements to help them reflect more of the whole truth.

I like this book; it's explicit about ways to improve our conversations, and I found that very helpful. (Reviewed August, '03)

This is a mass-market book on sociolinguistics. When we talk, there is a message (our words) and a metamessage (our actions). The metamessage supersedes the message. People use various ways of controlling the meaning of conversations. Something like indirectness can be a barrier when people want to be told explicitly, but it can build rapport or safety too. The relative power of speakers can control what either hears.

When we talk, we work in a frame that represents how we view the conversation. Sometimes, a conversation can be re-framed to make it mean something completely different. Re-framing is a powerful but dangerous tool.

Finally, it's worth considering how style differences affect conversations. For example, some people wait for different-length pauses before speaking. Someone who waits just a little longer can feel, "I can't get a word in," while the other can feel, "This person is making me carry the whole conversation."

This book was helpful in bringing out these issues, but doesn't really have as much direct advice on how to address them as I had hoped for. (Reviewed August, '03)