Stop Talking

STOP TALKING START COMMUNICATING, Play Dumb, Be Boring, Blow Things Off, Lose Your Friends and Other Counterintuitive Secrets to Success in Business and In Life, Geoffrey Tumlin, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2013

Desperate for “serious business” humor, rolled through the chapter titles in this contrarian – but dead-on – book:

1.     Back Up to Go Forward

2.    Invest Your Expectations

3.    Lose your “Friends”

4.    Stop talking

5.    Don’t be yourself

6.    Play Dumb

7.    Question your questions

8.    Ignore Your (Telltale) Heart

9.    Don’t Solve Problems

10.           Blow Things Off

11.           Let Difficult People Win

12.           Respond with Weakness

13.           Change Your Change Plan

14.           Take Things Off the Table

15.           Be Boring

16.           Give People What They Want

Each one of these chapters is a gem, a colorful and memorable way the author explains to us what real communication is, as he also shows us everyday ways we derail possible new connections.  But one particular chapter sums up what all authors and presenters need to know – the importance of story-telling:

          Tumlin was attending a family reunion when he heard this story:

          Years ago my uncle and his dad decided it was time to prune back some limbs that were growing too close to the house.  My granddad, who was 80 years old at the time, climbed a tall ladder that he had leaned against a sturdy limb and began trimming with a handsaw.  My uncle was collecting the limbs as they fell when all of a sudden the ladder, the saw, a large limb, and my granddad came crashing to the potato patch below.  My granddad had mistakenly sawed off the limb that the ladder was resting on.

“Dad, are you all right?” my uncle asked frantically.

“No, I’m not all right, “my granddad replied in his Newfoundland brogue, “I ruined me potatoes, me poor potatoes.”

          Other memorable stories take the reader through Tumlin’s well-illustrated list of how not to communicate or connect with important people – bosses, family, friends – in our life.  In praise of restraint Tumlin urges us to lasso the Neanderthal brain and preserve civility.  He argues that it is the Internet that can so quickly and easily allow us to plunge into embarrassing faux pas and on-line “Dislikes,” and he’s right.  It’s a dangerous world – but we knew that – and it’s good to be reminded that despite the seemingly omnipresent abundance of on-line social “friends” and “circles”, we still want to understand and live within predictable and productive boundaries.  We don’t want, as Tumlin says in his great Neanderthal chapter, “our words to trump our goals.”

Mill Girl Verdict:  Fun read, great stories, better than Emily Post.