Ten skills for being heard, two years on.

From an older blog of mine, lifted across. I am keeping the date honest (written October 2022) and the verdict basically intact. The voice I am loosening, because reading my own old reviews is awkward, and that is the better lesson anyway.

The book is Jessica Higgins's 10 Skills for Effective Business Communication. Tycho Press, 2018. Two hundred and a bit pages. Twelve chapters if you count the two bonus ones. The pitch on the cover is what it sounds like: a structured tour of the things that make people listenable-to at work. Higgins is a lawyer-MBA-marketing person who has been published in the usual outlets. She writes the way that CV writes.

I read it earnestly the first time. The earnestness shows in my old review. I gave each chapter its respectful little paragraph, in order, like a student turning in homework. Reading that review back, the embarrassing thing is not that I liked the book. It is that I let the chapter list run me. The book has twelve chapters. Maybe four are necessary. Pretending the other eight matter equally is something I would quietly stop doing in any later review I wrote.

The chapters that actually did something

Listening. Chapter one, also chapter ten, also half of every chapter in between. Listen to understand, not to respond. Clear your head. Do not interrupt. Ask open questions. None of this is novel and all of it is the part of the book I still think about. The other nine chapters are mostly elaborations of it.

Empathy. Higgins defines it as "the action to understanding or feeling someone else's experiences or emotions." Clumsy phrasing, but she is pointing at the right thing. The chapter is short and the rest of the book quietly leans on it. Most "communication tactics" are empathy with extra steps.

Saying no. Filed under "assertiveness" in chapter seven. This is the chapter I underlined hardest at the time, and the one I would hand to my younger self before any of the others. Declarative statements. Embrace the no. Do not confuse assertiveness with volume. There is a line in it about how mishandled assertiveness becomes abrasiveness that I still think is the best sentence in the book.

Conflict as motor, not problem. Chapter nine reframes disagreement as the engine of innovation. I would add a caveat. It is the engine of innovation when both sides are operating in good faith. Otherwise it is just disagreement. The reframe is useful, especially for anyone who treats "we are disagreeing" as a personal failing.

The chapters I would skim now

"Psychological communication hacks" boils down to "keep it simple, stupid." The acronym KISS appears in every business book I have ever opened. If I never read it again it will be too soon. Body language is interesting at the research level (Higgins cites some of it) but the practical advice (power postures, controlled facial expressions) has not aged well. The Amy Cuddy posture work has been substantially walked back since the book was published. That part of chapter two is, charitably, dated.

The high-stakes chapter (ten) is mostly the rest of the book read aloud again. My original review noted "some repetition from earlier chapters" with diplomatic restraint. Less diplomatic: there is not enough new material to justify the chapter. The two bonus chapters (public speaking, "avoid #metoo situation") felt tacked on then and feel more tacked on now. The latter especially aged into something that needed a much better book to be the right size to address it.

What rereading the review taught me

Two things.

I was more respectful of the structure than the book deserved. The chapter list is the marketing, not the argument.

And: the useful material in the whole book runs to maybe thirty pages. Not because the rest is bad. Most of it is reasonable. But reasonable repeated twelve times stops being reasonable and starts being padding. Business books in particular have a structural incentive to be book-sized rather than essay-sized. Higgins's book is the polite, well-organised version of that problem.

The recommendation has not really changed. If you are early in your career and you want a structured tour of "the communication things people do not tell you," this is a fine on-ramp. Pages 30 through 60 (Listening, Empathy, Assertiveness) are the keepers. The rest you can skim with a clear conscience.

What has changed is the reviewer. Two years ago I would have ended this with a clean three-bullet recap. I will stop here instead.