HONEST ABE'S
NLP BOOK REVIEWS
 

Written and Produced
by Andy Bradbury
 
(author of "Develop Your NLP Skills", "Successful Presentation Skills", etc.)


Reviews: Part 10  
 
 

All pages on this site were prepared using WinHTML


The Title
Name(s) of the Author(s)
Publisher   ISBN Number [this will be for the paperback version except where the number ends with (Hb)]

How Children Fail
John Holt
Penguin   0-14-013556-1
Originally published in 1964, and re-released in expanded form in 1982, this is indeed, as the reviewer for The Times Educational Supplement put it, "An important, compassionate and disturbing book, will make any teacher think about his or her methods".

To many people, despite his excellent academic credentials (he taught in various schools in Colorado and Massachusetts, and was a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and UCLA, Berkeley), Holt must have seemed almost eccentric in his opposition to the American educational system.  And maybe he was.  But, as he explains in this book, with good reason.

In simple terms, this is the first of a two-part modelling project that looks at how children interact with the educational system and why, for most children, this becomes a losing battle.  Since NLP holds that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback, it is worth quoting Holt's own explanation of what he means by children "failing":

"Most children in school fail.
    For a great many, this failure is avowed and absolute.  Close to forty percent of those who begin high school drop out before they finish.  For college, the figure is one in three.
    Many others fail in fact if not in name.  They complete their schooling only because we have agreed to push them up through the grades and out of the schools, whether they know anything or not."

Holt himself died in 1985 and had no connections with NLP that I know of.  Nevertheless, his thoughts and beliefs frequently overlap with NLP pre-suppositions, as this example clearly shows:

In the Foreword to the Revised Edition Holt refers to a study carried out on behalf of the New York City public schools.  The study showed that in the entire northeastern section of the United States, the researchers could only find 55 schools which rated as "effective" - meaning that the percentage of children from poor backgrounds who legitimately earned promotion to the next grade, each year, was equal to the percentage of middle-class and affluent children who legitimately qualified for promotion.
Holt notes that the researchers found some five qualities that the 55 'effective' schools had in common, and goes on:
"... two struck me as crucial: (1) if the students did not learn, the schools did not blame them, or their families, backgrounds, neighbourhoods, attitudes, nervous systems or whatever.  They did not alibi.  They took full responsibility for the results or nonresults of their work.  (2) When something they were doing in the classroom did not work, they stopped doing it, and tried to do something else.  They flunked unsuccessful methods, not the children."

Sure sounds like NLP to me!

Very highly recommended for anyone interested in learning in any shape or form * * * * * * *

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How Children Learn
John Holt
Penguin   0-14-013600-2
Originally published in 1967, and re-released in expanded form in 1983, this is the companion to Why Children Fail and an equally enthralling record of a modelling project, centered on how children learn - or don't learn - within the standard US schools system (which is applicable, to a greater or lesser degree, throughout the western world - and certainly in the UK).

Holt's work, in these two books, at least, is anecdotal - and all the more enjoyable and readable because we get to met a number of 'real' children rather than sets of statistics.
Is it NLP?  Not deliberately so.  But Holt's work frequently overlaps those areas which are included within the NLP 'sphere of interest' - and the results are frequently remarkably NLP-like, as I think these two quotations show.  Firstly, on the importance of 'maps; and models in the learning process:

"How could what was so simple for me be incomprehensible to other people? ... Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models ...."
(Ellipses as in original text)

And on the difficulty caused by assuming that a shared vocabulary includes shared meanings:

"We teachers - perhaps of all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion.  We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else."

The value of these books, for me, at least, is not that Holt always comes up with 'right' answers, but that he asks such important - and still relevant - questions.

Very highly recommended for anyone interested in learning in any shape or form * * * * * * *

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The Art of Persuasive Communication
Richard Storey
Gower   0-566-07819-8
I suppose Genie Laborde (Influencing with Integrity) and Jerry Richardson (The Magic of Rapport) more or less invented the "describe NLP techniques with little or no mention of NLP" school of writing.  And a large part of Richard Storey's book follows in that entirely honourable tradition.

The first six chapters, plus chapters 11 and 12, are almost pure NLP, and though they carry fairly bland titles like, "Understanding human motivation", "Asking the right questions" and Developing the relationship", they might just as well have been called "Values, Beliefs and Criteria", "The Meta Model" and "Creating Rapport", etc. Likewise the book as a whole might have been accurately entitled, The Business Guide to NLP and Other Persuasion Skills.

The problem, of course, is that NLP has received a bad Press in certain quarters, and many business trainers prefer to avoid possible controversy - and the equally off-putting Glassy-Eyed Effect (when you 'explain' that NLP stands for "Neuro-Linguistic Programming") - by simply omitting any mention of the dreaded acronym.  And why not!

It is a tribute to this author's integrity that, although he regularly trains people in the sort of skills covered in this book, he includes full and unambiguous descriptions of both what to do and how to do it.  As a result the book succeeds on two fronts - as a primer in persuasive communication skills, and as a basic guide to the use of a particular subset of NLP in the workplace.
My only reservation is the almost complete absence of any mention of the NLP meta programs - all the more unexpected since Shelle Rose Charvet's Words that Change Minds is included amongst the dozen or so books in the bibliography.

Overall, I get the impression that Richard is writing for a very particular audience, whom he well understands.  The writing style is down-to-earth and highly readable, and I can see this being a popular and useful addition to the Personal Development bookshelf in any company library.
Recommended   *   *  *  *  *

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Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Univ. Chicago Press   0-226-46801-1
Either this book is back-to-front, or it has the longest Introduction I've ever seen!

The main text of Lakoff and Johnson's book is some 234 pages long, broken down into 30 Chapters.  On the face of it this should have helped to make the book more readable, since you never get that feeling that you've wandered into a mass of unending text.  Unfortunately it didn't help me at all - for two reasons:

  1. The authors seem incapable of saying what they mean and leaving it at that.  To be sure, this is a semi-academic thesis, and in hindsight I can see why the authors felt they had to cross every "t" and dot every "i".  But surely that doesn't mean having to repeat everything time, after time, after time, after ...
  2. The other setback, as I intimated in the first sentence of this review, is that the book is effectively back-to-front.  That is to say, the basic thesis that the book is designed to support isn't introduced until Chapter 25, which starts on page 185.

As it stands, the first part of the book, including it's endless repetitions, doesn't appear to have any particular sense of direction to it.  All the authors seem to be saying - and this won't come as much surprise to anyone with a moderate knowledge of NLP - is that the metaphors we use both shape and reflect our view of the world.  Thus, if you accept the notion that "Argument is War" it makes sense to talk about "demolishing his arguments", "attacking the other person's ideas", "shooting her thesis full of holes" and so on.  The trouble is that this goes on so long, with one example after another, that I ended up with a serious attack of the "so what's".

The true thrust or motivation behind this book, eventually comes to light in Chapter 25 - The Myths of Objectivism and Subjectivism.  Here, at last, the authors finally make the point, and it is a point worth making, that both ends of the linguistic spectrum - the objectivists and the subjectivists - are for all practical purposes wrong.

According to the authors, objectivists, (such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker), believe in an absolute reality which we can understand and describe when we use precise, unequivocal language which fits that reality.

Subjectivists, on the other hand, are reported as believing that our subjective senses are far more important than any kind of objective rationale, and that objectivity is more likely to separate us from the essence of our humanity than to enhance it.

In place of both, Lakoff and Johnson offer "the Experientialist Myth", which basically argues that we can adhere to the idea that experience can have a meaningful structure without having to refer out to some kind of absolute truth.  Metaphors are offered as an important means of expressing our own reality in a way that is meaningful for other people.
Unfortunately, the last six chapters, in which the authors discuss these ideas, are as rambling and verbose as the rest of the book.

So, some good ideas, but nowhere near enough to justify a book this length.  I'm not really sure who, except another academic, would find it useful to plough through the 'waffle' for the sake of the few nuggets.
Recommended, but with very little enthusiasm * * *

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The Emprint Method
Leslie Cameron-Bandler, David Gordon & Michael Lebeau
Real People Press   0-932573-02-9
Subtitled "A Guide to Reproducing Competence", this book, originally published some 15 years ago, represents a worthy attempt to bring a little rigor into the teaching and practise of NLP.  Worthy, but not 100% successful.
(Visit http://www.experiential-dynamics.org/ to see David Gordon and Graham Dawes' latest work in this area)

In the Preface the authors explain that:

"The purpose of this book ... is to provide you with tools that will enable you to identify and acquire (or transfer to others) desirable human aptitudes."

Or to put it another way - the Emprint Method is about that key NLP skill - modelling for the purpose of transferring skills, talents and aptitudes from those who can to those who'd like to.

At this point I must confess that I'm not a very 'scientific' person.  I've always regarded psychology as an art rather than a science.  And very probably on that account I found this book a bit of a slog.  Having said that, I can easily imagine that many readers will take to and greatly benefit from the Emprint Method, a genuinely original approach to this subject.
Indeed, I shall certainly be going back to re-read the book in the not too distant future, and I confidently expect to get a lot more out of it than I have already.

The book runs to a total of 330 pages, including the fairly brief glossary and the bibliography.
The main text is divided into three parts:

  • Part 1 - Introduction - sets out the basic thinking behind the Emprint Method.  I found this section particularly useful as an idea generator.
  • Part 2 - The Method - is a pretty lengthy (140 pages) description of the Emprint Method.  Again, I found this fairly useful for generating new ideas of my own; but I imagine that it would take someone of a more methodical nature than myself to really appreciate the 'scientific' approach devised by the authors.
  • Part 3 - Making the Method Work for You - consists of two chapters: 11 Elicitation and Detection of the Variables, and 12 Reproducing Competence.
    Chapter 11 contains plenty of useful information and guidance, especially if you aren't too familiar with NLP.   Chapter 12, on the other hand, is little more than a foretaste of Know How, by the same authors.  It is also, in this reviewer's opinion, far too long and needlessly repetitive.  An ill-judged end to an otherwise praiseworthy book.

It would be impossible to give a real sense of how much material is covered in the book, so let me end this review by giving you a little taster of the kind of insights you will meet:

"The internal process underlying the subjective differences between hoping and anticipating is that when we hope, we simultaneously maintain internal images of both getting what we want and not getting what we want. ... When we anticipate, however, we maintain an internal image of only one possibility."

An interesting book, of special relevance to readers who like the textbook approach to NLP.
Recommended * * * * *

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Networking for Success
Carol Harris
Oak Tree Press   1-86076-161-5
This book is subtitled "The NLP Approach to a Key Business and Social Skill", which in my opinion is about as misleading as you can get without actually telling 'porkies' (East End rhyming slang - "pork pie" = "lie").  Indeed, there is so little NLP in this book that it's hard to see why it was mentioned at all unless in the hope of boosting sales to the unwary.
The bibliography, for example, features 40 titles under 16 headings.  Only four books are mentioned under General Neuro-Linguistic Programming - 50% of which are by Ms Harris herself.  The rest of the NLP-related books, six in all, are grouped under a single heading - Language.

So, if you are looking for a book on networking then, despite its bland, impersonal tone, this is probably as good a book as you're likely to find - in the UK and Ireland.  That is to say, I haven't actually come across any other UK or Irish book exclusively devoted to this subject.
Taking a wider view, however, I imagine it would come a long way down the heap in the USA where they are far less hesitant about discussing such matters.

If, on the other hand, you're looking for a book on the NLP approach to networking then hold on to your money - this most definitely isn't it.  What we actually have here is a rather pedestrian description of the various aspects of networking (with people, not computers) including various more or less related items, such as Action Profiling (no, I'd never heard of it before, either) including a few references to NLP.
And I do mean "few".  If I didn't already know about NLP, I sincerely doubt if this book would have significantly changed my level of knowledge.
This is all the more regrettable given that Ms Harris is described on the back cover as the "Chair of the Association for Neuro-Linguistic Programming".  (Her term of office actually ran out only a month or two after the book was published.)

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the book is this passage on page 193, where Ms Harris is trying, for reasons best known to herself, to identify parallels between NLP and Action Profiling:

"To summarise, Action Profiling teaches that PMG patterns express the individual's true self, are relatively unchanging in adulthood and have a compulsive nature, in that people express their personality through repeating their PMG patterns.  NLP, too, takes this view, that people cannot help representing their inherent behaviour patterns, however hard they try.  This means that, in networking, once you become aware of people's patterns, you have a sample of their "true self" and can then act on this information accordingly."

In the first place we must surely question what is meant by the term "true self".  Where, in the whole of NLP is there anything that says that each person has some kind of unchanging and unchangeable core self?  And secondly, if we can "become aware of people's patterns ... a sample of their 'true self' " can we really treat this as something that is "relatively unchanging in adulthod" and then "act on this information accordingly", apparently as some kind of one-off operation?

Why, if this were true, would we need to frequently calibrate and recalibrate the people we are communicating with?  Are we merely paying lip-service when we talk about people adopting different meta programs in different contexts?  What happens to the notion of creating and having choices as a key element in NLP?
No wonder Ms Harris finds so little to say about NLP in this book if this is a true reflection of her understanding of what NLP is all about.
Definitely not recommended.

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Change Management Excellence
Martin Roberts
Crown House Publishing  1-899836-14-4 (Hb)
This is an interesting book which, for the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed.  The author has years of experience of real-life business situations on which to base his comments (as distinct from 'academic knowledge'), and in my opinion it shows through clearly in the text.

Having said that, however, I must admit to having found the book rather uneven.
The first five chapters constitute a sort of rambling introduction including lots of very basic NLP, but all in a rather woolly style.  This is in marked contrast to the central section, starting with Chapter 6, where the whole thing suddenly lights up with clear and interesting descriptions of various aspects of the change management process.
The style shifts yet again around the start of Chapter 9, when the author begins to interweave the two strands to show the practical applications of NLP in the change management process.  This final section maintains the high standards of the previous three chapters.

So how do I rate the book overall?  That's a tricky one.
As a business text on change management I'd have no hesitation in listing it as "Strongly Recommended".  As a book on NLP in change management I'm not so sure.
(Incidentally, it is worth pointing out that this is about business-oriented change management rather than personal development.)

That the author himself has applied NLP techniques in the world of high-powered business is beyond question.  My reservations are more to do with the level of NLP detail in the book.
On the one hand I get the feeling that there's rather more than will be intuitively understood by someone who has little or no prior experience or training.  On the other hand I'm not sure that there is enough detail to allow a novice to become sufficiently acquainted with NLP so as to fully understand how it can be put to the best use in this particular context.

In short, I think that in order to get the best out of this book readers will need to have such a level of prior knowledge of NLP that they will be inclined to skip over a significant portion of the text.  That said, there's more than enough excellent material here to justify the cover price, and I'd be happy to recommend it to any business organisation as a worthy addition to the company library.
Highly Recommended * * * * *

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Andy Bradbury can be contacted at: bradburyac@mistral.co.uk