Presenting Magically
Tad James and David Shephard
Crown House:nbsp; 189983652-7 (Hb)
Basically I really enjoyed this book, BUT with a couple of serious reservations.

Tad James and David Shephard are both professional trainers with substantial reputations in the field of NLP.  No surprise, then, to find that this book contains a substantial amount of information on how to put a presentation together and deliver it effectively.  Indeed, I congratulate the authors for including as much material as they have, since there is easily enough material here for other trainers to develop their own courses without needing to consult any other resource.

So what's the problem?
Basically, there are two sections in which the authors blatantly impose their own spiritual/religious beliefs upon the reader.  This is unnecessary to the book, and contrary to the principle of respecting their audience,which the authors purport to honour.
It also does nothing to recommend the book to people - from the business community, for example - who already regard NLP as airy-fairy new age nonsense!  Whilst the reader can safely skirt round this material - see The Trainer State, pages 54-57, and the whole chapter on Energy, pages 95-121 - without missing out on anything of value, the authors might want to consider whether it would be better to re-write these sections in a less partisan fashion for the next edition.

They might also want to clear up one or two little errors that have crept into the text.  For example:

• On page 115 the reader is told "Take off your shoes, so that you have greater contact with the ground."
  The "ground" - in a training or presentation room?  Surely you're most likely to be in contact with 100% industrial strength synthetic fabric?  And in any case, if it's that important, why do all of the accompanying photos of Tad James and David Shephard clearly show them both wearing shoes?
• Quote (page 125): "In the 1950's the psychologist George A. Miller did some research on human information processing." (italics added)
  Actually he didn't "do some research", leastways, not in the sense of conducting any experiments.  The famous, or infamous (?) 7 ± 2 concept was derived from a review of studies carried out by other researchers.
• And how does auditory-digital become a representational system (page 128-129)?
  I'm aware that this is an increasingly common misconception.  Alder and Heather, for example, in NLP in 21 Days, have altered the list of rep systems to: VAKAd (visual, auditory, kinesthetic and audio-digital) - but mere repetition of an error does not turn it into a fact.
  Bandler and Grinder (and Dilts) made it quite clear that the rep systems were the five basic sensory systems.  James and Shephard clearly recognise that Ad is not a sensory system - so why treat it as though it is?

OK - rant over.  To come back to my original assessment, for all it's faults, there is so much good stuff in this book (and I speak as someone who has been doing presentations, training, etc. for a loooong time) that I'm going to give it a good rating anyway.
Strongly recommended   *  *  *  *  *  *

Magic in Action
Richard Bandler
Meta Publications:  0-916990-14-1
Every time Bandler runs one of his seven day trainings in London there are complaints from people who feel that they have been cheated because all they've seen is a few phobia cures and Bandler's views on psychiatry.  Well, I've never been on any of Bandler's courses, so I've no idea what his rants about the psychiatric profession are about, or what they are intended to achieve.
After reading this book, however, the one thing I can say with a high degree of certainty is that anyone who has seen Bandler dealing with phobias has seen the most essential core skills of NLP in action.

Though it may be a lttle obscure in places for complete newcomers, this is undoubtedly one of the key NLP texts.
Highest possible recommendation   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

An Insider's Guide to Sub-Modalities
Richard Bandler and Will MacDonald
Meta Publications:  0-916990-22-2
I'm not going to say much about this book, because there's no point.
Like Magic in Action this is a key NLP text.  If you're serious about developing your NLP skills you will buy and study this book.  End of story.

Oh, okay, here's a taster:

Basically this is a complete introduction to working with submodalities, edited by the late, great Will MacDonald, primarily based on actual training sessions run by Bandler and MacDonald.  It includes:

• Complete instructions on how to run about twenty exercises
• Half-a-dozen full length transcripts of Bandler/MacDonald using submodalities
• A seven page core section on how submodalities are expressed in people's conversation, and example questions for eliciting what submodalities a person is using (both key elements of effective modelling, the most fundamental NLP skill
• Clear and detailed explanations of how submodalities can be used in specific situations - dealing with phobias, the swish pattern, creating change, etc.

In all this praise I must include one qualification.  Although anchoring is used at numerous points throughout the book, there is no description of the anchoring process as such.  If you're not already familiar with the anchoring process you will need to read up on it before beginning this book (see Creating an Anchor in the glossary on this site).
Very highly recommended   *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Coaching at Work
Perry Zeus & Suzanne Skiffington
McGraw-Hill Australia  0-07-470842-2
Excuse me - is this book supposed to be about "coaching" at work?  Because if it is then businesses in Australia are about 30 years behind the times.  To keep it short and sweet, I'm hard put to find anything in this book that doesn't belong under the heading "basic management skills".  And I don't mean basic management skills in 2002, I mean as described in Blake & Mouton's mid-1960's book The Managerial Grid.

Or maybe I'm being unfair - to the Australians.  Maybe we have to face the fact that western-style management has been so pre-occupied with one fad and another, for the last three decades, that there has been little or no significant progress in the development of the average manager's interpersonal skills set.  This is a proposition that would certainly make for an interesting discussion, but it doesn't change the basic fact that managing is managing and coaching is coaching, and they are not the same thing.
Thus whilst some parts of the book seem to be based on the assumption that manager and coach are synonymous, from time to time we come across a statement such as:

"The coach rarely has the luxury of being involved in the selection of team members."
(page 139)

For a coach this will almost certainly be true - but substitute one word and plainly

"The manager rarely has the luxury of being involved in the selection of team members."

just doesn't make sense.

In fact there are a number of places where the text, for all the authors' declared experience, seems to exhibit an air of blithe impracticality.
On page 93, for example, under the sub-heading "Step three First coaching session", we are told:

"Our experience indicates that being assessed, regardlessof the format, can arouse anxiety and hostility in some coachees.  Some of the typical questions or rebuttals we have encountered in the first session are:
[a brief list of three comments]
Once these questions or rebuttals have been satisfactorily answered or dealt with, the remainder of the session is taken up with the assessment."

And how do we deal with the questions and rebuttals?  Ahhh, well, ummm ... At this point the book moves swiftly on to "Step four Second Coaching Session".
Or how about this statement on page 140:

"... we find that smaller teams tend to work better together, get more things and are easier to facilitate.  Five to eight team members are recommended. ... management should be cognisant of the barriers to success presented by larger team numbers."

In some kind of ideal situation this may well be true, but the reality of business is that a team must be as large as the project it is working on.  And even if a large project is broken down into a number of smaller teams, what is the effect on the project as a whole of having coaching going on at the sub-group level rather than at the whole group level?
Should one "coach" cover all of the different sub-groups?  What happens to the group as a whole if the sub-groups are progressing at different rates?  Maybe the "hares" will encourage the "tortoises" - or maybe the "tortoises" will become resentful and defensive, leading to damaging fragmentation?

I was also rather surprised to find that the chapter on Communication Skills (Chapter 8) occupies just 9 pages (out of 246).  Of course the topic surfaces throughout the book in one way or another, but given its importance - and the extensive lack of communication skills in business today - I believe the text could have been arranged more effectively, and edited more thoroughly, to give space for a much more detailed introduction to some of the key issues and skills.

Mind you, this is another area where the book tends toslide gently away into its own version of reality.
On page 176, for example, in a brief review of the NLP technique of matching a person's "rep system", the authors say:

"Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) practitioners claim ... there are four ways or channels in which we can respond: (1) visual - people who tend to respond to the world in a primarily visual way tend to respond with 'I see your point', 'that looks good' or 'I see what you mean'; (2) auditory - some auditory responses include 'Sounds good', 'I hear you' or 'it comes through loud and clear'; (3) intellectual - these type [sic] of responses tend to emphasise the rational or logical aspects of a situation, such as, 'Sounds reasonable', 'That makes ...'

Hold it!  'Sounds reasonable' is surely and auditory response.  The "intellectual" response would be something like 'that seems reasonable' - with no indication of which of the five senses is being used to make the evaluation.

Incidentally, the rest of the section I was quoting read:

'That makes sense' and 'it doesn't add up'; (4) kinaesthetic - some typical responses include 'That feels good', 'I've got a good feeling about that' and 'That feels okay to me'.

On the very next page the authors - one of whom is a "consulting psychologist" (page v) - come up with this interesting statement:

"It is generally accepted that the impact we make on people in the first few minutes of contact is based 60 per cent on visual messages, 33 per cent on vocal messages and only 7 per cent on content.  Although in time content increases in importance, it is never more than 50 per cent of the impact.  This rather startling information indicates the importance of non-verbal signals."
page 177

"Rather startling"?  I'll say!  In fact I've seldom seen so much mis-information packed into so few words:

1. "It is generally accepted"?  Who by - no-one I know of.
   Possibly this refers to a quote by a certain Australian theatrical director which appeared in a theatre programme some years ago.  Unfortunately, when I contacted the person concerned she couldn't remember who or where she got the information from.  From a personal perspective, I don't remember ever seeing the figures 60 / 30 / 7 quoted anywhere outside of this book and the theatre programme.
   The figures I think the authors may have been looking for aren't 60 / 33 / 7 but 55 / 38 / 7.
2. The figures 55 / 38 / 7 - based on the work of Mehrabian and Ferris (1967), and Argyle, Alkema and Gilmour (1970) - do not relate to the impact of a new acquaintance, they are the typical weighting we give to various factors when "decoding" conflicting information (when a person says they're happy, for example, but looks and sounds like they're carrying the cares of the world on their shoulders).
3. The initial impact we have on people isn't measured in minutes but in seconds - usually no more than 20 seconds, to be precise.
4. Because it happens so quickly, initial impact may depend entirely on visual messages - or on visual and kinaesthetic signals if we shake hands with the person.
5. Since the book includes an extensive bibliography - but no cross-references - there is no way of telling where they got this information from.  Especially since neither Mehrabian or Argyle appear in the bibliography.
6. Once we've made an initial assessment of someone, we seldom change that initial opinion to any great extent unless something quite significant occurs.
7. If there is no conflict between the visual, vocal and content signals in a given communication then the impact of the content of a message rates far higher than 50 per cent, even when dealing with a new acquaintance.

The basic format of the book consists of bullet point lists followed by fairly short paragraphs explaining what each bullet point means.  Generally speaking the lists tend to vary in length, until the latter stages of the book where the author suddenly breaks out in a fit of Coveyitis (septophilia?) and we are treated to:

• 7 attitudes and behaviours to build healthy self-esteem
• 7 H's of Healing
• 7 C's of High-Performance Teams, including:
  • 7 characteristics of a feedback-rich environment
• 7 Principles of Cultural Change
• 7 most important collaborative skills

This style of writing, when done well, certainly tends to make a book a fairly easy read.  Unfortunately it doesn't do much to guarantee that the book will be a worthwhile read, and I'm afraid this particular book really isn't worth even a minor output of effort.

What the author offers is something he calls "transformational coaching".  It sounds great, but when we get down to the nitty-gritty it turns out that:

Transformational Coaching is the art of empowering people to improve their effectiveness, in a way that they feel helped.  This process engages the huge untapped potential within people and organizations by focusing energy on key performance objectives.
p. 200

And that means precisely "what"?  With a description that vague I have to ask how many styles of coaching wouldn't fit that self-same description?  Not too many, I suspect..  And the kind of advice on offer does little to suggest that "transformational coaching", Crane-style (other writers/companies also claim to be offering some form of "transformational coaching") has anything of significance to offer.  Here are just a few examples:

In a section called Handle Your Anger, the author understandably recommends against the use of comments like:

"Henry!  You make me angry every time you screw up on these customer quotes.  You don't have a brain in your head!"
page 62

but then goes on to say:

'It would be more effective to authentically say something like:
 
"Henry, those quotes have mistakes in them.  It angers me when this happens.  We have got to start doing more accurate work.  We need to talk about this and fix the problem - permanently!"

Oh really?  Although he is no longer blaming Henry, by name, for causing hia anger, this manager is still blaming "it" rather than accepting personal responsibility.

Number 5 in 'The 7 Qualities of Effective Feedback' reads:

"Describe observed behaviors and impacts, not evaluate or judge [sic]"
page 73

Yet on the previous page we find this example of how to give feedback:

"I noticed yesterday in our meeting with Production that you seemed perturbed and upset.  It seemed to me that you responded with defensiveness in your voice to Gene's questions."
page 72

"You seemed" qualifies as a description of "observed behaviors"?  And a person's emotional state qualifies as "behavior"?  I don't think so.

"Difficult people have a way of showing up in everybody's life from time to time.  How do we coach the "uncoachable?"
Think of it this way: In some finite amount of time, this difficult person will need to choose to "get with the program," or he or she will be working some place else.  Nothing is forever.  This ought to give you some sense of relief.'
page 113

I wonder what someone has to do to qualify as "uncoachable"?  Or should we, perhaps, be addressing the all-too-common problem of underskilled coaches?

The basic problem in this book seems to be that the author starts out from the assumption that a manager can function equally well as a coach - a highly questionable proposition, yet one which isn't even openly stated, let alone discussed.
This weakness is further compounded by what seems to me to be a rather unreal assessment of business in general.  Indeed, the closing comment before the Epilogue reads as follows:

"The total quality movement and process re-engineering have taught us that improving processes improves performance.  Process holds the key, coaching can help make that connection crystal clear."
pages 214-5

Actually, apart from a few die hard supporters, these two "movements" have gone the way of other management fads - down the tubes.  Business Process Re-engineering in particular has had an estimated failure (or quiet non-completion) rate of at least 75%, with some estimates putting that figure in the high 80's or low 90's.
The reason?
Something Mr Crane himself implies elsewhere in the book - people don't like to be "re-engineered".

The overall impression I got of this book was that it was intended for managers and especially those who like things left just the way they are.  It makes big promises,and it does make some useful and interesting points.  But in the final analysis it says nothing you cannot find in lots of other books on management, and there is certainly nothing here that would give old fashioned managers a single sleepless night.
Unless you've set yourself the task of reading every coaching book in print:
Not Recommended.