Coaching for Performance (3rd edn.)
John Whitmore
Nicholas Brealey  1-85788-303-9
Two authors come far ahead of the rest as making the most frequent appearances in other writers' books on coaching, namely Timothy Gallwey and John Whitmore.  In Gallwey's case several books are mentioned, most notably his easliest work: The Inner Game of Tennis.  In Whitmore's case just one book is named - his only book - and this is it.

I'd like to say that the book warrants all of the attention paid to it, but to be honest, I can't.
That isn't to say that it is a 'bad' book in any way, it just doesn't - despite the backcover description of it as "a new, expanded and fully revised third edition" really amount to much.  Indeed, not having seen the earlier editions it is hard to imagine how this edition is in any way an advance on the original, 1992 edition.

On the plus side, it strikes me that Whitmore strikes me as having considerable integrity as a writer.
Although his book is clearly aimed at managers he makes no concessions in pointing out just how bad things are at the current time.  In no way does Whitmore offer his reader an easy ride, and at times the passion in his writing over injustices and bad practices due to poor management skills and training is quite palpable.

Having said that, Whitmore's sporting background is clearly evident, especially in the on-going coaching "demo" which is used to illustrate points made in the main text.  It is a positively trivial example, involving fictional characters Mike (the coach) and Joe (the coachee) and their work on getting Joe's weight down by a mere 15 lbs in seven months.  Not exactly rocket science, and not even a very demanding goal.  On a sensible diet Joe could probably achieve that result in half the time and without taking any extra exercise at all!
Whitmore himself acknowledges that:

"Not all coaching sessions are as straightforward as this one, and coachees can offer more resistence and complications, but this is fairly typical and it serves to illustrate the majority of the coaching principles."
p.96

In practice I suggest that it is a grossly oversimplified example and doesn't even begin to hint at the many complications that are a more or less standard element of the coaching process.

The biggest surprise in the book, as far as I was cincerned, was how little time Whitmore takes over describing the book's best-known feature, the GROW model.  In fact it seemed to me that the author spends more time discussing Maslow's hierarchy of motivation than he does on GROW.  It was interesting, however, to note that the author finds it necessary to defend the ordering of the first two elements of the GROW model (which, by the way, originated with Graham Alexander, in the mid-1980's, NOT, as many people seem to think, in this book).
At the start of Chapter 8 (p.67), Whitmore argues that:

"Even if goals can be only loosely defined before the situation is looked at in some detail, this needs to be done first."

As I commented in my review of Miles Downey's book, Effective Coaching, if you haven't first checked the current state of affairs, how do you know what, if anything, needs to changed?  How do you shape a goal if you don't know what you've already achieved?

I can't see this being a book that will offer much to anyone with any significant experience of the coaching process, but it may be useful - in conjunction with other texts - for absolute beginners.
Very qualified recommendation -   *   *   *

Mindworks
Anné Linden with Kathrin Perutz
Berkley Books  0-425-16624-4
Okay, compared to most books on NLP, this one may seem amazingly cheap ($6.99 in the US at the time of writing).  On the other hand, given the quality of the contents, I'd say that's about $6.00 more than it's worth.  For example, how do you manage to write an introduction to NLP that runs to over 350 pages without even a passing mention of meta programs?  And why do chunking, dissociation - as related to "turning failure into feedback" (yes, the authors do misquote the NLP presupposition (see below)) - get 35 pages, whilst the meta model (a central concept in NLP) is presented in cut-down form in just 28 pages?
Did the authors overlook the fact that the "L" in NLP stands for linguistic?

(And just in passing, what on earth does "Anné Linden with Kathrin Perutz" mean?
Anné wrote it whilst Kathrin sat around looking out of the window?
Kathrin wrote it whilst Anné sat around looking out of the window?
Kathrin interviewed Anné then wrote down what she thought Anné said?
Who knows?)

And now - back to the plot!
My main impression, as I slogged through the seemingly endless text, was that someone had first decided how long the book should be, and that this estimate was adhered to come hell and high water.  It is a classic example of turning a molehill into a mountain; of milking a few basic ideas until they scream for mercy.
In paperback the main text (NO index, NO bibliography!) runs to 354 pages.  I'd be greatly surprised if it couldn't be edited down to less than half that length - say 150 pages - and actually benefit from the cuts.

Editing the text might also give the authors a chance to reconsider some of their comments, such as these alleged NLP presuppositions (page 7):

"Success is the ability to achieve intended results"

This is a "presupposition"?  Looks like a simple definition to me.  And does NLP really allow for only one definition of "success"?
Suppose I aimed for one result and got another - which turned out to be even more beneficial, but not in any way that I had intended or even forseen.  Would that NOT be a "success", because I hadn't achieved my intended result?

"You can turn failure into feedback"

Which seems to assume that failure actually exists, but we can talk ourselves into believing it was something else.
Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought that the authentic NLP presupposition:

"There is no failure, only feedback"

was supposed to help us to surmount the highly limiting concept of failure altogether, in favour of the more productive, cybernetics-based view that all feedback is useful, whether "positive" or "negative".

But the biggest surprise is on page 222, where the authors make this amazing statement:

"The map is not the territory" is an NLP presupposition that's taken from Noam Chomsky

"Noam Chomsky"?.  I don't thinks so.  This is, in fact, an almost^‡ exact quote from Alfred Korzybski's massive work Science and Sanity, and in all of the books reviewed on this site I believe this is the first time I have ever seen the quote - possibly the best-known quote in the whole of NLP - attributed to anyone other than Korzybski.
(^‡ To be absolutely accurate, Korzybski wrote "a map is not the territory", but I don't really think that casts any serious doubt on the paternity of this well-known phrase.)

All "non-fiction" books, on any other subject, are bound to include some degree of personal interpretation, especially in regard to something like NLP which actually announces itself as "the study of subjective reality".
In this case, however, the personal element is so dominant, the errors so basic, and the text so pointlessly long-winded, that I would recommend almost ANY other book on NLP in preference to this (for example, O'Connor and Seymour's Introducing NLP, O'Connor and McDermott's Way of NLP, or the NLP Comprehensive team's NLP, the technology of achievement).

An absolute non-starter, at any level.

Get the Results You Want
Kim Kostere and Linda Malatesta
Metamorphous Press  1-55552-015-4
Subrtitled "A Guide to Communication Excellence for the Helping Professional", when it was first published (in 1989) this must have ranked pretty high in the list of "must read" books on NLP.  Indeed, even today, when the number of NLP titles can be reckoned in hundreds rather than tens, as an introduction to NLP for psychotherapists and other "Helping Professionals" - including coaches, in my opinion - this is still an excellent text.

Now I must confess to a certain bias here, mainly because I've always believed that a demonstration was a superior form of teaching to a simple lecture.  On this basis I prefer books that provide actual transcripts rather than just bland descriptions like "ask questions that will elicit the other person's preferred rep system."  And this book is choc-a-bloc with transcripts.

I actually enjoyed Get the Results You Want so much that I'd like to be able to recommend it as an ideal book for all newcomers to NLP, but that isn't the category the authors were aiming for, and that isn't the role it fits.
For example, whilst eye accessing cues and rep systems are described in quite some detail, there's virtually nothing about submodalities.  Likewise there's some good coverage of the meta model, but not the "full monty" , and meta programs aren't covered at all.

Having said all that, there are certain points that could do with tidying up.

• On page 211, part way through a very comprehensive section on anchoring, the authors make an excellent point about letting the client know that you're going to touch them before you actually start the anchoring process.  It's just a pity they didn't also mention that it is advisable to actually ask your client's permission - even if you're only going to anchor them (as here) on the fingers, shoulders and knees.
• One point I found extremely off-putting was the way the authors describe the eye accessing cues positions from the point of viewpoint of the client rather than from the viewpoint of the observer.  Thus we repeatedly find transcript comments such as "Eyes shift down and to the right (Kⁱ)."  Given that the book is supposedly written "for the Helping Professional", this is a major bug, in my opinion, since said "Helping Professional" will NOT see the client's eyes "shift down and to the right" as the standard Kⁱ response, but "down and to the left"; they WON'T see "up and to the left" for a standard V^r response, they'll see "up and to the right", and so on.
• Although the book includes notes, a bibliography and an index, it does not include a glossary.  Although some definitions are included in the text, in an introduction this subject (or any other) I believe that a glossary is a non-optional extra.
• One of the terms not explained in the text is the frequently featured instruction to "clear consciousness".
  I'm assuming that is the quivalent of the more commonly used (noweadays) instruction to "break state".  And whichever term you use - what does it mean?  The authors don't even hint at an explanation.

And finally, saving the best for last, we come to Chapter 24 - on Metaphor.

Several of the books reviewed on this page claim to be about storytelling and the use of metaphors, yet as I have commented, time and again, they really don't cut the mustard because they just don't explain how to choose or construct an effective/appropriate story or metaphor.
Well, I've finally found the book that does just that - and this is it!
Even if the rest of the book were complete and utter rubbish, which it most certainly is NOT, I'd still recommend this book just for the contents of Chapter 24.
Yes, I know David Gordon's book on Therapeutic Metaphor has been around since the late 70's, but it is such a heavy read that I've never managed to finish it - which is why it isn't reviewed on this page.  Kostere and Malatesta, on the other hand, manage to demonstrate, analyse and explain the whole thing in just 20 pages to a level that I think would enable almost any reader to start constructing effective metaphors of their own.

So, despite the occasional criticism, overall I think this is an excellent primer in NLP for its intended audience, and a book that every serious NLPer might want to delve into at some time.
Highly recommended     *   *   *   *   *   *

People Pattern Power
Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall
Next Step Press  1-892876-00-0
Taken purely on what it has to say, this book easily qualifies as a top rank NLP text; so what a pity it is let down in so many ways.

Wyatt Woodsmall is probably best known as co-author of another definitive NLP text, Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality, which Woodsmall co-wrote more than a decade ago with Tad James.
A significant proportion of that earlier book was taken up with descriptions of over 20 meta programs, and Woodsmall seems to have kept that as his primary area of interest ever since.

This latest (1998) book stays with the subject of meta programs, specifically as they relate to business functions such as training, negotiations, personnel, etc.  As such it is useful to compare this book with Shelle Rose Charvet's Words that Change Minds and Sadovsky and Caswell's Selling the Way Your Customer Buys.

The first point that jumps out at any NLP-aware reader must be the way that all three books almost, or completely, sideline NLP.
Shelle Rose Charvet at least takes time to explain that Rodger Bailey's LAB Profile (which her book is based around) is a direct development from Leslie Cameron-Bandler's work on NLP.  Sadovsky and Caswell mention Rodger Bailey's work, and Leslie Cameron-Bandler, but ignore NLP completely, describing their "revolutionary new selling system" ("new"? In 1996?) as being based on various elements of HOS - the Human Operating System - by which they actually mean "meta programs".
The Woodsmalls don't mention anyone but themselves, using the ever-so-slightly grandiose appellation (don't laugh) "the two P³ Masters" (pp. 323 and 326).
(P³ stands for more things than I've had hot dinners - People Pattern Power, People Pattern People, People Pattern Pledge ... you get the idea.)

In a particularly ill-advised move, the Woodsmall's have framed the whole book as a fictional series of "discussions" between a new recruit to the firm of "Success, Incorporated" and the heads of various departments - Personnel, Sales, Training, etc. - over a period of nine working days.
Each day is devoted to a different meta program (now called "the nine keys to business success"), including sameness/difference, primary interest, chunking and tangible/intangible, internal/external reference, decision making, towards/away from, power/affiliation/achievement, options/procedures and structurists/free spirits.

Anyone already reasonably familiar with the established NLP meta programs will notice several non-standard entries in this list.
The Tangible/Intangible section, for example, introduces a meta program related to what people regard as valid "evidence" about the world around them - either demanding tangible information collected via the five senses (sometimes referred to as "empirical" evidence) or being comfortable with intangible evidence which is arrived at through insight or intuition.  This throws some valuable light on how people build their mental maps.

The Power/Affiliation/Achievement meta program is derived from the work of the late David McClelland, a psychologist at Harvard.  The rational is that everyone has one of the three as a primary motivator in their life, and another as a secondary motivator.  Moreover their may move towards or away from each motivator.  Finally, each motivator is a continuum in its own right, so "power", for instance, ranges from "power to be used for the benefit of others" through to "power for self-gratification".

For each meta program the authors provide a wealth of invaluable information, and even those readers who think they have the subject down pat will find more than enough to justify the price of the book, though I must confess that in the case of the ninth day material, on "structurists" and "free spirits", I'm still trying to figure out a significant difference between "structurist" and "procedural" and between "free spirit" and "options".

The let down, as is so often the case in self-published books like this, is the absence of a balancing influence that only an independent editor can provide.
The interaction between the inductee, who modestly (in the style of his creators) opens with the words "I am a highly successful manager" and the various people he meets give the overwhelming impression that the (unnamed) recruit is, in practice, a total airhead.  As a consequence the question that came to mind over and over again was "Why, if Success, Incorporated is the bastion of exceptional management, would these people ever recruit such a total dipstick?"
Indeed, as an advert for the authors' various courses, the book struck me as something of a double-edged weapon.

To be fair, our "hero" does have one brief moment of genuine utility on page 299, when he makes his one and only comment that actually contributes to the forward flow of the text.  Yet even here the authors come unstuck by having both parties to the conversation remember an interview question about why Mr X chose his current house.  Why is that a problem?  It's a problem because, on page 3 we were told that the interviewer actually asked: "Why did you choose your current job?"
Oops!

So, plenty of useful information but let down by a rambling text, occasional rants, regular adverts for courses run by the authors (posing as Success, Incorporated in-house courses, a fiction somewhat marred by the ^SM suffix after each course name), and all round poor editing.  I'd still argue that it's a book any serious NLPer should get their hands on, but it really could have been SO much better.
Strongly recommended, if you're prepared to be irritated by the presentation   *   *   *   *   *   *