(It's been a wild and crazy busy summer for me, and the reading and all other hobbies have taken a toll. I'm now getting back into a better reading rhythm and hope to catch up soon.)

I've recently faced a number of personal and professional situations where people didn't live up to what they promised. To provide some tools and perspective for this situation, a colleague recommended I read Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and David Maxfield.

I had read their predecessor book, Crucial Conversations, and enjoyed that. This book was a nice build on the earlier one, and what I enjoyed most was the actual verbatim quotes and conversation snippets. I enjoy this sort of specific advice, with exact language that can be used in different scenarios, more than general, high-level advice.

One of my biggest takeaways is the CPR model of having accountability conversations. The first conversation should be about the content (C) of what went wrong. If the problem continues, the second conversation should be about the pattern (P). And the third should be about the relationship (R). But as I said, what I found most useful were the concrete examples of language for how to start these conversations and how to frame the accountability issues while maintaining respect and safety.

Google's internal negotiation course uses the book Getting More by Stuart Diamond, so I figured it was worth a read. It was alright but definitely not the most useful book on negotiation I've read. I much more prefer the classic Getting to Yes, which was used in Stanford's and UCLA Anderson's negotiation classes.

I found Getting More to be way too heavy on anecdotes and stories. This was nice from the perspective of seeing many examples of the techniques in action, but it was overwhelming how many examples there indeed were in comparison to concrete explanation of the techniques and how to learn them. The book claimed at the beginning it would teach a highly disciplined and structured approach to preparing and creating a "List" and using techniques from a wallet card one can download, and I expected that explanation of all this would be the bulk of the book. Instead, this was glossed over in one chapter with barely any low-level explanation, and the rest of the book was devoted to applications throughout all fields of life from parenting to government. Also, I would've loved to read a lot more of the actual dialogues and transcripts of the example negotiations; instead, I read a sample phrase here and there but mostly just how a negotiation was concluded or a problem solved (instead of the full gory details of how the negotiator got there, which is what I would've preferred).

All that criticism aside, I did get some very useful bits of information from the book. I liked the emphasis on and many examples of trading items of unequal value and seeing the pictures in other people's heads. These two concepts seem very powerful.

Below are my full notes. I think the book was a nice complement to more structured negotiation reading and courses, but I don't think it's enough of a standalone guide to serve as a first book or introduction to the subject.