Perfect Phrases for Conflict Resolution

by Lawrence Polsky and Antoine Gerschel

This is one of those books that when I first get it and start reading, I begin to wonder what I was thinking. Do I really need canned phrases to succeed in the workplace? The answer is yes and no. Yes, I sometimes don’t think of the right thing to say in the heat of the moment, and yes, I don’t always say the right thing. But, no, just having a book of pat phrases is not always going to help out in a real life business predicament. Still, PPFCR is likely to be helpful to a lot of managers and business people, myself included. This book has a lot of phrases for a lot of different situations to be said to a lot of different people: superiors, inferiors, customers, vendors, bosses, good managers, bad managers, etc. And if it turns out your personality is suited to the majority of these phrases, there’s a lot of bang for the buck here. But for myself, the value in this book comes from the simple fact of looking up an appropriate phrase is much more likely to make me stop and think of what the right thing to say and do is. In other words, even if the answer isn’t in the book, it still might give me the answer. I often use humor to defuse touchy situations, and while this book avoids out and out humor (“Do you want fries with that?”), I found that just placing the book in a prominent spot on my desk was effective enough. If somebody still approached me with a bone to pick, I could just say, “Hold it!”, pick up my book, crack it to a random page, then say “Okay, go ahead.” (It really worked.) All in all, though, the authors have put a lot of thought into the subject, they’ve organized their ideas and phrases well, and the book is jam-packed with phrases, some of which will no doubt be very useful and effective. For its utility, four out of five dollar signs.