Archive for the 'Book Reviews' Category

Crucial Conversations

Several years ago I encountered one of the most gifted communicators I’ve ever been around. To watch this guy work was truly amazing. His ability to spread oil on roiling waters and bring people with violently disparate views together was almost magical. Now I’ve found a book that shows how he did it.

MD and I were involved with some other people in a business venture that had kind of blown up and was on the ropes. Interestingly, the business was not struggling - in fact, it was making money hand over fist. Which is strange because most blowups between partners come about when there is great financial strain in the business. In this case it was just the opposite.

Read more »

Hello! This is Dr. Mike - If you're new here and you've enjoyed my posts, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Best seller list Jan 1-Mar 31, 2008

Q1 2008 #1 best seller

While working on the next post about low-carb and calories it dawned on me that I hadn’t posted the best seller list for the first quarter of 2008. I decided to take a break from the serious stuff for a bit, go through the Amazon.com records, and whip it out.

Read more »

Mistakes were made, but not by me

mistakesweremade.JPG

If you are anything like I am, you’ve probably found yourself wondering how on earth people can cling to the low-fat diet when all the data out there shows it is vastly inferior to the low-carb diet in virtually all parameters. If you’ve had great results yourself with a low-carb diet, you’ve also probably wondered why it is so hard to persuade others to try it. And you may have asked yourself - as I have asked myself - why every little study that comes out purporting to show that low-carb diets are somehow dangerous gets media coverage out the wazoo while studies showing the superiority of low-carb diets are ignored.

If you have pondered all this, have I got the book for you.

A few weeks ago I followed the recommendation of one of the readers of this blog and purchased the book Mistakes Were Made, (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. This book gave me the answers to all the above questions. The good news is that now I know why people have the prejudices and biases they have. The bad news is that now I know how really difficult it is to change them. The sort of good news is that I can keep a watchful eye on my own tendency (which is inherent in everyone) not to slip into the same prejudiced, biased way of thinking myself.

Read more »