Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Book review: NLP The new technology of achievement by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner

I chose this book after someones response to my gentle mocking of someone reading ‘NLP for dummies’ on the train – its not a subject I knew much about. Well, I thought I didn’t know much about it. Reading this book though is like reading a collection of many other management and personal development books, there isn’t much in the way of new material here (for me at least, perhaps if you’ve not read so many of those books it might be fresher).

The book is structured around a series of thought exercises to take you through the process of accentuating positive aspects of your life and distancing yourself from the negative. The gist of it is to connect yourself (in your memories and imagination) with good things about your life, and reduce the importance of the bad things.

While I think NLP is a nice structure for learning to be positive about yourself this book concentrates too much on getting accolades from people it has helped and not enough on useful information about how to make it work.

Who should read this book? Anyone who feels like they are stuck in a rut and hasn’t already read a lot of management books.


5 comments

    • They can be quite distrubing, mostly because you start finding out where all the junk the powers that be spout comes from.

      • Ah, I used to work with people who were very very good, knew their stuff, and were great at applying it. Then I moved jobs, and sometimes it feels like the latest managment fad is what is pushed.

        (Guess whose software work is being partially outsourced to India at the mo?)

        • Jeez, they’re not still on the Indian outsourcing fad? Woah, we all realised there was no value in that two years ago.

          The thing that gets me is that its possible to do it well, and absolutely amazing when you see it in action, then you end up somewhere else for whatever reason and they’re getting everything wrong (without knowing it[0]) but you can’t explain it to them because you’re just ‘the cynical guy’ if you try.

          [0] I was even at one place where they quite deliberately got everything wrong because the management had a whole other agenda, its *really dangerous* to tell them in these circumstances

          • We have the disadvantage of a parent company who tell us to do stuff, and it becomes ultra-important that that partciular thing gets done. Still, keeps us busy, I mean I’ve spent the last couple of weeks mulling over our new T&C’s so gave the MD an objection letter today. See me soar on my wings of cynic.

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