Eloquence is the attempt to get a set of tricky ideas into the mind of another person using the art of verbal charm.

For most of human history and in almost all places it would have seemed absurd for employers to give their employees personal feedback.

Feelings we haven’t got a handle on wreak havoc on our work. They force themselves forward in troubling, furious and depressed ways. They buckle and strain the system.

Feedback was invented to get more out of employees and thereby to lift the productivity and the profitability of the company. But it’s difficult for a number of reasons.

Both at a psychological and at a political level, we have backgrounds that have emphasised the art of indirectness.

One of the worst ways to try to get anyone to evolve is to imply that their difficulties might be theirs and theirs alone.

When we get angry, impatient, disappointed and generally maddened by those we work with, there is a fatally attractive explanation of our troubles always to hand: we are surrounded by...

Listening is something we’re very reluctant to do, not because we’re lazy, but because we have never actually been taught how to do it properly...

We are, each one of us, severely limited creatures. We can only ever get good at a few things, we can only apply ourselves properly for a certain number of...