From the Preface to the Second Edition of Difficult Conversations:

             “The reception in the business community has been overwhelming.   Our little book on talking has been embraced as a guide to taking on the hardest challenges – from how stakeholders with divergent interests can make tough but smart decisions, to giving difficult performance feedback, to making dysfunctional functions function, and good teams great.  From new hires to CEOs, the book has helped people to break down silos and build up morale,   showing the way past a culture of nice to a culture of efficiency, openness, and respect.  

            “Global organizations are using it within and across cultures….it has even been downloaded, we’re told, onto the International Space Station.  The book has been used to train oil-rig operators in the North Sea, business leaders at Saudi Aramco, and at the headquarters and field offices of UN-AIDS.  Within the U.S. government, it’s been distributed at the Department of Justice, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve.  During one administration, the White House made it required reading for its top sixteen hundred political appointees.” 

Based on fifteen years of research at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Difficult Conversations provides a framework for understanding why some of our most important conversations are so hard, examines the common mistakes we all make, and offers a step-by-step method for handling them with less anxiety and better results.

It has been named one of Penguin's 75 Classics from the last 75 years.