How to Work with (Almost) Anyone Paperback – June 27, 2023

One specific, practical application of “How to Work with (Almost) Anyone” is helping you prepare for interviews as either the manager or as the applicant for a new position. Most managers & applicants waste an amazing amount of energy, time, & money engaging in the black box of first interviews. As referenced in this book, “People join an organization but leave a manager.” While the second question, “What are your practices and preferences?” can be addressed at different times in a relationship, one high leverage point is in the first interaction. If both parties explore the nine sample questions in MBS’s core exercise for this part of the book, they can clarify what’s ahead in a potential reporting relationship, e.g., “Do you start with the big picture and work towards the details, or vice versa?”. This provides a solid foundation for deciding IF both want to work together as well as front loading ideas on HOW best to minimize pain & optimize performance potential looking ahead. Brilliant!

With over two decades in entrepreneurship, and ten of those years striving to deeply understand relationships and human dynamics... I can confidently say that humans are both messy and beautiful.When working relationships are in flow, almost anything is achievable. When there is friction, it's death by a thousand papercuts.Everyone talks about hiring "A-Players"; however, great things aren't achieved in isolation. If you're lucky enough to have a stable of High Performers within your organization, it does not guarantee you will have an "A-Team". They are far from mutually exclusive.Michael is a signal in a sea of noise and has distilled how to build the best possible relationships with five simple questions.At the end of the day, 100% of your customers are human, 100% of your clients are human, 100% of your team are human... If you don't understand humans, you don't understand business.If you're a business owner, manager or leader of any kind, you should have this book at arms reach at all times.

I am a huge fan of MBS. I've read The Coaching Habit and How to Begin and got so much out of both of them. I bought How to Work With Almost Anyone because, even though I am a solo business owner, I do have employees and contractors and I knew I would find something useful in the book. The good news is I did. It got me thinking a lot about the working relationships I have (and had) in my almost 45 years of adult life. I appreciated all the free resources the book offers at bestpossiblerelationships.com, especially the demonstration video of the Keystone Conversation. I watched it with awe and not a small amount of envy as I thought, "no boss I've ever had would even consider a conversation with me like this!" And alas, that is the rub, for me, about this book. Admittedly this is my perspective but when I think back on all the employers I ever had, with the exception of perhaps one, I am hard pressed to imagine having the Keystone Conversation with any of them, let alone even asking for one. Chalk it up to life, but the array of emotionally challenged, narcissistic, drug-addicted, ladder climbing, self-absorbed, hostile, predatory, and downright stupid employers I've had, made my experience of reading HTWW(a)A feel like a naive pipe-dream at best and, at worst, something short of - "Yeah, right! Not going to happen in the corporate world that I was a part of, I guarantee it!" As an employer now, with a small team, and several contractors, I can see how having a Keystone Conversation could be valuable, provided it happens from the start. There was something else that bothered me about this book. It assumes one has a lot of time to do all the deep work and exercises. I know this is part of MBS style, and it's worked for me in other realms, but for this book it bordered on self-help psychology that made me feel like, "Hey I'm looking to you for the answers here!" There are some good "actionable, tactical, strategies," to quote Brene Brown's quote, but I can't really see how they would work with an employee/employer who is a real d**k from the get-go! If you are lucky enough to work with great people, this book could be for you. But if that was not the hand you got dealt, not sure you will find what you are looking for here. To leave on a positive note, I do very much appreciate (and am somewhat in awe of) the amount of books MBS reads and recommends at the end of the book, with short descriptions of their value. Also, there are a lot of other tidbits of wisdom that I do find myself thinking about. (e.g., The Curse of Competence and TERA) The book is like a cake with several really good ingredients but for some reason just didn't hold well together coming out of the oven.

This book was repetitive, and lacked depth. It also depends on the premise that you and your coworker will acknowledge that you are working together to have a good relationship

Others, notably Brene' Brown, Seth Godin and Amy Edmondson have commented on MBS’s ability to distill much needed wisdom in ways that are fun and accessible. In How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, Michael is at it again with a topic that I had not previously considered - starting any working relationship (as an employee, consultant or coach) with a Keystone Conversation that focuses exclusively on how to best work together in order to do what needs to get done.The five questions that constitute the Keystone Conversation may sound like common sense, but in my experience are not common practice. MBS skillfully delivers content blended with quirky anecdotes that make you think (and smile) followed by exercises that challenge you to apply what you learn in real time to real working relationships.I applaud Michael’s ambition to improve 10 million working relationships. I bought the book weeks ago and it’s already impacted a dozen or so of my relationships. Buy the book and join the movement!