Surrounded by Idiots
The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life)
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3.9 • 25 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Do you ever think you’re the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy? Or does your colleague’s abrasive manner rub you the wrong way?
You are not alone. After a disastrous meeting with a highly successful entrepreneur, who was genuinely convinced he was ‘surrounded by idiots’, communication expert and bestselling author, Thomas Erikson dedicated himself to understanding how people function and why we often struggle to connect with certain types of people.
Surrounded by Idiots is an international phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies worldwide. It offers a simple, yet ground-breaking method for assessing the personalities of people we communicate with – in and out of the office – based on four personality types (Red, Blue, Green and Yellow), and provides insights into how we can adjust the way we speak and share information.
Erikson will help you understand yourself better, hone communication and social skills, handle conflict with confidence, improve dynamics with your boss and team, and get the best out of the people you deal with and manage. He also shares simple tricks on body language, improving written communication, advice on when to back away or when to push on, and when to speak up or shut up. Packed with ‘aha!’ and ‘oh no!’ moments, Surrounded by Idiots will help you understand and communicate with those around you, even people you currently think are beyond all comprehension.
And with a bit of luck you can also be confident that the idiot out there isn’t you!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A basic but useful guide to communicating with the uncommunicable arrives from executive trainer Erikson. He begins with a story of interviewing a self-made entrepreneur who declared himself "surrounded by idiots" at his company. Though Erikson's follow-up question "Who hired all these idiots?" saw him thrown out of the office, he credits the experience with sparking his interest in why people do or don't work well together, and in the tendency to view those one consistently disagrees with or misunderstands as "idiots." To help readers put the kibosh on judgment and strive more to understand others, he lays out a color-coded personality trait matrix Red (dominant), Blue (analytical) Yellow (inspiring), and Green (stable) then explains how to adapt and tailor one's written communications and in-person behavior for the best collaborative results with other personality types. Though a simplified model, it provides a helpful way of framing intent vs. impact. Marred only by an ill-judged decision to use only masculine pronouns when referring to hypothetical situations, this book already a bestseller in Sweden is clearly, dynamically presented and easy to grasp.
Customer Reviews
Surround By Idiots - Highly Recommend for Everyone
This book is a great resource to better understand your personality and how it is perceived by others in any social environment as well as adjusting your ego to engage with those persons and their personalities. This book should be read by every employee and employer. The author has a humorous and real world approach while educating the reader. People often get marginalized and labelled because of their personalities but this book shows that although you have categorize personality characteristics, it’s not to pigeon hole someone but how to better interact with them on a neutral level. Loved it !
Gets at some points... misses the mark on others
Like with any business-centric behavioural book, there's the overwhelming tendency to think in terms of isolated categories of human behaviours. Some psychological concepts, like attachment theory, are more flexible. However, this book (despite how it claims most people are a combination of colours) groups personality traits in isolation to the point where each category seems like a caricature. The Red category for instance is described with almost only negative terms, while the more feelings-oriented categories mostly use amenable, desirable language. Consequently, I think this book confuses personal traits too much with induced reactions between people with conflicting personality types. Someone who feels uncomfortable or stifled might react like a Red and become louder and more opinionated and brash or like a blue and withdraw. However, had Red's peers been less defensive and open minded a Red might show other traits. The same appears for the other types, such as the yellow with the 'dream like' tendencies.
As well, many of the theories in this book tend to not address traits of neurodiverse people. The Red archetype strongly resembles individuals with ADHD or high functioning Asperger's, while the blues or greens are more in line with anxiety disorders. Psychiatrists in this genre I find are better able to untangle the nuance at play that a book like this throws away because it complicates its simple categories.