Carmine Gallo has it right... Communication skills are the driving force of 21st Century business and life. The opening chapters with their arguments about our continued replacement by menial and even sometimes technically skilled machines are resonant with my own thoughts on the matter. In fact, this displacement of people into higher IQ and EQ jobs may be the covert crisis that threatens the stability of our society most. Perhaps here we have the germ of a solution: To improve communication for the world. A noble and achievable goal, compared to so many that loom over us.
Indeed, it is something that should be quite readily known to even the lowliest climber of the social and employment ladders. It is for this reason I am somewhat disappointed with the outcome of the book. It feels, more or less, like a sales pitch for a product that never arrives. He outlines so many examples of general humans who improved their communication without really exploring the 'how' or 'why' in a way that felt satisfying or worthwhile to me. It is a veritable shopping channel of confusion, there is little narrative consistency or argumentation. A hodgepodge of unknown characters and their Twitter dealings are emphasised but no real substance ever emerges. It is, at its best, a work of an amateur aphorist, at its worst: a faulty pitch for a book based on the scrapings of Quora. However, as someone who deals with this exact field, I am perhaps a difficult reader to appease. I have frequently come up against this issue with both myself and my clients.
I believe Five stars is, perhaps, a lofty title for such a work. It is no true guide to the constellation of communication around us. It is more the Orion's Belt of communication skills, the first thing we find as amateurs. I truly wonder if anyone has ever received a Ted talk on the back of it! Could anyone receive even a miserly promotion or pay rise? There is some strange irony that an expert in communication, something I do not doubt about the author, could miss the opportunity to show us some beautiful prose on the importance of human relationship building in an ever more digitised world. Instead, we receive this collection of mundane vignettes into the lives of Jane, Jerry, Pope Francis, Gary Barlow, David, Sarah, Shakespeare, Dr Cho, Dr Vincent or any of the other million people featured in the book (disclaimer: I do not know if these people actually featured among the countless names, it being impossible to keep track...), senselessly given the prime role instead of serving as illustrations of some well-formulated structure. This leaves the work feeling empty and vapid as well as being unsatisfying.
In the end, all I can give is three of my stars for Camine's five.