Don't Get Mad at Penguins: And Other Ways to Detox the Conflict in Your Life and Business

by Gabe Karp

An indispensable tool kit for engaging and harnessing healthy conflict to drive success and happiness, and eliminate the pain and stress of toxic conflict.

While most people view conflict as a bad thing that should be avoided at all costs, the reality is that embracing conflict in a healthy way is the single greatest factor in driving success and avoiding painful failure. Don’t Get Mad at Penguins breaks down the factors that escalate conflict to dangerous heights and shows us how to defuse conflict and make it work for us rather than against us. Just as toxins in our bodies make us unhealthy, slow us down, and cause us pain, the same holds true for toxins in our organizations and minds. They cause healthy conflict to become destructive, which then consumes an organization’s energy and taxes its ability to compete, grow, and prosper. Team engagements become pained, client relationships are strained, and individual careers suffer. The same unhealthy, painful dynamics play out in our personal lives as well. The key to making conflict work for our benefit lies in removing toxins from our interactions, and Don’t Get Mad at Penguins offers simple yet powerfully effective tools to do just that.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published April 5, 2022

Reviews

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really good book. Having read The Oz Principle, the topics of Karp’s book are very similar, but I felt that this book did a better job of concisely summarizing key principles and of providing realistic examples and takeaways, as with the recommendation to address concerns using the same tone you’d use if you were asking someone to add an item to a grocery list. If you can’t maintain that tone, you’re probably not in the best frame of mind to have a conversation. I took so many notes on this book to go back and reference later for myself and to share with others and I’ll probably read the print version sometime as well.

[Lily Bea Foster]

Class reading!

[Mara Vernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A direct and actionable book on conflict. The book contains narratives and structures to help raise your self awareness and do something different.

“As long as the other person doesn’t feel heard and understood, it is extremely difficult to resolve a conflict. Feeling heard is a prerequisite for agreement and resolution...The most powerful way to make people feel heard is to resonate with them emotionally.” Gabe Karp