Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life)

by Thomas Erikson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

In order to communicate effectively, you have to understand who you are attempting to communicate with, and Surrounded By Idiots is here to help with that. By ascertaining the personality type of the person across from you, you can better engage and to greater success.

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!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250179937
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Series:	The Surrounded by Idiots Series
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	6,357
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Thomas Erikson is a Swedish behavioral expert, active lecturer, and bestselling author. For more than twenty years he has been traveling all over Europe delivering lectures and seminars to executives and managers at a wide range of companies, including IKEA, Coca Cola, Microsoft, and Volvo.

Surrounded by Idiots has been a Swedish runaway bestseller since it was first published in 2014. It has sold over 3 million copies worldwide and been translated into 42 languages.

Table of Contents

Foreword by David Bonnstetter
Introduction: The Man Who Was Surrounded by Idiots

1. Communication Happens on the Listener’s Terms

2. Why Are We the Way We Are?

3. An Introduction to the System

4. Red Behavior: How to Recognize a Real Alpha and Avoid Getting in His Way

5. Yellow Behavior: How to Recognize Someone Who No Longer Has His Feet on the Ground and
How to Get Him Back to Reality Again

6. Green Behavior: Why Change Is So Difficult–and How to Get Around It

7. Blue Behavior: In Pursuit of Perfection

8. The Annoying Flip Side—or No One Is Completely Perfect: Strengths and Weaknesses–What
No One Wants to Talk About

9. Learning New Things: How to Use What You’ve Learned

10. Body Language: Why How You Move Matters: How Do You Really Look?

11. A Real-Life Example: The Company Party—How to Understand Everyone You Meet

12. Adaptation: How to Handle Idiots (I.E., Everyone Who Isn’t like You)

13. How to Deliver Really Bad News, Because Even Positive Criticism Is Still . . . Criticism: The Challenge of Speaking Your Mind

14. Who Gets Along—and Why It Works: Group Dynamics in Its Finest Form

15. Written Communication: How to Evaluate Someone When You Can’t Meet Him in Person

16. What Makes Us As Mad As Hell?: Temperament Can Reveal Everything About a Person

17. Stress Factors and Energy Thieves. What Is Stress–Really?

18. A Short Reflection Through History: Nothing Has Changed—People Have Always Been like This

19. Voices from Real Life

20. A Quick Little Quiz to See What You’ve Learned

21. A Final Example from Everyday Life: Perhaps the Most Enlightening Team Project in the History of the World

Editorial Reviews

"A useful guide to communicating with the uncommunicable ... clearly, dynamically presented and easy to grasp."—Publisher's Weekly

"Readers will be delighted. Most everyone can benefit from this book, especially those in the workplace. In addition, parents, educators, and students will find these insights valuable."—Booklist, Starred Review

From the Publisher

04/29/2019

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. Agent: Maria Enberg, Enberg Literary. (July)

Publishers Weekly