Author
Joseph Grenny
The social scientist and co-founder of Crucial Learning who wrote the field's most used books on dialogue and influence.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Joseph Grenny is a social scientist focused on business performance and one of the four co-authors of Crucial Conversations. He co-founded the training company behind it and has spent three decades teaching its methods to organisations and writing about how behaviour changes at scale.
Crucial Conversations grew out of the authors' research at their training company, VitalSmarts, later Crucial Learning, where they studied people whose colleagues named them as unusually good at high-stakes conversations. The book, published in 2002 and revised in 2012 and 2022, became the standard corporate text on dialogue and was followed by Crucial Accountability and Influencer.
The signature
Grenny writes the case studies: the manager, the nurse, the engineer in the moment where a conversation turns, and what the skilled version of that moment looks like.