Author
Ron McMillan
Co-founder of the Covey Leadership Center and one of the four authors of Crucial Conversations.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Ron McMillan co-founded the Covey Leadership Center, where he served as vice president of research and development, before joining Patterson, Grenny and Switzler to found the training company that became Crucial Learning. He co-authored its books and taught its programmes for decades.
Crucial Conversations, which he co-wrote, was first published in 2002 and revised in 2011 and 2021. It grew out of the founders' studies of people their colleagues named as unusually good at high-stakes conversations, and it was followed by Crucial Confrontations, later retitled Crucial Accountability, and by Influencer.
The signature
The method McMillan taught for decades is built for the training room: short acronyms such as STATE (for speaking up) and CRIB (for finding a shared purpose) that let a manager remember the steps while a conversation goes wrong in front of them.