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Conversations / November 2025
With the integration of technology into our daily lives, people are more connected than ever. Yet that doesn't mean we have mastered the art of having effective conversations. Poor communication skills are estimated to cost businesses $1.2 trillion annually and can impact employee retention (Employee Benefit News Online, 2025). For November 2025, here are 12 books from JMU’s print and electronic collections that examine the art of conversations.
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Let's Talk with Each Other!
Through this compact textbook, you will learn in an entertaining way about the most important form of human communication - the personal conversation - and its essential facets.
Conversation Transformation
Conversation Transformation gives you practical guidelines for managing the six most common (and aggravating) conversation killers: yes-buts, mind-reads, negative predictions, leading questions, complaining, and verbal attacks.
Conversational Wisdom
This book will help you understand how to grow your conversational wisdom to create more inclusive and collaborative environments and to make work more meaningful.
The Revelation Conversation
The Revelation Conversation is a one-on-one exchange where leaders and managers involve employees in the discovery of their total job role, connect job duties to job purpose, and inspire greater employee engagement.
The Communication Book
Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler have tested the 44 most important communication theories and distilled them in book form, alongside clear and entertaining illustrations.
Eco-Words: The Ecology of Conversation
This book examines the power of words. It explores the links between communication, language and identity, arguing for a certain gravity to the practice of speech, for offering only meaningful words to the people we talk to.
Fierce Resilience
Discover the science-based secrets to reducing workplace stress, building unwavering resilience, and achieving success through the power of conversation.
Say the Right Thing
A practical, shame-free guide for navigating conversations across our differences at a time of rapid social change. Say the Right Thing charts a pathway out of cancel culture toward more meaningful and empathetic dialogue on issues of identity.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Third Edition
The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation; especially difficult ones, leads to the results you want.
Conversation Classrooms
This book invites teachers to let go of dispensing knowledge and information to be given back on quizzes and tests. In creating partnerships with students through conversation, teachers see themselves on a bridge where they bring information to share that invites thinking, questioning, ideas and respect.
The Communication Code
Communication Code helps you set up conversations and communication in a way that creates a win-win scenario for everyone involved. In this real-world guide, bestselling authors and international speakers Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram share their simple but powerful strategies for boosting your emotional intelligence and elevating your interpersonal communication skills.
How to Have Difficult Conversations about Race
With this book you'll learn how to: overcome your internal barriers to talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); work around others' barriers to productive discussion; be strategic about the outcome you want, and guide the conversation accordingly; use "Compassionate Curiosity" to connect and persuade; avoid common mistakes; and communicate more effectively over email, when you can't talk face to face.