"There are numerous books on how to improve your communication and leadership skills that are based solely on theory. This is not one of them. This how-to guide employs an empirical approach to meaningful improvement and aims to help you to leverage your own observations, assessments, experiences, and learning experiments, not just ours as the authors.

The first section deals with building better behavior-based communication skills, while working on fixing your mental wheel ruts (reinforcing negative behaviors that you find yourself performing over and over again). The communications section details how to listen better, build relationships, give and receive feedback, and mine disagreements for value, among other topics. The second section on leadership describes effective leadership in the virtual environment, building great work teams, and coaching for success. The final section combines your communication and leadership improvement areas into a focused transformation plan.

Transformative communication and leadership behaviors involve a commitment to improvement, patience, practice, change, hard work, and small victories in order to reinforce your efforts. However, you have to start somewhere. This is your jumping-off point."