Truth Under Pressure (Paperback)

Paperback. You are carrying a sentence right now. Almost everyone is.The number that is not what the forecast says. The person who is failing and knows it less than everyone around them. The worry about your own work you have not said out loud. You know the sentence - you could write it down in fifteen words - and you have been carrying it through meetings where it was almost relevant, past the doors of people who deserve to hear it.Fifty years in business taught George Bickerstaff one law: trust is rarely destroyed by lies. It is destroyed by true things said late. The truth always arrives - it always does - but it arrives with a bill attached, and the bill is for the waiting.Truth Under Pressure teaches the five moves that carry a hard truth safely: Face the hard truth yourself.Say it early - the day you know it.Say it in plain words.Tell the right person first.Treat the person with care.Drawing on a career spanning six chief financial officer chairs and some forty boardrooms - General Electric, Dun & Bradstreet, IMS Health, Novartis, and decades of company boards and nonprofits - Bickerstaff shows how truth actually travels in real organizations: up the ladder without going around anyone, into boardrooms where the real reasons live in the hallway, across deal tables where the terms change a week before closing, and through the hardest cases of all - when the truth is about you, when they refuse to hear it, and when a machine delivers a wrong answer with perfect confidence.Every chapter ends with five takeaways, five actions to take, five to avoid, and a one-line tool you can use tomorrow. The back of the book holds fill-in worksheets, a ten-second guide to finding the right page for the problem in front of you, and the research behind the method - from the Rogers Commission to today's studies on why people stay silent at work.No jargon. No borrowed credibility. Just what five decades of hard conversations, handled well and badly, actually teach.The truth you are sitting on is the cheapest it will ever be today. This book is about how to go say it - and keep the room while you do.Part of the Trust Series. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …