Breakthrough Business Negotiation: A Toolbox for Managers

Rating:
Summary: Packed With Knowledge!
Review: If you say po-tay-toe, and they say po-tah-toe, you say to-may-toe and they say to-mah-toe, you can work the whole thing out. Just ask Michael Watkins, Harvard associate professor and author of this solid primer on how to conduct effective negotiations. While "breakthrough" may seem like a title marketing pitch, since many of these techniques have been covered in other books, he organizes the material thoughtfully. Watkins emphasizes multi-party negotiating, examining the power of coalitions. He diagnoses the external and situational factors that shape even two-party negotiations and provides helpful examples, diagrams and lists. His clear interesting style is a big improvement over most ponderous academic tomes on negotiations. To get the most out of this volume, really read it, and then practice the techniques. Are position is clear: business managers, dispute resolution professionals and anyone facing multi-party negotiations should bring this to the table.

Rating:
Summary: What To Do When You've Gotten Past No
Review: This book describes and demonstrates, with various case studies revisited throughout the book, a number of intermediate negotiation concepts. Readers with experience in negotation will find themselves looking up from time to time saying, "Oh, that thing has a formal name!" For example, the tendency of one party to discount or ignore conciliatory overtures from the other side is called "reactive devaluation." Labelling the concepts isn't necessarily of any use in the throes of a negotiation, but can be useful as a guide for analysis, and it was very interesting.

Not as simple as _Getting to Yes_, on which it obviously builds (I think all books about negotiation have to use the term "BATNA" to have any credibility these days), nor yet as complex as _Beyond Winning_, this book does in fact offer a "toolbox" of strategies for the negotiator's use in analyzing a situation and maximizing the likelihood of obtaining a desired outcome.

Of particular note is Watkins's emphasis on identifying and analyzing the interests of multiple players, which is more often encountered in the real world than the one-on-one situations more frequently used as examples by negotiation authors.