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Title: Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People
Author: G. Richard Shell
Genre: Textbook (Negotiation)
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: A Wharton School professor walks you through the theories and strategies of bargaining. Negotiation styles, planning tactics, timelines, tricks, and ethics are all covered.
Thoughts: I suck at negotiations. Really. There's a little scale at the back that measures where you fall on certain traits: Competing, Collaborating, Compromising, Avoiding, and Accomodating. Apparently, if you're between 30%-70% on the various rangers, you have a functional style. I got basically 0%, 5%, 15%, 100%, 99% on these, respectively. Official proof that I do not do well on this topic, and need some serious help.
This book was awesome. (Whether I can put it into practice is my own problem, but he tried, he really did.) Written by a professor and assigned to Chuckro as a textbook, it nonetheless hardly reads like a textbook at all. It's clear, well-organized, and interesting. There are enough anecdotes to help you understand and keep you entertained, and enough general advice to actually be useful. The charts are well planned, well laid out, and actually do help convey the appropriate ideas. The material covers everything from your innate styles and how to best use them to how to plan a strategy for a specific negotiation in advance to step-by-step explanations of the rhythms of a negotiation. There's a lot here that codifies things you always kind of knew, but didn't really understand and couldn't articulate. It explains some ways to notice and avoid your own weaknesses.
He seriously addresses the topic of ethics and non-judgementally explains different people's approaches to negotiation ethics and the strengths and weaknesses of each. He does the same for the various negotiating styles, which is slightly less touchy but still rather personal. He includes lists of nasty tricks (and how to combat them) and ethical-but-dubious strategies (and how to replace them with more ethical alternatives, so you don't feel like you have to compromise your principles just to win).
I actually feel somewhat more confident of how to plan things out so I will be more confident the next time this kind of thing comes up. And, as he points out that just about everything in life from buying furniture to disciplining your child involves negotiation, these are skills that are relevant to just about everybody.
It's a miracle--an interesting, well-written textbook that actually might help improve your life.
Author: G. Richard Shell
Genre: Textbook (Negotiation)
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: A Wharton School professor walks you through the theories and strategies of bargaining. Negotiation styles, planning tactics, timelines, tricks, and ethics are all covered.
Thoughts: I suck at negotiations. Really. There's a little scale at the back that measures where you fall on certain traits: Competing, Collaborating, Compromising, Avoiding, and Accomodating. Apparently, if you're between 30%-70% on the various rangers, you have a functional style. I got basically 0%, 5%, 15%, 100%, 99% on these, respectively. Official proof that I do not do well on this topic, and need some serious help.
This book was awesome. (Whether I can put it into practice is my own problem, but he tried, he really did.) Written by a professor and assigned to Chuckro as a textbook, it nonetheless hardly reads like a textbook at all. It's clear, well-organized, and interesting. There are enough anecdotes to help you understand and keep you entertained, and enough general advice to actually be useful. The charts are well planned, well laid out, and actually do help convey the appropriate ideas. The material covers everything from your innate styles and how to best use them to how to plan a strategy for a specific negotiation in advance to step-by-step explanations of the rhythms of a negotiation. There's a lot here that codifies things you always kind of knew, but didn't really understand and couldn't articulate. It explains some ways to notice and avoid your own weaknesses.
He seriously addresses the topic of ethics and non-judgementally explains different people's approaches to negotiation ethics and the strengths and weaknesses of each. He does the same for the various negotiating styles, which is slightly less touchy but still rather personal. He includes lists of nasty tricks (and how to combat them) and ethical-but-dubious strategies (and how to replace them with more ethical alternatives, so you don't feel like you have to compromise your principles just to win).
I actually feel somewhat more confident of how to plan things out so I will be more confident the next time this kind of thing comes up. And, as he points out that just about everything in life from buying furniture to disciplining your child involves negotiation, these are skills that are relevant to just about everybody.
It's a miracle--an interesting, well-written textbook that actually might help improve your life.
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Date: 2011-03-29 01:07 pm (UTC)From: