Synopses & Reviews
This fine blend of Harvard scholarship and seasoned judgment is really two books in one. The first develops a sophisticated approach to negotiation for executives, attorneys, diplomats -- indeed, for anyone who bargains or studies its challenges. The second offers a new and compelling vision of the successful manager: as a strong, often subtle negotiator, constantly shaping agreements and informal understandings throughout the complex web of relationships in an organization.
Effective managers must be able to reach good formal accords such as contracts, out-of-court settlements, and joint venture agreements. Yet they also have to negotiate with others on whom they depend for results, resources, and authority. Whether getting fuller support from the marketing department, hammering out next year's budget, or winning the approval for a new line of business, managers must be adept at advantageously working out and modifying understandings, resolving disputes, and finding mutual gains where interests and perceptions conflict. In such situations, The Manager as Negotiator shows how to creatively further the totality of one's interests, including important relationships -- in a way that Richard Walton, Harvard Business School Professor of Organizational Behavior, describes as "sensitive to the nuances of negotiating in organizations" and "relentless and skillful in making systematic sense of the process."
This book differs fundamentally from the recent spate of negotiation handbooks that tend to espouse one of two approaches: the competitive ("Get yours and most of theirs, too") or the cooperative ("Everyone can always win"). Transcending such cynical and naive views, the authors develop a comprehensive approach, based on strategies and tactics for productively managing the tension between the cooperation and competition that are both inherent in bargaining.
Based on the authors' extensive experience with hundreds of cases, and peppered with a number of wide-ranging examples, The Manager as Negotiator will be invaluable to novice and experienced negotiators, public and private managers, academics, and anyone who needs to know the state of the art in this important field.
Review
Richard G. Darman
Deputy Secretary of the United States Treasury
Sophisticated managers know that the largest part of management is negotiating, not giving orders or unilaterally executing plans. This fresh work on negotiation usefully combines analysis and experience -- and goes far beyond the tired cliches of the "win-lose" or "win-win" approaches. I recommend it highly.
Review
Richard E. Neustadt
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Lax and Sebenius do themselves proud in this seminal book. They write as well as they think. They show not only how the world is, but how to affect it -- for doers and scholars alike.
Review
Howard Raiffa
Frank Plumpton Ramsey Professor of Managerial Economics, Harvard Business School; author of The Art and Science of Negotiation
As a most interested third party, I have watched this remarkable book take shape over several years. If it were mainly intended as an analytical work on bargaining, it would be a great success, posing new questions, generating deep and original insights, and rigorously developing their implications. Yet The Manager as Negotiator transcends its roots in game theory and decision analysis, asking broader more realistic questions and addressing its exceptionally clear prose to a much wider audience. This book will give managers and negotiators invaluable advice. At the same time, it should profoundly influence the way scholars from many fields analyze negotiation.
Review
Peter G. Peterson
Chairman of the Blackstone Group; former chairman of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, United States Secretary of Commerce, and president and CEO of Bell and Howell
The ability to think through and carry out negotiations is vital to success in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the corporate world. I have long felt that there was an inner logic to the process, but until I encountered this book, I doubted that it could be so insightfully and persuasively set forth. Further, having worked closely with one of the authors and having seen this approach make major differences in significant transactions, I recommend The Manager as Negotiator to anyone interested in a sophisticated understanding of this subject.
Synopsis
This fine blend of Harvard scholarship and seasoned judgment is really two books in one. The first develops a sophisticated approach to negotiation for executives, attorneys, diplomats -- indeed, for anyone who bargains or studies its challenges. The second offers a new and compelling vision of the successful manager: as a strong, often subtle negotiator, constantly shaping agreements and informal understandings throughout the complex web of relationships in an organization.
Effective managers must be able to reach good formal accords such as contracts, out-of-court settlements, and joint venture agreements. Yet they also have to negotiate with others on whom they depend for results, resources, and authority. Whether getting fuller support from the marketing department, hammering out next year's budget, or winning the approval for a new line of business, managers must be adept at advantageously working out and modifying understandings, resolving disputes, and finding mutual gains where interests and perceptions conflict. In such situations, The Manager as Negotiator shows how to creatively further the totality of one's interests, including important relationships -- in a way that Richard Walton, Harvard Business School Professor of Organizational Behavior, describes as "sensitive to the nuances of negotiating in organizations" and "relentless and skillful in making systematic sense of the process."
This book differs fundamentally from the recent spate of negotiation handbooks that tend to espouse one of two approaches: the competitive ("Get yours and most of theirs, too") or the cooperative ("Everyone can always win"). Transcending such cynical and naive views, the authors develop a comprehensive approach, based on strategies and tactics for productively managing the tension between the cooperation and competition that are both inherent in bargaining.
Based on the authors' extensive experience with hundreds of cases, and peppered with a number of wide-ranging examples, The Manager as Negotiator will be invaluable to novice and experienced negotiators, public and private managers, academics, and anyone who needs to know the state of the art in this important field.
About the Author
David A. Lax is founder and co-director of the Negotiation Roundtable at the Harvard Business School. An Assistant Professor of Business Administration there, he teaches an extremely popular negotiation course. Educated at Princeton and at Harvard, from which he holds a doctorate in statistics, he has written extensively on negotiation. As a principal of The Negotiation Group, Professor Lax frequently acts as a consultant to business and governments. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.