Mastering Negotiation

Book excerpt: This comprehensive book covers the key stages of the negotiation process: choosing an approach, preparing to negotiate, initiating talks, moving to substantive bargaining and problem-solving, overcoming common difficulties, and closing a deal. It focuses on issues of negotiation strategy, especially those associated with the interest-based or mutual-gains negotiation that professional negotiators often use in complex disputes. Special features include chapters on cross-cultural negotiations, group negotiations, and ethical issues. "People engaged in the study and practice of negotiation and appropriate dispute resolution have long been on the lookout for a book that explores all of the advances in principled or interest-based negotiation that have occurred since the 1981 publication of that ground-breaking work by Roger Fisher and Bill Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Professor Michael Fowler's Mastering Negotiation is a clear, engaging, wide-ranging, and perceptive study, ideal for classroom adoption and sure to be of great interest to university students and faculty as well as practitioners in law firms, board-rooms, civil society, foreign ministries, and the halls of politics." -- Sean Byrne, Director, Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace & Justice, and Professor of Peace & Conflict Studies, St. Paul's College, University of Manitoba "This is a landmark contribution to the teaching, learning, and practice of negotiation. . .The book succeeds on two tracks: it is a tour-de-force in articulation and critical examination of fundamental concepts, but it is also an intensely practical guide to techniques for applying those concepts. In every chapter, specific illustrations and real-world examples abound, as do checklists and roadmaps. The book is destined to be a well-thumbed reference guide to what succeeds and what fails in diverse negotiation contexts." -- Donald L. Burnett, Jr., Professor (Emeritus) of Law, University of Idaho Dean, College of Law