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Take It Or Leave It: The Only Guide to Negotiating You Will Ever Need

If you want to be a better negotiator, you can buy 24 books, take 12 courses, and attend 7 seminars -- or, you can read this article.

On the 147th page of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, at the start of the "In Conclusion" section, the following sentence appears: "There is probably nothing in this book which you did not already know at some level of your experience." This burst of candor may strike the reader as disarming or annoying, but either way, by the standards of the countless books that offer business or self-help advice, it's startling: The whole premise of such titles is that you know very little, and whatever you think you know is dead wrong. Otherwise, why would you buy the book (or its inevitable sequel)?

Volumes specifically devoted to negotiating form a growing subset of the sprawling advice category, with literally dozens of examples ranging from the memoirs of celebrated negotiators to academic explorations thick with charts and graphs. Self-styled gurus like Roger Dawson also sell audio and video primers, and there will almost certainly be a $900 Karrass negotiation seminar held in your city any day now. Software programs offer computerized training, and business school negotiating courses abound. Highly specialized newsletters publish negotiating advice, and so does the Harvard Business Review. Nobody has a Gross Negotiation Product figure that totals up the aggregate costs of all this instruction and tip-giving, but as John Baker, editor of The Negotiator Magazine, observes, "There are a lot of people who are making their living that way."

Getting to Yes is not exactly the founding text of negotiation studies, but it was largely responsible for converting the field from rarified specialty to fodder for a pop audience. In 1981, when it was first published, books about negotiating were rare. You Can Negotiate Anything, a chatty and amusing book by consultant and "world's best negotiator" Herb Cohen, had been published just months earlier, becoming a bestseller. The Art Science of Negotiation, a scholarly work by Harvard Business School professor Howard Raiffa that applied game- and decision-theory ideas to business, came out the following year. Getting to Yes has sold around 3.5 million copies, and to this day sells about 3,500 copies a week. The current edition is substantially the same book that was published 22 years ago, and the explosion of titles is not evidence of an avalanche of new developments in negotiation theory. It is evidence, as Getting to Yes co-author Bruce Patton puts it, that "people smelled a market."

The sheer number of offerings suggests a remarkable variety of approaches to the subject: Can there really be that much to say about negotiating? Well, no. Even the most ferocious and the most laid-back authors actually share a good deal more common ground than either would care to admit. But each is useful in its way, and you'll find many of the handiest insights below.

Like most every other source of negotiation advice, Getting to Yes begins by saying that however much you think negotiation is part of your life, you're underestimating. "Everyone negotiates something every day," according to the introduction. "All of us negotiate many times a day," G. Richard Shell ups the ante in the opening to Bargaining for Advantage. Many of the authors suggest that you negotiate with your children or your spouse all the time. "Your real world is a giant negotiating table," Cohen writes in his book. Patton and Getting to Yes's principal authors, Roger Fisher and William Ury, had earlier collaborated on a book for international mediators, which is of course a rather small audience. The idea of Getting to Yes was to translate their thinking about multilateral peace agreements into lessons that might be applied to more quotidian forms of negotiation. The new audience would be all of those who have ever figured they were getting screwed when they tried to argue for a raise, dicker with cantankerous suppliers, sell a used car, or buy a new house.

Getting to Yes offers a sort of archetype of what we imagine "negotiation" means: A customer and a shopkeeper haggle over a brass dish, the latter asking $75, the former offering $15. Both sides seem to have picked a number out of thin air with the hope of arriving at the most advantageous price at the end of a series of concessions. The Power of Nice, by sports agent Ronald Shapiro and Mark Jankowski, summarizes this common vision as "Two SOBs locked in a room trying to beat the daylights out of each other." The only choice is whether to play hardball or roll over.