Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas in Bargaining

by Deborah M. Kolb, Judith Williams

Overcome obstacles to successful negotiation—including the ones you create yourself
Each time people bargain over issues, a parallel negotiation unfolds beneath the surface of the formal negotiation. Everyday Negotiation provides a clear, insightful guide to the common stumbling blocks of successful negotiations and tells how to overcome them. The authors show readers how, by bargaining more strategically, they can establish the terms of the negotiation while also encouraging the open communication essential to a collaborative discussion. Originally published as The Shadow Negotiation<?i>—and named one of the Harvard Business Review's Best Business Books of 2000—this book is now available in paperback for the first time.

Author Biography: Deborah M. Kolb, PhD (Brookline, MA), is Professor of Management at Simmons Graduate School of Management and a Senior Fellow and former executive director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Judith Williams, PhD (Cambridge, MA), who has worked in publishing and investment banking, established in 1990 a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the study of organizational change and how women can promote it.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management

377 pages

First published January 8, 2003

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the last half. The style was a little irritating though... too many stories mixed in.

[Catharsis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction part was promising. It has some helpful insights into the idea of negotiations. And it's not like you read the whole book while browsing the bookstore aisles, there's only enough time to cover a portion of the introduction part before you start getting dirty looks from the store managers. So you garner what you've read and then look at the reviews by people of apparent eminence praising it with adjectives like "thrilling" and a "page turner" so you take a chance and spend that hard earned money to get home or wherever you won't get any dirty looks for reading the newly purchased book that is supposed to "thrill" you to read and weep about purchasing it. 🥲

In my opinion, I'd give a 5/5 to the Introduction section. It had some well-structured arguments on what works and what doesn't, it is researched and exposes the fallacies around reductive but overused anecdotes about negotiations, and it is organized and methodical about its premise on the book which makes the book seem promising about its content. Honestly, if you are completely new to the subject you might end up with new perspectives on the subject from the introduction section.

However, when you start going beyond the introduction and deeper into the book it just ends up falling back on the structure of the generic pattern of self-help books that contains a lot of words that don't say anything with its thesis falling flat and discordant promoting conflicting ideas from chapter to chapter. The lucidity it promised in the introduction gets betrayed and lost amidst the stories that don't do much to support the author's thesis and serve the purpose of distracting the reader from the scope of discussion. In the end, you end up investing your time to gain one or two sentences of insightful ideas per thousand words or so.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a useful book! Everyone should read this book; it is quite helpful and though-provoking. People think they are either great negotiators or that they cannot negotiate at all and even fear the idea of engaging in a negotiation. This book has something to teach all people. Originally called "Shadow Negotiation", this book focused on the differences in men and women in their negotiation styles; but this newer version offers suggestions for a broader audience.

[Sabina Varga · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some good advice in this book, but you have to dig really deep to find it. Information is suffocated by too many stories, between which the author jumps at a dizzily pace. Also, most of the examples feel made up, and they probably are, and thus it's difficult to follow and relate to them. I also didn't much like the writing style: there's information redundancy and the language is somewhat superfluous.

[Negowatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book changed how I see things, how I think and how I work!
OK, when it first came out it had another name, "The Shadow Negotiation".
For anyone interested in strategic positioning and how to leverage power in a negotiation this is core reading.

[Michael Roman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a great read. There is no clear flow. Some interesting examples throughout.