Bill Breslin is retiring as managing editor of the Negotiation Journal. I write those words with decidedly mixed feelings — regret and gratitude prominent among them.
Bill has been with the Journal since Volume 1, Issue 1 (or January 1985 according to a more familiar calendar). That means 20 years in all, counting the work that Bill did with Jeff Rubin and Larry Susskind to get our publication launched. Since that first issue, Bill has been much more than managing editor. Yes, he collaborated with three different faculty editors and countless authors over that time. And yes, he exercised a discerning eye and a sharp blue pencil in ways that both made academic prose accessible to practitioners and, equally important, made case-based research stimulating for theorists.
That would have been quite enough, but Bill did far more. He came to personify the Journal. He represented us (and the Program on Negotiation [PON] more broadly) at academic and professional conferences. No one was his match in working the phones, coaxing people into contributing articles, and getting others to serve as reviewers. In the course of all these conversations, Bill built amazing intellectual capital and a wonderful set of relationships. He knows virtually everyone in the field and what they are doing — and he has been unfailingly generous in sharing what he has learned. Who needs Google when all you have to do is ask Bill?
I admit that I would be in a deep funk about Bill’s retirement were it not for the fact that I will continue to be able to call on his good counsel as Managing Editor Emeritus. We will try not to impose on his good will, but his advice has already been very helpful in putting together this special issue. We also benefit from all the work that he did this past year forging a relationship with Blackwell Publishing. He has also made Shannon Quinn, our new managing editor, feel welcome and comfortable.
We hope that this issue and the ones that follow will be worthy of the high standard that Bill has set. As you will see, it is comprised largely of articles generated by a faculty seminar on Critical Moments in Negotiation, sponsored by the Program on Negotiation. An introductory note, written by Kimberlyn Leary, its convener, provides an overview of the group’s work.
We have supplemented that material with another closely related piece. Daniel Stern, whose new book, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, propitiously arrived just this winter, contributes the essay “The Present Moment as a Critical Moment.”
Assembling all these perspectives on critical moments in a single issue should be useful, but doing so has bulked up this edition of the Journal, to say the least. The forthcoming July and October issues will be correspondingly trimmer, though only in page count, not in scope or quality. As promised, by the end of 2004 the Journal will have delivered more content than in years past. We hope that the added breadth and depth enhances the publication’s value to you.
I must close with the terribly sad news of the deaths of two of our friends and authors, Peter Shikhirev and Susan Eaton, both of whom had articles in our most recent issue. Peter was professor and director of the Center for Social and Psychological Studies at the Graduate School of International Business at the Academy of the National Economy in Russia. A note on his contribution to the field of negotiation follows.
Susan Eaton worked closely for years with many of us at the Program on Negotiation, most recently as a colleague at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and before that, as a doctoral student in industrial relations and organizational studies at MIT. Susan also taught in PON’s executive programs and was a frequent contributor to the Journal. Her work in the field of negotiation and dispute resolution was unwaveringly focused on promoting social justice in the world. Bob McKersie has written a memorial essay about her remarkable life and work.
We are privileged to have known Peter and Susan as friends and colleagues. We will miss them sorely. We offer our deep condolences to both their families.
