Danny Ertel and Mark Gordon. The Point of the Deal: How to Negotiate When Yes Is Not Enough. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2007. 240 pages. $26.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 978‐1‐4221‐0233‐6.
This is a book for deal negotiators and the managers who hire them. Its thesis is that deal making is as much about implementation as getting to yes — that “yes” only gets you so far. The authors draw on their experience as global business consultants for Fortune 500 chief executive officers and board members, diplomats, and entrepreneurs, citing plenty of case studies and anecdotes from various industries, countries, and functions. The book's first third discusses the “implementation mindset” including: treating the deal as a means, not an end; performing away‐from‐the‐table work with stakeholders who will be instrumental in executing an agreement; setting precedents for cooperative joint behavior after the deal is signed; highlighting, instead of papering over, potentially deal‐threatening obstacles; helping other parties avoid overcommitting to unrealistic deals; and articulating within written agreements how deals will be implemented. In the second third, the authors discuss how to build this mindset into an entire organization. Finally, the book brings the implementation mindset to bear on two kinds of important deals: “bet‐the‐company deals,” such as mergers, alliances, and outsourcing, and also “bread‐and‐butter” deals, pertaining to customers and suppliers.
Thomas A. Kochan, Adrienne E. Eaton, Robert B. McKersie, and Paul S. Adler. Healing Together: The Labor‐Management Partnership at Kaiser Permanente. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 258 pages. $24.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978‐0‐8014‐7546‐7.
Eight years in the making, this story about one of America's first and still largest integrated health‐care systems draws instructional insights from rich documentary detail throughout what is essentially a book‐length case study. The authors were invited to document the entirety of this partnership, leaving no stone unturned. Their account results from interviews, data collection, observation, and informal conversations with hundreds of labor and management representatives across the United States. This book is intended for those who want to understand how negotiation plays a crucial role in health care and labor relations, and which best practices could improve both.
Rosemary O'Leary and Lisa Blomgren Bingham (eds). The Collaborative Public Manager: New Ideas for the Twenty‐First Century. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. 320 pages. $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978‐1‐58901‐223‐3.
Instead of managing one organization by themselves, many of today's managers “often find themselves facilitating and operating in multi‐organizational networked arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by single organizations.” This book collects the empirical research on this collaborative public management from scholars writing about public management, public policy, and public affairs. Part I looks at why public managers collaborate. It touches on topics such as resource sharing, incentives and obstacles for collaboration, partner selection and interorganizational effectiveness, local emergency management, and disaster response. Part II looks at how public managers collaborate. It touches on recent contracting patterns and performance within state agencies, relational contracting, mechanisms for collaboration in emergency management, and the structure of employment and training programs. Part III examines how and why public managers get others to collaborate. It discusses public organization start‐ups, environmental conflict resolution, leadership, and, finally, some predictions, paradoxes, and odd results found in collaborative public management research.
Bruce W. Dayton and Louis Kriesberg (eds). Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding: Moving from Violence to Sustainable Peace. New York: Routledge, 2009. 288 pages. $42.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978‐0‐415‐48085‐7.
This collection discusses intrastate conflicts and, especially, how they become less violent. Essays in the first half of the book address such topics as the dynamic strategies that intrastate adversaries adopt as conflict escalates and de‐escalates; the role of leadership in intrastate conflict transformation, including the effects of rhetorical praise and blame; intermediaries and third‐party intervention; challenges to conflict transformation from those who take to “the streets” outside of traditional leadership roles; and globalization. The book's second half offers case studies of intrastate conflicts in Mozambique, South Africa, Nepal, Guatemala, Brazil, the Basque Country, Israel–Palestine, and Sri Lanka. This volume is distinguished by a significant and rich dialogue among the contributors, who explicitly consider and discuss other ideas presented within the volume. The editors also contribute a piece framing and contextualizing the collection. This book is of interest to scholars and teachers of conflict management, international relations, peace studies, conflict resolution, ethnic conflict, and security studies in general.
Craig E. Runde and Tim A. Flanagan. Building Conflict‐Competent Teams. San Francisco, CA: Jossey‐Bass, 2008. 256 pages. $29.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 0‐470‐18947‐4.
This book is about enhancing the ability of teams to handle internal conflict — their “conflict competency.” In keeping with its focus on teams rather than individuals, it discusses fostering climates rather than moods and encourages constructive behaviors rather than specific skills. It includes an innovative chapter about technology‐mediated teams and another that provides a checklist for diagnosing a team's conflict competency. Strategies for turning team conflict into constructive problem solving are distilled from anecdotes about real teams at major organizations. This book is ideal for managers, executives, and team members.
Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir. Who Gets What? Domestic Influence on International Negotiations Allocating Shared Resources. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. 180 pages. $60.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 978‐0‐7914‐7539‐3.
The author analyzes seven international agreements, spanning two decades, concerning fish stocks shared by Iceland and Norway. These make for good source material, says the author, because they entail zero‐sum negotiations over a scarce resource that straddles multiple jurisdictions. The Law of the Sea regime does not dictate or predict how exactly these kinds of distributional outcomes ought to be decided. Scrutinizing bilateral negotiations as well as larger economic and political constraints, the author answers a classic question about international negotiation: who got the better deal and why? The author argues that domestic interest groups can constrain and influence their agents at the negotiation table by narrowing their range of acceptable outcomes, driving them to bargain harder and claim more of the shared resource. In these particular negotiations, interest groups such as Iceland's vessel owners spurred their country's negotiators to claim a disproportionate amount of the shared resources, ultimately benefiting their country's economy.
Vivienne O'Connor and Colette Rausch (eds). Model Codes for Post‐Conflict Criminal Justice, Volume II: Model Code of Criminal Procedure. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Process, 2008. 560 pages. $40.00 (paperback), ISBN: 1‐60127‐015‐1.
This book offers a model code of criminal procedure for consideration by postconflict societies. It does not begin with a single vision of criminal justice, and so it benefits from the wide range of opinions offered by the experts who drafted the code and commented extensively on it. It is aimed primarily at those involved in nation building. This is the second installment of the “Model Codes Project” launched by the United States Institute for Peace and the Irish Centre for Human Rights, in cooperation with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Marcos David Katz. We Must, We Want to, We Can: Real Negotiation Cases. Mexico: Oxford University Press, 2008. 279 pages. (paperback), ISBN: 970‐613‐920‐7.
Drawing on years of negotiation experience as a businessman, philanthropist, and member of many prominent boards, Marcos David Katz summarizes what he has learned about negotiation in this easy‐to‐read personal account. Laced with examples, anecdotes, and dialogues drawn from his experience, this book presents short lessons on how to negotiate in any circumstance. Free of citations or other academic references, it is aimed at people who want to quickly improve their day‐to‐day or business‐related negotiating skills by getting simple advice from a seasoned negotiator.
