Product Description

In Getting to Yes, renowned educator and negotiator Roger Fisher presented a universally applicable method for effectively negotiating personal and professional disputes. Building on his work as director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, Fisher now teams with Harvard psychologist Daniel Shapiro, an expert on the emotional dimension of negotiation. In Beyond Reason, they show readers how to use emotions to turn a disagreement—big or small, professional or personal—into an opportunity for mutual gain.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5037 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-06
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com
Let's say you're trying to convince a new employer to sweeten its job offer to you. Or perhaps you're buying or selling a company. Or maybe you're even solving for peace in the Middle East. If any of these scenarios is yours, Roger Fisher, Daniel Shapiro, and their colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project have ideas that they would like to share. Fisher's previous book, Getting to Yes, stands today as a seminal work in negotiations theory. Businesspeople in a wide variety of industries have drawn from the book's tips for deal-making and its larger framework for "interest-based negotiation", which focuses on understanding each side's interests and working together to produce proverbial win-win outcomes. In Beyond Reason, Fisher and Shapiro go one step further.

To the authors' credit, they started this new book with a clear understanding of the previous one's chief shortcoming. Though Getting to Yes introduced a powerful paradigm for negotiations, it did not fully address a critical element of most deals: emotions, and the messy human details that can distract from purely rational decision-making. If both negotiators are consistently lucid, fair, and calm, the game has a certain set of rules, but if--as in most situations--the different parties get excited, angry, sad, insulted, and so on, then those rules change. That expanded focus forms the basis for Beyond Reason.

Fisher and Shapiro have structured this latest work around five key emotions which they identify as most critical to productive negotiations. Even though each situation has its own dynamics, they point to appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role as the most important for making each party comfortable enough to grasp the principles of rationality that maximize the chances for a win-win result.

Critics may deride this book as still too simplistic, too black-and-white, and unappreciative of life's shades of gray. The authors' pragmatic bent comes in the book's final two chapters. One takes readers through the overall process for negotiations--not just the parry-and-thrust of conversations with the other party, but also pre-conversation preparation. It's in this preparatory stage, the authors contend, where a thoughtful consideration of potential emotional dynamics can help prevent later problems. To synthesize many of the lessons they impart, Fisher and Shapiro then close their work by inviting guest commentary from the former President of Ecuador, Jamil Mahuad, who explains how he applied interest-based negotiations theory to highly charged negotiations between his country and Peru, on a border dispute in the late 1990s. It's this kind of real-life application of Fisher and Shapiro's theories that continue to give them relevance. --Peter Han

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Masters of diplomacy, Fisher and Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, build on Fisher's bestseller (he co-authored Getting to YES) with this instructive, clearly written book that addresses the emotions and relationships inevitably involved in negotiation. Identifying five core concerns that stimulate emotion—appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status and role—the authors explain how to control and leverage your own and others' emotions for better end-results. They enliven the book with detailed examples of commonly faced situations—from dealing with colleagues to understanding one's spouse—and with anecdotes of high-level negotiations regarding critical matters of state (e.g., Fisher's conversation with the head of Iran's Islamic Republican Party when U.S. embassy in Teheran was seized in 1979). Fisher and Shapiro play out each situation, often toward an unsatisfactory conclusion, and then carefully analyze the negotiation and rewind it according to their behavioral framework for more favorable resolutions. Take the initiative and understand the five core concerns, they suggest, offering practical advice on understanding another's point of view, building connections, joint brainstorming, tempering strong emotions and defining an empowering temporary role. Baffled spouses, struggling middle managers and heads of state might take a cue from the convincing strategy laid out by these savvy experts. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Two experts break new ground with this articulate lesson on the emotional dimension of negotiations. One of many insights they offer is the importance of attending to the five core concerns, or needs, that everyone has when involved in negotiation. These core concerns--appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role--are the source of much emotion, whether we want them to be or not. These concerns and clear standards for reacting to each of them are spelled out early in the lesson and serve to integrate the material that follows. Though the abridgment is a bit uneven, the insights are cutting-edge and will be a welcome change from competitive and mechanical models of negotiating. T.W. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Using your emotions positively
As the title suggests, the authors Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro set out to show how to manage emotions during a negotiation - both yours and the other party's. Fisher is the co-author of the best selling book on negotiation, "Getting To Yes" and the similar style is evident here - simple concepts with plenty of real case scenarios to illustrate.

The book is in five parts, but it's part two that has all the guts of their concept. The five chapters in this section outline the author's key negotiating strategies for managing emotions - express appreciation, build alliances, respect autonomy, acknowledge status and choose a fulfilling role. I found the best of these to be "express appreciation" which has three simple strategies - understand their (the other party) point of view; find merit in what the other person thinks, feels and does; communicate your understanding. Whilst these may seem like common sense and reasonably straight forward, the hints and tips the authors give on how to implement these is well worth the price of this book. For example, one that impressed me was how to show appreciation for the other party's argument whilst not necessarily agreeing with it, thus building positive rapport and approaching the negotiation from a collaborative rather than adversarial perspective.

Fisher and Shapiro are extremely experienced and knowledgeable negotiators. I really liked their many (real) cases to illustrate key points. I will certainly use the things I have learnt from reading this book in my own negotiations. My one piece of advice - if you are a novice negotiator, I would suggest reading a book such as "Getting to Yes" first so that you have some basic negotiating principles to work from. The tips in this book can then enhance your expertise.

Bob Selden, author
What To Do When You Become The Boss: How new managers become successful managers

Excellent Read - Using Emotions to Help Yourself as Well as Others
This book illustrates effectively how emotions can be used in the communications process between yourself and others for a positive result. We have always been taught that emotions should be kept out of communication -- that it is a bad thing, but this book uses charts and conversation examples to show that that isn't the case. An excellent, easy to read book that helps the reader and teaches them to be a better communicator with better skills for negotiation.

Guidebook for using emotions in negotiation
Far too many books treat negotiation as a rational process, as if the parties involved are calculating machines (or close to it). Authors Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro show that is not the case. They explain how emotions affect negotiating, and provide tools based on five core emotional concerns for dealing with powerful feelings at the negotiating table. This slender book is clearly written, and the authors illustrate each point in their theoretical framework with examples from their extensive experience. The result is an immediately applicable book that provides a host of practical tips. getAbstract recommends it to anyone who negotiates...and that means just about everyone.