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Breakthrough International Negotiation
Topics: Information-BooksGovernment and Politics-International RelationsNegotiation-GeneralWhen the stakes are high - in business, politics, or everyday life - it pays to take a page from the playbook of the world's greatest negotiators. And if you want to learn how to be a world-class negotiator, consider how Richard Holbrooke helped defuse the war in Bosnia, or how George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney built an international coalition to support the Gulf War. In Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts, HBS associate professor and negotiation expert Michael Watkins and Kennedy School of Government researcher Susan Rosegrant urge business leaders to learn from the lessons of negotiators who have helped to shape recent world history.
Watkins, who teaches the popular HBS elective Corporate Diplomacy, worked with Rosegrant, a political case writer, to cull the most essential elements of skilled negotiation from a collection of diplomacy cases developed in the last decade. Through in-depth interviews with top diplomats and negotiators on the front lines of tense international conflicts, Watkins and Rosegrant have distilled a set of basic principles that can be applied to any situation requiring negotiation, not the least of which is the corporate arena. "Brokering a deal requires the same ability to assess complex situations and craft breakthrough strategies as brokering a peace agreement," says Watkins. "Leaders of companies and leaders of countries must possess many of the same skills."
Recently awarded the Center for Public Resources'
2001 prize for outstanding book in the field of negotiation and
dispute resolution, Breakthrough International Negotiation
is organized around four core concepts of negotiation: diagnosing
the structure of the situation, identifying barriers to agreement,
managing conflict, and building momentum. The authors guide readers
through detailed accounts of complex negotiations involving North
Korea, Bosnia, the Middle East, and Kuwait, raising questions
and providing commentary at critical junctures in the text. They
provide a framework to help readers manage the dynamic nature
of negotiation, to anticipate and defuse conflict where possible,
and to become proactive in moving toward resolution.
These skills are not intuitive, the authors say, but once learned they give corporate leaders and others an enhanced ability to recognize familiar patterns in negotiations and to respond appropriately, bringing about a desired outcome in a wide range of scenarios. "The ultimate goal of learning breakthrough negotiation is to be an architect of structure and process and not a passive participant in situations defined by others," notes Rosegrant. "The payoff is the ability to reconfigure any landscape in ways that make agreement possible that wasn't possible before."
- Margie Kelley
by Michael Watkins and Susan Rosegrant
(Jossey-Bass)
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