Expand the Pie: How to Create More Value in Any Negotiation

Expand The Pie is a useful and practical book for anyone involved in any kind of negotiation. I've found it to be extremely helpful in both business and personal situations.

.Excellent ...Over twenty years ago, Roger Fisher and William Ury published a thin volume entitled Getting to YES and immediately and fundamentally changed the field of negotiations. They called their new approach "principled negotiations" and its central tenets are taught and practiced throughout the world, often labeled as "interest-based," "win-win" or "collaborative" negotiations.In their work, Fisher and Ury recognized that one of the greatest weaknesses in the traditional positional approach to negotiations was that it operated on "... the assumption of a fixed pie" (Getting to YES, p. 58). Negotiators in this setting spent their resources on dividing it.Fisher and Ury then postulated that if negotiators turned from positions to focusing on the interests of the parties and then worked together to seek creative options to satisfy those interests, negotiations offered an unlimited potential for adding value for all the parties. It was a true break through. "How you negotiate may determine," Fisher and Ury wrote, "whether the pie is expanded or merely divided" (Getting to YES, p.177). Their approach offered the promise of changing negotiations from a zero-sum game to a collaborative effort to create new value.When Fisher and Ury published Getting to YES in 1981, it was far more than a theoretical treatise. Their work provided multiple examples of negotiating situations and interactions to illustrate their approach.In the two decades that have passed since their book appeared, however, author after author has written a primer on how to do collaborative negotiations. Training programs have abounded on the subject.Why, then, the reader might ask, is yet another book on how to achieve the promise of the collaborative approach important. It is vital because negotiators continue to struggle with practicing the concept. Expand the Pie uses the experiences of its three authors in consulting, training and coaching to teach the reader "what to say and do" on order to successfully practice collaborative negotiations (Expand, p.2). Two of the authors of this companion piece to Getting to YES, Grande Lum and Irma Tyler-Wood, were students of Professor Fisher. Fisher calls Expand the Pie "...perhaps the most useful book you will find"(Expand the Pie, p.i). This reviewer fully concurs.At it's core, collaborative negotiating requires careful and thorough preparation, an orchestrated process towards clearly defined objectives during the negotiations and the patience and skill to keep the participants focused on creating value. Expand the Pie provides a tested, clear and easily understandable step-by-step guide to the process. I am convinced you can become truly a successful collaborative negotiating leader by using this complementary volume to Getting to YES.The key to collaborative negotiating is clear in the Getting to YES and reinforced by the authors of Expand the Pie. "Prepare, then prepare some more, and finally, prepare again"

Collaboratively written by professional business negotiators Grande Lum, Irma Tyler-Wood and Anthony Wanis-St. John, Expand the Pie: How To Create More Value In Any Negotiation is a straightforward and "user friendly" guide to improving one's skill at negotiation and bargaining. Individual chapters cogently address the importance of abandoning preconceptions and readying oneself before approaching the negotiation table; the 4D process (Design, Dig, Develop and Decide) to see discussion through to closure; using objective standards; and much more. An excellent self-help guide useful in both business and daily life, Expand The Pie is especially recommended for those new to negotiating business contracts.