The Upper Hand: Winning Strategies from World-Class Negotiators

Buy this book for the stories. Few of us will ever have the opportunity to engage in such high stakes negotiation, and reading about how such skilled negotiators approached the negotiations is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the book isn't as good as others for improving the negotiation process. First a disclaimer: I've been a fan of the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project since reading Getting to Yes soon after it was first published. Thus, whenever I read a new book on negotiation (and I try to read many of them), I have a fairly strong bias that few books have been able to overcome. This review should be understood in that light. The book does a good job of describing particular skills and behaviors that great negotiators use -- illustrated by wonderful stories -- but it offers little insight in how to develop the skills and behaviors. For example, Chapter One does a nice job of persuading that it's vital to prepare for every negotiation and that precious few negotiators put adequate time into preparation, but when I was hoping for new insights into how to prepare, the chapter ended. Other books, such as Howard Raiff's Negotiation Analysis and Roger Fisher's Getting Ready to Negotiate, are far superior in helping to prepare for a negotiation. The second chapter, on knowing objectives and a bottom line, was somewhat disappointing. Again, because of my bias toward interest based negotiation, I wasn't persuaded that understanding objectives is as important in preparation than understanding interests of all parties and being prepared to address those interests. Chapter 3 is a great arugument in favor of why relationships matter. It's worth the price of the book. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same defect as the first 2 chapters in that it didn't add anything to my understanding about how to improve relationships. Chapter 4 is a good argument for enlightened self interest -- the best negotiators satisfy their own interests by spending a lot of time figuring out how to satisfy everyone else's interests -- and, unlike the earlier chapters, it even spends some space on process. From Getting to Yes, this book borrows a good comparison of integrative and distributive bargaining, which likely is why I enjoyed this chapter more than the others. Skipping over to Chapter 7, the authors included a lot of discussion about where negotiating power comes from. My experience is that the things they mention are not nearly as important as the choices available if you cannot reach agreement -- the alternatives to agreement. Thus, I was suprised that the discussion of the BATNA was so limited. Overall, I recommend the book because of the stories. The bibliography is very comprehensive, but the book itself doesn't add much new to that negotiation literature, and several books on improving negotiation skills listed in the bibliography are better than this one for that purpose.

Not only is it chock full of stories, but this book is chock full of negotiating wisdom. As someone who has taught negotiation skills to hundreds of BBAs and MBAs over the past 20+ years, I recommend this highly. It's so good that I'm assigning it to my Executive MBA class this semester as one of the basic texts.

We recommend this book to anyone who negotiates regularly and wants to get better at it. Actually, authors Michael Benoliel and Linda Cashdan have written such a clear book that just about anyone could read and enjoy it. They interviewed a host of well-known expert negotiators, such as former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, U.S. Senator Bob Dole and even sports agent Jeff Moorad, for their advice and perspectives on negotiation. This is intrinsically interesting reading. Novice negotiators should take special heed since most negotiation is deeply experiential and, as the authors note, most new negotiators don't predict its outcome correctly. People tend to overestimate how good they're going to be at negotiating, and underestimate how challenging it will be. Let one deal go bad or even allow one negotiation to stall for days, and you'll be ripe for the solid advice this fine book provides. It is realistic, applicable and challenging.