Fans pick 100 books like Negotiation

If you’ve been avoiding having a difficult conversation, this book is for you.

It provides a step-by-step guide for preparing to have difficult conversations and navigating the waters once you’re in them, both personally and professionally. You’ll learn to see your own defensive barriers to communicating well (defensiveness to silence) and how to apply strategies for overcoming these obstacles and creating a safe and productive environment.

It’s a valuable resource you’ll come back to again and again, because people are complex, and communication is the bridge to building trust. 

It’s not either/or: You can get a good deal and improve your relationship with the other side, at the same time. I loved Getting to Yes when I first read it in Roger Fisher’s law school class, and I still love it today, because it taught me I could solve difficult problems or deal with difficult people, and do it in a principled way. Whether it is a transaction for a Fortune 500 company, negotiating for a raise, or working on an international boundary dispute, the concepts and tools are the same, and they don’t start by requiring the other side to lose. Whether you are a negotiation expert, or just starting out, start here.

This is a follow-up book to the famous Getting to Yes. In Getting Past No, the author addresses the issues of dealing with more difficult people and difficult situations. He spells out a 5-step method with details of how to implement each simple tactic: Don’t React, Don’t Argue, Don’t Reject, Don’t Push, and Don’t Escalate. Of course, each of these chapters has a dozen techniques and principles within it which gives even the least experienced negotiator some good ideas as to how to proceed. He emphasizes the importance of preparation and includes a worksheet to help with that. Experience tells me he’s right!

This is honestly one of the smartest books I have ever read about group thinking, negotiating in groups, and avoiding massive group mistakes—which happen around the world every day! The authors give examples from negotiating the names of new household products to understanding group polarization and how to negotiate around it. They break down numerous conflict situations involving groups and give very detailed insights into what is going wrong and what can be done to make things go well. This is a great little book for negotiators, business managers, politicians, and everyday people who want to know how to get what they want in any group negotiations. 

When I read this book for the first time, my reaction was “wow.”

Professor Rousseau helped me to appreciate that everything (really, everything!) related to work was malleable and negotiable. We can all be more proactive in co-designing our own work arrangements, so that we can be happier people and deliver better value to our families, employers, and communities.

I say “negotiable” but the book is not motivated by self-interest. The book focuses on idiosyncratic deals that help employees to leverage their unique strengths, so that everyone (including managers and coworkers) benefit from employee i-deals.

Professor Rousseau’s recommendations are firmly anchored in empirical evidence, so her advice to employees is spot-on.  

So many books on negotiation and communication basically say, “Imitate me!” And then, if the author’s advice doesn’t work for you, you must be the problem. Damali’s book and approach are the ones I wish I had existed when I was at Harvard Law School and in the years after when I was teaching well-regarded negotiation frameworks but feeling like something was missing.

Reading Damali’s observation that what makes you different might just become your superpower was the “finally!” moment I’d been waiting for. Instead of telling you to be more like someone else, Damali models and lays out a way for you to be most effective—by being yourself. 

This book puts the concept of ethics in negotiations front and center. It is a must-read because ethics in negotiation are essential not only for getting to the contract – but how you will address the business decisions long after the parties come to a formal contract. For me, an ethical framework is a crucial foundation for any business and for contracting. In fact, they are so essential our research at the University of Tennessee advocates contracting parties create a Statement of Intent that formally embeds a commitment to six guiding principles that combined, help contracting parties make more ethical decisions. If you ever wondered what is fair in negotiations, pick up this book; or if you scratched your head when you thought something was not fair, pick up this book. Either way, the insights will help you develop better contracts. 

This is the book that brought game theory to life. Eschewing dry mathematical theorems, and conducting rigorous logical analysis through rich examples of strategic use of threats, promises, and brinkmanship in real life, Schelling opened up a whole world of practical applications of the theory. My own thinking and writing about game theory owes a huge debt to Schelling. You should also read his “Arms and Influence,” “Micromotives and Macrobehavior,” and “Choice and Consequence.”

Bill Ury was one of the authors of the most important book in the negotiation field – Getting to Yes written more than 30 years ago. It challenged the win-lose model of negotiation that prevailed at the time. Bill and his partners Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton made it clear that we not only need to get agreement, when one is possible given the underlying interests of the parties, we also need to know how to defend our own interests in the face of inside and outside pressure. 

One of the reviewers of The Power of a Positive No said that the book “has the power to transform our lives by enabling us to say Yes to what counts – our own needs and values.” I’ve watched him in action; Bill’s three-step method works. First, you say what you really need. Then, you say no to proposals that don’t meet… show more.

3-D Negotiation lives up to its title – by showing that negotiations require a multi-dimensional (3D) perspective. My favorite part of this book is the emphasis that deals are unlikely to last when negotiations ignore the “spirit of the deal.” As Lax and Sebenius put it, "while parties can agree to the same terms on paper, they may actually have very different expectations of how those terms will be met. And because they fail to achieve a true meeting of the minds, the deal they've signed may well fall apart." Their solution? Negotiators need to look beyond the tactics (the first dimension) and make sure they consider the deal design (the second dimension) and the setup (third dimension). The authors provide a compelling argument about why negotiators fall short when they don’t consider all three dimensions.