Architect's Essentials of Contract Negotiation (The Architect's Essentials of Professional Practice) [Paperback]

Negotiation is something we do every day but seldom give much thought to it. In her new book, The Architect's Essentials of Contract Negotiation, Ava Abramowitz succeeds in outlining and explaining the critical components for successful negotiation. In an easy to read and sensible manner, she outlines the principles, tools and techniques needed for successful negotiation.

The book is divided into easily accessible chapters focused on key components of general negotiation, contract understanding and practice exercises. The book is arranged in such a manner that it may be used as a quick reference guide or read full through, with each chapter building on the next.

An example of the materials addressed, is the chapter on different types of negotiation, hard, soft and principal based. In this section Ms. Abramowitz analyzes negotiations techniques of soft (participants are friends), hard (participants are adversaries) and principled (participants are problem solvers). This tackling of old ideas and presenting new, research based techniques is what really gives this book its edge.

Written for a wide audience, The Architects Essentials of Contract Negotiation is an essential read for any student interested in improving basic negotiation skills or understanding contracts. In its comprehensive yet sensible manner, Ms. Abramowitz sheds light on a highly valuable subject years before students are exposed to it in formal academia.

My first reaction to this book is as a technical writer: Ava has produced, quite simply, the most accessible technical book that I have ever read. If you have been in one of her workshops, you will remember that she knows how to keep a room full of architects wide awake for two hours after lunch, and that most there will give her presentation a five out of five rating.
Well, she writes like she talks. We architects are famously words-averse; we prefer pictures. Ava paints rich word pictures, then cannily grabs you by the necktie and puts you in the middle of the picture. Reading her book is as close as you can get to a face-to-face conversation in print. Her writing style is what the thriller publishers call a "page-turner" - but you won't read more than a dozen pages without putting it down and thinking hard about some aspect of your practice.

For those of us who write for the severely right-brained, the bar has just been raised about a foot. Tough act to follow.
Now, my reactions as an architect: This is primarily a book on contract negotiation, as the title says - particularly about professional services agreement negotiation. But it is much more than that - contract negotiation is just a doorway to her vision of the future of practice.

Every authoritative writer in our field that I know of agrees that our professional is in the midst of the most profound change in its 4,000 year history. If you sense these winds of change, and your reaction is one of your practice and your profession being victimized and marginalized, then don't buy her book - you are a buggy-whip maker looking at a Model-T Ford, and you might as well keep practicing until your business dies of irrelevance.
But if you sense these winds of change and are sure there must be a new and better way, her work is the Swiss Army knife that will get you out of the James Bond torture chamber. She marches you step by sure step from the mentality of a service provider whose output can be bought as a commodity to one who is the client's trusted advisor, whose value can't be measured. She calls this "assertive practice". I won't attempt to summarize the details, for this, buy the book.

Her principles of negotiation are as clear and easy to understand as the best. Her section on communication is short, sharp and precise. Her five phases of dispute resolution and six steps for managing change are without equal for simplicity and clarity.
Throughout, she richly illustrates her points with personal anecdotes from her years as Deputy General Counsel to the AIA, Vice President of Victor O. Schinnerer & Co., and her current involvement as owner/developer/restorer of some 30 buildings on a Virginia farm.

If you are a young architect starting out in business, and could only afford five books in your professional library, this has to be on your short list. If you are a seasoned veteran of the practice wars, you will agree with Gensler: "I truly wish I had had the opportunity to read The Architect's Essentials of Contract Negotiation years ago." If you are in between, say an associate level architect with aspirations for leadership, the skills Ava teaches so eloquently will propel you to partnership faster than anything else you could do short of marrying the chairman's ugly son or daughter.