Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Book! Shame I can only award it 5 stars, 26 April 2007
If anyone is thinking about the buying this book. Then, stop thinking about it and buy the thing!
I wish I had found this book years ago as, I work in a cut throat industry and realised that I had to learn about the art of negotiation in order to survive. This book, will take the complete novice to the person who is highly competent and teach them something new. As business books go, this is written in a very straight forward manner with lots of examples to illustrates the points being made. Furthermore, the negotiation quiz will help you to see your style and how that could effect the negotiation process if you are sitting across the table (or in my case over the phone) from a person with a different style from yourself. The best thing in this book is the bargaining plan as it will really make you think about what is the best strategy you can use in the negotiation process - and in my case the negotiation is more equal that I had imagined.
Don't take my word for it. Buy the book now and see for yourself.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Savvy, entertaining negotiation manual, 21 Oct 2008
Negotiating is one of the most basic yet complex social interactions that people undertake. These sessions can be straightforward or highly strategic, and can involve the exchange of everything from sheep to global conglomerates. Since negotiations are the products of intense human relations, they produce great stories founded on basic social science and psychology principles. Author and professor G. Richard Shell has done a masterful job of presenting the art and science of negotiation. That must be why he is known as one of the most highly-rated business school professors in the U.S. This book is educational and entertaining, and contains great examples of negotiations from such varied sources as African tribes and J.P. Morgan. getAbstract highly recommends it to anyone who wants to find out more about this intricate social interaction. Learn exactly how to become better at getting what you want.
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0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Be prepared to be irritated at every single page of this book..., 8 Jan 2008
I already started to get scared when I saw all the "praise" messages at the first page: this is a well known cheap marketing trick to use weak praise messages (from some, well, at least "strange" companies) to promote a book. And it turns out I was right. Have you ever experienced getting angry at literally *every* page in the book? If you want to experience that happy (not...) feeling again, buy this book. I feel I have been ripped off completely. Do you know the expression "never scratch the top - always scratch the bottom?" Well, this author only scratches the top - the surface -: he never dives into the topics he touches, he merely touches them. With that I mean: he writes about a subject, tries to make it look all "academical" (I graduated from university myself, but I would be ashamed if my book would be like this) by constantly referring to "research has shown", and then...: he quits! For example, he says: Topic A - "research has shown" ((blabla, and completely irrelevant) that XYZ is relevant in negotiations", and then he presents NO *serious* strategies at all to deal with it! Basically all he says is "well, this might be a problem when you negotiate, and well, you will need to find a way out of it. I suggest talk about it with your counterpart - or at least, don't fall for it, and try to become friends with your counterpart, because then they won't try to take you" (say what???? Say what????). Actually, there is so much more to write about this book, I just don't want to waste my time on it (believe me, I am again getting *extremely angry* while writing this about the rip off this is. You expect somebody from Wharton to be sincere (he writes that ... "Me being an academic, I choose to be most ethical in all my negotiations"...Can you imagine this? It's an insult to all non-academics) and either write a decent book that lives up to the expectations generated by the marketing machine ("A Wharton professor") or just realize you don't know nada about negotiations and just want to make money writing a book that people will buy because of the marketing. I mean, chapter I starts with "your bargaining style". You get some (superficial!) blabla about 5 styles that exist, you expect this to be THE foundation of the book (it is presented like that...) and when you've read a *very high level* attempt at profiling something...the chapter is done...(!) Can you imagine this? No "so this is your style, it means this or that", nada. Well, later on, some 20 chapters or so later to be precise, there is a *very weak* attempt at touching back at chapter 1, but it fails any, even low-level, test (trust me, I have graduates that write *far better* thesis than this "Wharton professor"). This superficial nonsense continues chapter after chapter after chapter. I really got irritated (well, actually, more than that, but let's keep it nice) page after page after page: the whole 250 pages. Now I am not from that "renowned" university Wharton (I am from that other "renowned" university;-)) but I do have your average brain, and this book is an insult to any reader. I strongly recommend against it. If you want a book that skips the blabla, try "Everything is negotiable" by Gavin Kennedy. That book isn't perfect either, but it hits the right target about a 1000 times more than this book. Don't fall for this trap: skip it, and save your money. I wish somebody would have written a review like mine so I wouldn't have bought it, because I feel I've been ripped off; not by Amazon, but by the author. And as to the publisher: have you *ever* heared about decent paragraph numbering? Because this book lacks any. And since the book is so full of blabla, unnecessary side steps, you end up reading 5 pages of blabla and suddenly there's another heading without proper subnumbering: so you need to go back constantly to see "is this a new topic, or a subtopic?).
It's a shame I like Amazon, otherwise I should ask for a refund and a compensation for my waste of time and energy.
To recoup: just don't buy it: you've been warned. (Instead, send me a postcard, because I devoted my time to warning you for this disappointment - only kidding ;-))
Sorry for this relatively hard ranting, but I get so pissed off if people don't provide value for money and think they can get away with it. I'm sort of an honest guy: my blood pressure pumps of the scale when I get confronted with stuff like this. Mea culpa ;-)
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by Robert Cialdini
by Roger Fisher
by William Ury
by Princeton Language Institute
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