Customer Reviews

Harvard Business Review on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (A Harvard Business Review Paperback)

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Management of Differences & Overcoming Group Warfare
What should a manager do when subordinates or groups disagree? In these chapters, the concepts of equality, understanding, evaluation, and action are discussed. It's important for a leader to view each employee/group equally, find the facts, and make an informed decision. Toeing the line between authoritarian and laissez faire leadership fundamentals, a manager must achieve an end-state that is educational but doesn't damage the more fragile sensitivities of some employees/groups. Sometimes it's even necessary to include arbitration in the process in order to placate those involved without negative repercussions. Additionally, a manager should promote loyalty, teamwork, and solidarity without stifling creativity, causing dissension, or creating groupthink.

The Team That Wasn't
Group dynamics and teamwork are often the most difficult assignments in the business world. In this lesson, the group must deal with a maverick, a person intent on disrupting the collaborative process. Focusing on team-building and consensus, experts weigh in on goal accomplishment and accountability while handling an unruly employee, when relatively little authority has been delegated to the group leader, and no ground rules have been established for behavior detrimental to the effort.

Negotiating With a Customer & Negotiation as a Corporate Capability
These lessons are straightforward solutions to realistic conflict resolution with customers while establishing a corporate-wide negotiation infrastructure. Displaying an ability to delay or avoid confrontation, it is determining how to appease the customer with little personal or corporate sacrifice that is paramount to success.

When Consultants and Clients Clash
The least helpful of all chapters, this lesson includes the details of a fictitious merger that requires the outside help of a consulting firm, and how difficulties can arise between an established company and a outside group proposing new ideas.

Five Ways to Keep Disputes Out of Court & Alternative Dispute Resolution
These chapters deal with the core principles of conflict resolution, and are perhaps the most helpful. Providing several examples of Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR), experts weigh in on how a company can save legal and management time and money by avoiding court with hybrid forms of arbitration that sometimes carry legal clout. Further, the problems with ADR - which amount to the creation of business-saturated, private judicial systems - are discussed and shown to sometimes cause more harm than good.

This is a great collection of analyses for the manager/leader faced with conflict in an ever-changing social and business environment. It is highly recommended for the reinforcement of conflict resolution techniques.

This book offers articles on negotiation and conflict resolution, but has no overarching theory to it. The individual chapters are all well-written, however. I especially liked "5 ways to keep disputes out of court" and "the team that wasn't." These kinds of chapters make the book poignant and show how groups operate under conditions of conflict and high-intensity emotion.

THis book is a useful supplement to the groundbreaking new negotiation bestseller "Beyond Reason: USing Emotions as You NEgotiate" (written by Roger Fisher, who is probably the most influential thinker in the field of negotiation and conflict resolution).

This is a great addition to an engineers library in the field in managing construction projects. I recommend it greatly.

The Harvard Business Review has done it again. A very useful tool for negotiation.