Customer Reviews

The Everything Negotiating Book: Savvy Techniques For Getting What You Want --at Work And At Home (Everything (Business & Personal Finance))

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Pinet does a good job at covering all the different aspects of negotiating including negotiating personality types, nonverbal communication, and some tactics. What this book lacks is a proper framework for negotiation, or if it is there, then it is lost underneath the pile of other information that is tossed into the book. This book also does not even go into the aspects of conflict that inevitably result from negotiating and must be dealt with. There is nothing mentioned about reframing interests, or active listening to address concerns. If you want to know everything else about negotiating then this book is great, but if you want to know the true framework for a real negotiation, then this book is seriously lacking.

I bought this book on sale for $3.99, and I truly believe I wasted my money. There are two big problems with this book. First, negotiating is a skill that is developed through years and years of practice. Unfortunately the author has very little experience as a negotiator, and it shows in the book. Here is a direct quote about the author's experience and background taken from the back cover of the book: "Angelique Pinet is a professional writer, editor, and desktop publisher with a degree in commercial art and a degree in literature." I think the publisher made a big mistake by not bringing in someone with real world negotiating experience to work with Ms. Pinet.

The second problem is that the book has NO real world examples of how to negotiate. For the average person the three biggest negotiations are salary, purchasing a house, and purchasing a car. This book allocates three pages for salary negotiation, four pages for purchasing a car, and 13 pages for purchasing a house. A grand total of 20 pages out 242 pages are devoted to the THREE BIGGEST negotiations the average person will face in their life! The rest of the 222 pages deal with understanding personality types, being in touch with your emotions, how to feel good about yourself, and other things that most people learned back in the third grade. I'm sorry, but I feel this book was a waste of my time and money.

Excellent book for beginners, written in an easy-to-follow format that doesn't bog the reader down with too much technical information. I especially appreciate how the author relates the subject to simple, day-to-day situations using professional tactics. Rather than reading like a boring business manual, the book is more like a friendly guide that discusses everything from body language to the steps of negotiating to the different types of negotiating styles. This is a great reference book for anyone wanting to understand the subject and wanting to learn how to practice the skills associated with it.