Negotiating Skills (Essential Managers) [Paperback]

Tim Hindle (Author)

Book Description

Series: Essential Managers | Publication Date: September 17, 1998

Learn all you need to know about negotiating from preparing your argument and briefing a team to establishing the right atmosphere and closing a deal. "Negotiating Skills" not only shows you how to start from a strong position and find common ground with other people but also provides practical techniques for you to use when talking and bargaining. Power tips help you to handle real-life situations and develop first-class negotiating skills that will dramatically improve results and relationships. This innovative series covers a wide range of management and personal development topics. Each title is a comprehensive yet compact source of easy reference for all those in or aspiring to a position of responsibility with a focus on developing and enhancing professional management practice.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's true that negotiating skills are learned over a lifetime, but this itty-bitty handbook aims to distill a lifetime's worth of deal-making lessons into 72 snazzily laid-out pages... and often even succeeds. Neatly divided into the three phases of a negotiation--preparation, conducting, and closing--it covers all aspects of the bargaining process, including identifying your own objectives and assessing the opposition's, choosing a strategy and creating the right atmosphere, making and/or responding to a proposal, strengthening your position while weakening the other party's (nicely, of course), and moving to a close, handling a breakdown in progress, and even using a mediator or going to arbitration if you have to. On every page, boxed tips, checklists, flow charts, and mini case studies walk you through the entire process. Granted, if you're looking for very specific or in-depth guidance, you may find this book too cursory and general in its approach. But if you're looking for a thumbnail guide to the basics, it'll do you just fine.

It's worth mentioning that the book is also part of reference publisher Dorling Kindersley's Essential Managers series--20 itty-bitty li'l books on business and career topics ranging from communication, leadership, and decision making to the management of time, budgets, change, meetings, people, projects, and teams. Combining the For Dummies book series's talent for breaking down a lot of information into bite-size bits and sidebars with Dorling Kindersley's signature design style of crisp, classy graphics on a gleaming white backdrop, they don't represent the cutting edge of business thinking, and they don't necessarily reflect any unique individual perspective. Instead, it's as though someone collated the best general thinking on these 20 topics and rolled them out into 72 brightly designed and easy-to-read pages, studded along the way with boxed tips, color shots of a multiracial cast of "coworkers" animatedly hashing through the workplace issues of the day, and a self-test of one's skills in the topic at hand on the last few pages of each volume. Again, they're not for anyone looking for more in-depth or focused help on any of the subjects they cover, but they're perfect as a quickie general-interest reference... and let's face it, they're so cute and look so smart in a neat little stack or row that you'll probably want to buy a whole bunch to give to your entire staff or department. --Timothy Murphy --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Tim Hindle is founder of the London-based business language consultancy, Working Words, which helps international companies to compose material in English and communicate their messages clearly to their intended audiences. A regular business writer, Tim Hindle has been a contributor to The Economist since 1979 and was editor of EuroBusiness from 1994 to 1999. As editorial consultant and author, he has produced a number of titles including Pocket Manager, Pocket MBA and Pocket Finance, and a biography of Asil Nadir, The Sultan of Berkeley Square.

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Dorling Kindersley (September 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0751305316
• ISBN-13: 978-0751305319
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,003,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Getting started in the negotiating world, September 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Essential Managers: Negotiating Skills (Paperback)

Tim Hindle's book is an easy-to-use introduction to negotiating. This is the first book on negotiating that I've read. It is divided into three main chapters: Preparing, Conducting and Closing. It has a common sense approach and offers lots of tips including countering tactics for leading questions, intimidation, bluffing, threats or insults. It contains graphics and photographs in a clean design that help convey the ideas. I found the book was written for high level business negotiators, but most of the tips would be helpful in dealing with car dealers, gas stations, banks, stores, utility companies, or even a significant other. The book is a handy size for tucking away and reading a few pages at a time. It was an easy read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brief--but useful--introduction to negotiation, January 31, 2010

By 

Steven A. Peterson (Hershey, PA (Born in Kewanee, IL)) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essential Managers: Negotiating Skills (Paperback)

DK is a wonderful publisher, from their children's series on. This is another entry, in an "Essential Managers" series. The focus here? Negotiating skills. The book has scarcely 69 pages of text, so this cannot provide detailed consideration to negotiating.

But it does a nice job as a thumbnail sketch on the subject. It is also a small enough volume that one can take this anywhere (a truly portable book!). The book defines its aim thus (Page 5): "Negotiation involved parties who each have something that the other wants, reaching an agreement to exchange through a process of bargaining. 'Negotiating Skills' explains this principle of exchange and gives you the confidence and skill to conduct negotiations and achieve a mutually acceptable outcome." The book is organized around three stages of a negotiating process--Preparing for a negotiation, Conducting a negotiation, and Closing a negotiation.

Preparing for a negotiation? Sections address the concept of exchange, identifying one's objectives, assessing the person with whom you are negotiating, choosing a strategy (One lesson: Keep strategy simple and flexible), developing an agenda (sounds simple enough, but an agenda has real value in any decision making process), and even seating plans. Actually conducting negotiation? How do you make a proposal? How to you respond to the other party's proposal? How can reading body language help? How can you strengthen your position and weaken your "adversary's"? Finally--closing the deal. Subjects addressed include handling breakdowns, using a mediator or going to arbitration.

Again, very brief. If you want a detailed discussion, this volume won't work for you. However, if you want a brief "common sense" introduction, this would be useful.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Compact And Useful Negotiation Guide, February 6, 2006

By 

Robert I. Hedges - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essential Managers: Negotiating Skills (Paperback)

This book is a very good introduction to negotiating. Though it is geared to business to business negotiations, it contains many useful tenants valuable in any type of negotiation, including home and car purchases, and to a limited extent job offers.

I found many of the important bullet points to be especially succinct and well written, and recommend this guide for them alone. The text is generally well illustrated, though a few of the diagrams are a bit superfluous and less than helpful.

This is an excellent compact guide and is handy as either an introduction or a refresher course on negotiating. I recommend it along with the rest of the series.