Customer Reviews

The Point of the Deal: How to Negotiate When Yes Is Not Enough

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As a person holding an "implementor" role in a global outsourcing firm, I felt as if the opening chapters of this book were scripted from our business model. Don't let the delivery folks into the room - they might speak the truth. Just get it sold -delivery will figure it out. And then both customer and supplier hang on for dear life for 3 to 7 years and pray that it doesn't happen again - but it does. This book should be required reading for every "deal team" and should help customers and suppliers alike move from deals with high failure rates to sustainable relationships with profit and performance enough to make even the most skeptical deal maker change their tactics. A worthy successor to the other fine books from the minds of the Vantage Partners. Pointed, understandable, actionable, and right on the money. Recommended for anyone who has to interact externally or internally on anything more than a transactional basis. Something to be learned on every page no matter how long you have been doing deals or how good you think you are.

The first line of this book's preface asks what many potential readers may be thinking: "Yet another book about negotiation?" The answer is yes, and a much-needed one. Many books on making deals are out there. Some are good, others bad, but most focus on the negotiation process. Even those that emphasize extensive preparation and research tend to focus on the deal itself - making it, improving it, wording it. Danny Ertel and Mark Gordon focus elsewhere. They direct readers to a single core concept: implementation. In doing so, and in illustrating what focusing on implementation means in practice, they add genuinely new insight into negotiation. Shifting the focus to how the deal will work long-term, if it will work, and what sort of precedent the negotiation process establishes for ongoing interaction is extremely valuable. As a result, we recommend this book to anyone involved in negotiation.

Why do business deals fall apart, and how do strategists and deal-makers fail? THE POINT OF THE DEAL: HOW TO NEGOTIATE WHEN YES IS NOT ENOUGH goes beyond the usual business focus on getting the deal to examine what makes it work or causes it to fail. From a different focus on using the deal as a means and not the end goal to considering behaviors after the deal has been signed, THE POINT OF THE DEAL follows through where other books end, using strategies from different businesses and even different countries to show how a different focus on implementation processes leads to success. Business libraries, especially those catering to managers, need this.

I point this book after reasonable consideration and a flick through seemed interesting. However it's a leaflet of about 4 pages padded out to a 240 page book. The same five concepts are repeated, span, respun, repeated, inverted then self-fulfilled, and repeated...you get the idea.
I pushed myself to half way but today, after a scan through the last half and seeing the same five, concepts repeated in slightly different context and respun again, I have stopped reading and have no inkling to restart.