Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Let's say you're trying to convince a new employer to sweeten its job offer to you. Or perhaps you're buying or selling a company. Or maybe you're even solving for peace in the Middle East. If any of these scenarios is yours, Roger Fisher, Daniel Shapiro, and their colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project have ideas that they would like to share. Fisher's previous book, Getting to Yes, stands today as a seminal work in negotiations theory. Businesspeople in a wide variety of industries have drawn from the book's tips for deal-making and its larger framework for "interest-based negotiation", which focuses on understanding each side's interests and working together to produce proverbial win-win outcomes. In Beyond Reason, Fisher and Shapiro go one step further.

To the authors' credit, they started this new book with a clear understanding of the previous one's chief shortcoming. Though Getting to Yes introduced a powerful paradigm for negotiations, it did not fully address a critical element of most deals: emotions, and the messy human details that can distract from purely rational decision-making. If both negotiators are consistently lucid, fair, and calm, the game has a certain set of rules, but if--as in most situations--the different parties get excited, angry, sad, insulted, and so on, then those rules change. That expanded focus forms the basis for Beyond Reason.

Fisher and Shapiro have structured this latest work around five key emotions which they identify as most critical to productive negotiations. Even though each situation has its own dynamics, they point to appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role as the most important for making each party comfortable enough to grasp the principles of rationality that maximize the chances for a win-win result.

Critics may deride this book as still too simplistic, too black-and-white, and unappreciative of life's shades of gray. The authors' pragmatic bent comes in the book's final two chapters. One takes readers through the overall process for negotiations--not just the parry-and-thrust of conversations with the other party, but also pre-conversation preparation. It's in this preparatory stage, the authors contend, where a thoughtful consideration of potential emotional dynamics can help prevent later problems. To synthesize many of the lessons they impart, Fisher and Shapiro then close their work by inviting guest commentary from the former President of Ecuador, Jamil Mahuad, who explains how he applied interest-based negotiations theory to highly charged negotiations between his country and Peru, on a border dispute in the late 1990s. It's this kind of real-life application of Fisher and Shapiro's theories that continue to give them relevance. --Peter Han

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Masters of diplomacy, Fisher and Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, build on Fisher's bestseller (he co-authored Getting to YES) with this instructive, clearly written book that addresses the emotions and relationships inevitably involved in negotiation. Identifying five core concerns that stimulate emotion—appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status and role—the authors explain how to control and leverage your own and others' emotions for better end-results. They enliven the book with detailed examples of commonly faced situations—from dealing with colleagues to understanding one's spouse—and with anecdotes of high-level negotiations regarding critical matters of state (e.g., Fisher's conversation with the head of Iran's Islamic Republican Party when U.S. embassy in Teheran was seized in 1979). Fisher and Shapiro play out each situation, often toward an unsatisfactory conclusion, and then carefully analyze the negotiation and rewind it according to their behavioral framework for more favorable resolutions. Take the initiative and understand the five core concerns, they suggest, offering practical advice on understanding another's point of view, building connections, joint brainstorming, tempering strong emotions and defining an empowering temporary role. Baffled spouses, struggling middle managers and heads of state might take a cue from the convincing strategy laid out by these savvy experts. (Oct.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (October 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670034509
• ISBN-13: 978-0670034505
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #61,328 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable book, November 8, 2005

By	Val Elbert (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I recently finished reading "Beyond Reason" by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro. The book is centered on an idea that emotions play an important role in negotiations and provided an analytical view on how to best manage the emotional side of negotiations. While I was aware that emotions can have a big impact on a negotiation, or even a conversation, I really enjoyed the perspective that the authors offered on dealing with people who "abuse" the power of emotions, ranging from coercion by threat to playing on sympathy.

Although the advice of the authors was generally helpful, I sometimes questioned practicality of following the guidelines in day-to-day affairs. For example, the authors encouraged the readers to document and discuss each of the negotiations as part of constant learning process, often spending sixty to ninety minutes in follow up discussions. As a manager of a development team with frequent meetings, such analysis would put a significant damper on my productivity. However, I realize that the book is not intended to be followed as a "manual" and each person may have to make practical adjustments.

Overall, the book is a "must read" for everyone, not just frequent negotiators. In the book, I found a lot of advice on how to respect the emotions that govern the meeting in many different settings. Since I learn best from seeing complex concepts in action, the case study that concluded the book put a neat "bow" on a very enjoyable and valuable read.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An attorney's impression, December 21, 2005

By	Margaret Gold "Margie" (Cabot, PA) - See all my reviews

As an attorney this book has altered the way I argue my cases. It has given me insight into the negotiation process in a different way than any other book I have read on negotiation. The five core concerns have helped me when I talk with my client, other attorneys and even when I interact with the judge. I also use the five core concerns in my personal life. You can grasp them in only a few minutes, yet they have a complexity to them. When you read the chapter about the ex-President of Equador you can understand how these core concerns can work on any level - personal, professional, or political. It is a must in everyone's library.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winning With the Other Party Feeling Good, November 23, 2005

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In MBA school we are taught to negeotiate with a lot of figures, charts, graphs, etc. Once all the facts are known, the decision is simple. The problem with that is two fold: 1. They are typically based on projections that may well not be true (remember the Edsel and the Convair 880). 2. They ignore the feelings of the other person involved, and feelings are very important. Sometimes (often) a decision is made that is not to the person's best interest simply because of feelings.

This book breaks down the five core emothions of feeling appreciated, alone, imposition, put down, trivialized. It covers business negeotion, but perhaps even more important is negeotiating with teens (but not two year olds), the mentally ill (ex-wives included), the drunk in a bar.

The techniques described here are given examples in buying a small item, presenting a case to the Supreme Court, to discussing border disagreements between a couple of nations. In short, we all negeotiate all the time, it works best when both parties feel that they got the best of the deal.