Negotiating In the Real World: Getting the Deal You Want

"Negotiating is a face-to-face human drama that can be as genteel as croquet or as brutal as a prizefight," writes Victor Gotbaum in the opening to Negotiating in the Real World: Getting the Deal You Want. Gotbaum ought to know: a labor leader and consultant for over 40 years, he ran the largest municipal-employees union in the U.S. when it conducted historic bankruptcy-averting negotiations with New York City in 1975. After shrugging off the idea of a book for years while serving as director of Baruch College's National Center for Collective Bargaining, he was finally persuaded to put to paper the powerful lessons learned from those experiences (along with others gleaned from being "a husband, father, grandfather, worker, ex-husband, friend, consumer, client, and patient," he notes).

The result is a concise yet complete primer on the process that travels from "evaluating yourself as a negotiator" and "assessing your adversary" through "the sanctity of the contract." One of the most interesting and original chapters, "Women and Negotiations," focuses on overcoming the gender-based obstacles that unfortunately remain part of many such engagements. Another, "Negotiations That Failed--And Why," looks candidly at the 1994 Major League Baseball strike and the author's own mid-'70s divorce. --Howard Rothman