A tough-talking and disarmingly smart look at what it takes to be a canny negotiator.
Michael offers a guide to all levels of negotiating.
In his nonfiction debut, the author draws on his background in personal finance, investing, economics, stock markets, and marketing (as well as an extensive career in aviation) to create what he calls “the best book about negotiation ever written.” In these pages, Michael takes readers through all the different kinds and stages of negotiation, operating from the initial assumption that we are all involved in some kind of negotiation virtually for the whole of our lives. He adopts (right from the start) a belligerent tone that permeates the book, relating how every time he entered a room to negotiate, he felt aggressively self-confident about dealing with his opponents (“I’ll add them to the landscape littered with the bodies of people I’ve taken on in negotiations over the past four decades”). Negotiation is a learnable skill, the author maintains, but it helps if the learner is already self-confident, persuasive, and analytically dispassionate. On top of these foundational qualities, Michael layers more detailed advice gleaned from his own experiences (an autobiographical thread runs through the chapters), from basics like putting everything in writing and not negotiating with people impaired by drugs or alcohol to dealing with the lawyers who are almost inevitably a part of the process (don’t assume a great lawyer is a good negotiator, he warns). Michael comes off as tough and experienced. For good or ill, he’s prone to pithy maxims like “Use anger as an action, but avoid it as a reaction” or “Everything is negotiable” (contradicted by his admission that sometimes a negotiation runs into “a brick wall with no way around or through it”). On balance, his hard-won wisdom wins out over the business-jock aphorisms.
A tough-talking and disarmingly smart look at what it takes to be a canny negotiator.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798991032001
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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