Never fails to bring gratuitous academic heft to the instinctive, ancient principles of simple bartering.
Business school professors attempt to teach the art of negotiation with a mix of psychology and basic economic logic.
In this heady guide to the art of the deal, Neale (Management/Stanford Univ. Graduate School of Business; co-author: Negotiating Rationally, 1992, etc.) and Lys (Accounting/Northwestern Univ. Kellogg School of Management) transform seemingly obvious and common-sensical business thinking into what often reads like quasi-technical classroom-speak. Curiously, the prose isn’t quite oblique enough to distract from the fact that much of the advice in this book sounds strangely facile. Obvious points abound—e.g., “getting a good deal should be the goal of any negotiation”; “All negotiations are exchanges, but not all exchanges are negotiations”; “If you reached an impasse in the prior negotiation, you are significantly more likely to reach impasse in the next one”; “Power is typically defined as the inverse of dependence…the better your alternatives, the less dependent you are on reaching a deal.” One of the first and most strikingly obvious points made in the first few chapters of the book is that the more alternatives you have when you’re negotiating, the more confident a negotiator you’ll become. For example, a person interviewing for a job who has nine other job offers is going to be a more successful salary negotiator than someone who has no other job offers—unless another interviewee can manufacture the confidence of a person with many alternatives. Throughout the book, Neale and Lys emphasize the importance of maintaining a systematic haggler's mindset: the more you know about your own goals, as well as those of your adversary, the more empowered you will feel in a negotiation. Ultimately, much of the narrative is just common business sense made to sound like a doctoral thesis.
Never fails to bring gratuitous academic heft to the instinctive, ancient principles of simple bartering.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-05072-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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