TRANSFORMATIVE NEGOTIATION

A guide offers a wide-ranging look at the state and changing nature of negotiation as a discipline.

In these pages, Federman seeks to explore a comprehensive and modern understanding of the art of negotiation, particularly as seen through the lens of modern sensibilities. “New understandings of transgenerational trauma, marginality, and structural oppression remain largely unaddressed in the negotiation field,” she writes. “This book adds peacebuilding wisdom to negotiation while showing how those working for social transformation can benefit from negotiation training.” One of the key figures working for social transformation in the book is the former convict and bestselling author of The Master Plan (2019), Chris Wilson, who “created his life vision and then repeatedly requested that the judge reduce his life sentence.” Wilson worked with a nonprofit to revitalize Baltimore neighborhoods. Federman likewise concentrates on the hard realities of life in Baltimore’s inner city in order to ground her concept of “transformative negotiation,” which means “striving for freedom from disenfranchisement, whether that shows up as debt, illness, and/or demeaning environments.” To help readers engage with her core concepts, the author regularly includes interactive sections, such as asking the audience to answer discussion questions. Throughout the manual, Federman is an energetic and engaging guide to the very personal, uplifting side of negotiation and the ways that various forms of the discipline can change individual lives. “Negotiation skills help you get somewhere,” she writes. “You decide where.” Discussing the tactics of transformative negotiation, she vividly dramatizes how to “negotiate for time, recognition, freedom, space, and physical security.” At every turn in her book, she takes the whole subject of negotiation out of the corporate boardroom and very effectively situates it squarely in the world of everyday people. 

A spirited, useful, and thought-provoking manual that “teaches the powerful about their power.”