A book You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen provides reader simple and useful advice for achieving the advantage in everyday accidental meetings. It helps to succeed in family relationships as well as in the international dealings. It presents unique winning approaches and teaches how to negotiate with partners, chiefs, bankers, and companions.
The book impressed me very much. It reveals a lot of approaches in negotiating science. It makes me believe that negotiating is an integral part of life especially in modern times.
According to Herb Cohen in his book, You Can Negotiate Anything, the actual starting point of a negotiation always precedes the face-to-face discussion by weeks or even months: a negotiation is not an event, it’s a process – a process of gathering and using information to your advantage (Legette, 106).
The very first moment I would like to highlight is that the book is built on the concept “Customers are critical”. This very statement is considered to be one of the central statements of our class.
There is no doubt that the book is written on the customer’s behalf. Although we can interpret it to be written from the standpoint of vender. Some people working in the trade sphere might debate that some parts of the book do not correspond to the ethic and content of their business. In other words, they hoist one’s flag to the competitor. However, the main question (in my opinion) that needs to be properly settled is the attitude by means of which the writer is expressing his point of view.
The primary message in You Can Negotiate Anything is to show how to refine the negotiator’s need and to choose the appropriate approach for its implementation. It also offers clever practical advices of effective behavior leading to successful end of any bargaining process. The author clearly explains how to handle different key factors such as the levels of time, informational volume and strength in order to construct an advantage in business negotiations.
While reading a book, my eye fell suddenly upon a very important concept concluded in a phrase “everyone must win”. This statement seems to be the nature of business. The book revealed the opportunity for the achieving of this concept in quite an easy way. My previous understanding of business world was not correct in some ways. The book helped me to understand that the process of winning money in business sphere can be successful not only in a case if someone has losses. The law of things equilibrium in life does not work here as in any other sphere. I came to conclusion that money is not always the aim to achieve. There is a lot of things except money that people exert for.
There is another one important fact to be useful to take into account while negotiations: Power, Time, and Information. The combination of those three factors helps extremely in problem solving process.
It should be born in mind that everybody has their own unique needs. The author of the book highlights that when the needs of one party are faced with the needs of another party, the seller has the right for an auction to gain benefit.
In conclusion I would like to point out that Cohen is a skillful and rather successful negotiator. His distinguished talent can be easily applied to his creative intelligence. His unique ability to focus on achieving his client’s goals and a style of negotiation is simple enough, flexible and full of humour. The book outlines the practical wisdom of human life. But sometimes it does not keep on the razor-edge of the limits of the reader’s patience.
Bibliography
Legette, Synthia. How to Improve Your Negotiation Skills. Black Enterprise. 1989: 106-108. Print.