Good for You, Great for Me ─ Finding the Trading Zone and Winning at Win-Win Negotiation

?Win-win” negotiation is an appealing idea on an intellectual level: Find the best way to convince the other side to accept a mutually beneficial outcome, and everyone gets their fair share. The reality, though, is that people do not want a fair share; they want to win. Tell your boss that you concocted a deal where your company got its piece of the pie, and the reaction is likely to be: ?Maybe we need to find someone harder-nosed than you who knows how to win.” However, to return to an earlier era before ?win-win” negotiation was in fashion and seek simply to dominate or bully grudging opponents into submission would be a step in the wrong direction? and a public relations disaster.

Into this dilemma steps renowned expert Lawrence Susskind with a brilliant new negotiation paradigm he calls ?the trading zone.” Good for You, Great for Me provides the missing operational guidelines for winning negotiations in business, family disputes, international relations, or public affairs without undermining trust or ruining relationships. It provides not just new principles but new tools? six operational steps to take after you’ve found your way into the trading zone? to ensure you get as large a share of the pie as possible.

Good for You, Great for Me also provides guidance for handling special situations such as dealing with huge power differentials (the 900 pound gorilla), liars, and irrational people; the addition of lots more parties to the negotiation; a history of bad relationships; negotiating when the relationship is too important to lose; and trying to make deals in cross-cultural situations.

Lawrence Susskind is Ford Foundation Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Founder and Chief Knowledge Officer of the Consensus Building Institute. He has served on the faculty at MIT for over 40 years. He is also Vice-Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, which he helped to found in 1982, and where he co-chairs the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, the Negotiation Pedagogy Project and teaches advanced negotiation courses.

Professor Susskind has mediated numerous disputes, including land use conflicts, facility siting controversies, public policy disagreements, and confrontations over water. He has served as a court-appointed special master and helped facilitate multilateral global environmental treaty negotiations. He offers a range of executive training programs every year and has served as a guest lecturer at more than two-dozen universities around the world. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Wilmot, New Hampshire.