Negotiation and Dealmaking

The original text on strategic positioning. Sun Tzu's core insight — that winning without fighting is the highest form of strategy — runs through everything that followed. Short enough to read in an afternoon, dense enough to argue about for a career.

Conflict as bargaining: commitment, credible threats and focal points.

Principled negotiation: bargain over interests, not positions, and trade less.

How Lyndon Johnson mastered the Senate's rules and became its majority leader.

Techniques for handling people, being liked and winning others to your view.

How 1950s advertisers used psychological research to sway buyers.

The 1787 Federal Convention in Philadelphia that wrote the US Constitution.

Why acquirers overpay: the premium is a promise of gains most never deliver.

A step-by-step approach to business negotiation from Wharton's negotiation workshop.

How Lincoln brought his three rivals for the 1860 nomination into his cabinet.

The deal is shaped before the table: set up the parties, interests and options first.

FBI hostage-negotiation tactics: labelling, mirroring and calibrated questions.

Contemporary reporting on the raiders, including his Phillips Petroleum fight.

The 1984 greenmail raid that brought in Eisner and Wells.

How biases such as anchoring and the winner's curse distort bargaining.

Bain's evidence that frequent small deals beat occasional large ones.

Why mergers fail; the break risk an arbitrageur underwrites.

Patterson et al. address high-stakes conversations where opinions differ and emotions run hot — conditions that describe most negotiations worth having. The STATE model and the concept of the pool of shared meaning give practitioners concrete tools rather than abstract principles.

From the Harvard Negotiation Project, this examines the negotiations we avoid: performance reviews, relationship ruptures, disagreements about fault. The three-conversation model (what happened, feelings, identity) explains why these go wrong and provides a structure for having them anyway.

Givers, takers and matchers, and why givers end up both at the bottom and the top.

Six principles of compliance, from reciprocity to scarcity, and how sellers use them.

How to receive feedback, from performance reviews to criticism and advice.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Forty-eight rules for gaining and keeping power, each shown by historical episodes.

Sun Tzu's strategies of war applied to helping women win at love.

Four steps to speak without blame: observations, feelings, needs and requests.

Seducer types, victim types and a step-by-step process of attraction from history.

When and how to say No to people at work, at home and in the community.

Why some words persuade and others fail, from a political pollster.

Cialdini's persuasion research condensed into fifty applied findings

A short method for direct conversations and for making difficult requests.

How to deal with irrational, volatile and manipulative people at work and at home.

Where you direct attention just before a message shapes how it is received.

How to give a talk that transfers one idea, from TED's work with its speakers.

An FBI counterintelligence system for earning trust, built from recruiting sources.

Eighteen patterns of human behaviour, from irrationality on, and how to handle them.

Venture financing term by term, for founders negotiating their first rounds.