Business Book Summaries

Emotions matter.

We cannot stop having emotions any more than we can stop having thoughts. The challenge is learning to stimulate helpful emotions in those with whom we negotiate – an in ourselves.

You negotiate every day, whether about where to go for dinner, how much to pay for a secondhand bicycle, or when to terminate an employee. And you have emotions all the time. These may be positive emotions like joy or contentment, or negative emotions like anger, frustration and guilt.

Beyond Reason offers straightforward, powerful advice for dealing with emotions in your toughest negotiations, whether with a difficult colleague or your angry spouse. You will discover five “core concerns” that lie at the heart of most emotional challenges. And more important, you will learn how to address these concerns to improve your relationships and get the results you want. The advice builds on previous work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, the group that brought you the groundbreaking Getting to Yes. World-renowned negotiator Roger Fisher teams with psychologist Daniel Shapiro, an expert on the emotional dimension of negotiation, to bring you this indispensable new classic.

BestSummaries.com is a book summary service that provides summaries of top self-help, motivational and inspirational books where you can learn–in minutes– what it takes to live life and live it well. BestSummaries sends out one book summary every week in PDF, PDA, audio and/or print formats.  For more information, please go to http://www.bestsum.com.

In today’s pop business culture of motivational phrases and self-improvement books on successful management, there is no shortage of slogans about the value of teamwork: “There’s no ‘I’ in teamwork.” “TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More.” “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

The fact is, they all convey what we know instinctively: Teams are powerful. Through our own experience and supporting research, we are convinced that complex problems benefit greatly from the creativity that comes from diverse thought, backgrounds, and styles. But I have yet to see a slogan that reveals the underlying secret of the very highest performing teams.

A major consulting firm figured it out. The researchers studied “successful” teams and the truly “breakthrough” teams to try to determine the differentiators between the two. They looked at the size of the team, the combination of management levels, the gender and culture mix, among many other variables.

In the end, they concluded that the greatest determinant of a breakthrough team is that they members of the team care as much about each other’ success as they do about their own success.

It’s well worth the investment to institutionalize a method for hiring people that’s based not only on the capacity to do the job but also on the capacity to care. That is, if you care about more than just getting the job done.

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Miami, Florida, March 16, 2009—BusinessSummaries.com releases its new business book “The Adversity Paradox: An Unconventional Guide to Achieving Uncommon Business Success”, by J. Barry Griswell and Bob Jennings, St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Subscribers may now access PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, Audio, Video and Mindmap formats of “The Adversity Paradox”, and enjoy the book summary anytime, anywhere.

Miami, Florida, March 16, 2009—BusinessSummaries.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites for business book summaries, today releases the abridged version of one of the business bestsellers “The Adversity Paradox: An Unconventional Guide to Achieving Uncommon Business Success”, by J. Barry Griswell and Bob Jennings, St. Martin’s Press, 2009. This executive book summary is now accessible to subscribers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and Mindmap formats.

Recovering from career-toppling adversity and going on to achieve pinnacles of success lies in gaining and making full use of firsthand knowledge of “the adversity paradox”. All those who have managed to accomplish this feat attest to having found that the knowledge they gained from overcoming adversity played such a crucial role in their success trajectories that they now consider adversity a friend.

Many motivational business books promise easy access to prosperity and power by way of secret insight, quick and easy steps, or so-called “insider tips” that are dubious at best. This book is different. The Adversity Paradox tells it straight and offers no secret formula or silver bullet. Instead it offers its readers candid accounts from people whose skills, resourcefulness, and confidence have been tested by adversity and who have put their misfortunes to good use by not caving in and by gaining invaluable business lessons from their harrowing experiences instead.

The Adversity Paradox offers lessons that are practical and inspirational and which can be applied at any stage of one’s career. You can end up as one of those people who emerge from even the most humble of beginnings or the most devastating of setbacks to achieve the success you’ve always dreamed of – an uncommon level of success, as the authors put it. No dream is ever impossible.

The paths to success are nothing if not diverse, but The Adversity Paradox identifies patterns that anyone can study and learn from. Business people working to overcome humble beginnings, lack of knowledge, unexpected setbacks, or any manner of misfortune may find their greatest tool for creating business success in this book.

Every week, subscribers enjoy business book summaries of today’s business bestsellers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and mindmap formats. The latest versions of the book summaries are all available online upon subscription to BusinessSummaries.com.

Miami, Florida, March 9, 2009—BusinessSummaries.com releases its new business book “Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business”, by Richard Owen and Laura L. Brooks, Ph.D., Jossey-Bass Books, 2009. Subscribers may now access PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, Audio, Video and Mindmap formats of “Answering the Ultimate Question”, and enjoy the book summary anytime, anywhere.

Miami, Florida, March 9, 2009—BusinessSummaries.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites for business book summaries, today releases the abridged version of one of the business bestsellers “Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business”, by Richard Owen and Laura L. Brooks, Ph.D., Jossey-Bass Books, 2009. This executive book summary is now accessible to subscribers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and Mindmap formats.

In this book, authors Richard Owen and Laura Brooks discuss how — based on a variety of real case studies — Net Promoter discipline can be embedded in organizations of all types and industries. The Net Promoter Score is a fast, accurate, quantitative measure whose purpose is to gauge customers’ real loyalty to a company, establish a baseline and effectively track changes going forward. This discipline was co-developed by Owen, Brooks and fellow author Fred Reichheld, and was first introduced and elaborated on in Reichheld’s 2006 book The Ultimate Question.

Answering the Ultimate Question takes the topic a few steps further by re-introducing the topic and building on the link between Net Promoter Scores and business growth and profitability. When combined with an operational discipline, Net Promoter represents a potential win-win for businesses and their customers. The Net Promoter Score offers a near-real-time metric that is closely coupled and correlated with precipitating actions. Instead of looking in the rear view mirror of customer satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter will help effect real, positive change every day in and for those organizations in which it is applied correctly.

Drawing on illustrative case-study findings from the more companies for which the authors have helped to put Customer Experience Management and Net Promoter disciplines in place, this book is designed to help apply Net Promoter correctly, and foster growth and profitability in any organization.

Every week, subscribers enjoy business book summaries of today’s business bestsellers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and mindmap formats. The latest versions of the book summaries are all available online upon subscription to BusinessSummaries.com.

Customer satisfaction scores for the majority of large corporations have not historically shown significant improvement. Although annual reports highlight the importance of customers (usually accompanied by glossy phoos and glowing tributes), many CEOs, when interviewed, have expressed a lack of confidence in their customer satisfaction efforts or a disregard for the programs that exist.

Billions of dollars a year are spent on customer satisfaction surveys and market research, and outcomes seldom seem to result in any real changes to the business. Consider your own experiences as a consumer. When you fill in a customer satisfaction survey, do you believe that something will happen as a result?

Research can be valuable for the organization, but viewing your investment in customer loyalty as a research project is setting your efforts up for failure. We unfortunately continue to witness the stereotypical annual customer satisfaction report, presented to a suspicious executive team that invests just enough time to argue its validity before consigning it to the corporate bookshelf for another year. This is the classic outcome of a program that is driven from the needs of research rather than the needs of the business.

It’s worth clarifying the difference between satisfaction and loyalty. Simply put, satisfied customers still defect. The fact is that satisfaction is a standard that had great meaning in the postwar industrial growth of Europe and the United States but falls short against the standards of global hypercompetition today. Worse, it provides a false standard thatundermines the impact that leadership could obtain byapplying a higher standard to their businesses.

If you turn on your TV and see a company claiming to have 90 percent customer satisfaction, what does it tell you? It certainly indicates that the company’s basic products or services seem to work as advertised. It might also suggest the company is able to handle inevitable problems in a reasonable and timely fashion. You might even suppose that this business’ help desk phones are not clogged with customers calling in to complain about the company. But does any of this sound like a basis for competitive advantage or an engine for growth?

Net Promoter programs establish a higher standard than simple satisfaction, one worth holding your business to. There is no false sense of comfort, just a real focus on the drivers of growth and competitive advantage.

Dell, the world’s largest direct-sale computer manufacturer, runs a global customer experience program and understands the distinction between satisfaction and true loyalty. Dick Hunter, who heads the global consumer support program, told us:

The thing I was struck by is that we were all hung up about customer satisfaction, and I frankly didn’t think that was the right goal. It’s one thing to have a customer call us with a problem. We solve their problem, and they’re satisfied with the fact that we solved the problem. It’s an entirely different matter if, after a customer calls us, they’re much more loyal to us and say, “I’m going to buy from Dell forever because I really get great service and that’s part of the overall experience that is great and I couldn’t imagine buying from anybody else.” There’s a huge difference between those two. And my view was that we had to go toward loyalty and move away from satisfaction.

We couldn’t agree more.

To access the full book summary of “Answering the Ultimate Question,” please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

A Top Sports Negotiator’s Lessons for Making Deals, Building Relationships, and Getting What You Want by Kenneth L. Shropshire

The Big Idea
Do you want to negotiate with the same success and confidence that you see among the professionals who handle teams, leagues, athletes – the sort of people you see in the sports pages and on ESPN – on a daily basis?

Negotiate Like the Pros tells the stories behind some of the most notable, complex, and lucrative sports deals of all time. A world-class negotiator in his own right, Kenneth L. Shropshire uses those stories to explore powerful negotiating strategies, and teaches you how to use them to score big in any negotiation.

Why You Need This Book
In Negotiate Like the Pros, Shropshire tells the stories behind some of the most sensational sports deals of all time and extracts powerful lessons on the skills you need to master to become a top-notch dealmaker.

This book offers an approach that challenges you to mentally analyze your own negotiating techniques, style, relationship-building strategies, and powers of persuasion. If you want to become stellar at deal making, building relationships, persuasion, and even leadership, then this book is for you – whether you are a sports fan or not.

Prepare With Passion
To begin, you’ll have to focus on the most important element in any negotiation: preparation. You’ll understand both how to prepare and why taking the time to do so can be the most valuable transformation you can make in your negotiating life.

That viewpoint dominates in sports, and it should be just as prevalent in business dealings. There are many coaching admonitions that dwell on the phrase “just do your job.”
CULTURAL, GENDER, AND RACIAL DIFFERENCES
In any global negotiation, you must take the time to learn and understand the negotiating style of the culture of your negotiating partner. Just as you wouldn’t like to be stereotyped as an “American-style” negotiator, those in other cultures also do not want to be stereotyped.

AGENDA SETTING
An important part of planning any detailed negotiation is to establish the road map to get from the beginning of the negotiation to the end result that you desire.

CONTEMPLATING THE APPROACH
Another key piece of the preparation phase is determining if there are any steps you can take to move your position forward that will be viewed positively by the decision maker on the other side.

According to successful coach John Wooden: “I believe there is nothing wrong with the other fellow being better than you are if you’ve prepared and are functioning in the way you’ve tried to prepare. Preparation puts you in the best possible position to win, whatever winning might be in a given setting.

ESTABLISHING CREDIBILITY
Credibility is important on two levels: your personal credibility and the credibility of the information you bring to the table. Even your counterpart will respect you more if you are credible.

WORST-CASE SCENARIO
You must be prepared for negative circumstances as well as for positive ones. Your counterpart may know that single piece of information you thought he lacked. Spend some time thinking about that worst-case scenario and how you will respond to it.

Stick with Your Style
This chapter guides you through both understanding your most comfortable bargaining style as well as how to use it to your advantage rather than fretting about a style that does not come easily to you. In sports, we most often express this as “playing within yourself.”

REVEL IN YOUR STYLE
Discover your strengths and base your preparation strategy on them. It is easy to be yourself for the long haul; imitating another style is a formula for potential failure. Be yourself, and assert that style to the fullest.

As much as you can control it, you want the negotiation environment to be as favorable as possible to your style and your comfort level. Once you have a grasp of your style, you want to set the stage for the negotiation so that it is advantageous to you and detrimental to your counterpart.

Set Goals and Aim High
This chapter relays the value of establishing goals and making them a regular part of your preparation process. It is not unusual for sports teams to begin a season aiming for an event or for the Olympics by setting goals for the number and types of medals they will win.

THE POWER OF GOALS
There is a psychology to getting successful negotiation results that is underused: visualizing the end result. The concept of visualization is valuable for everybody. You are more likely to accomplish goals if you actually have them and then picture them in your mind. You are certainly more likely to achieve success if you have goals than if you don’t have them.

GOALS, TARGETS, AND WALK-AWAY POINTS
If in the course of the negotiation you can deliver your plea and it passes the chuckle test (that is, no one laughs out loud at the suggestion), that is probably your goal position.

You should also know your walk-away point. Be as firm as you can about your walk-away point as you enter the negotiation. The target requires a high level of precision. What is the number, quantity, price, or whatever the metric is that you think, given the full impact of all of the information available, will close the deal fairly? This is the target, the bull’s-eye.

REFERENCE POINTS
Saying that you need to have a goal, target, and walk-away point is easy enough, but how should you establish goals? You do so with reference points, indicators that point you in the direction you want to go.

Seek Leverage
This chapter explores how lying and negotiating somehow seem to go hand in hand. It helps you push back against lying while focusing on the topic that is lied about most: tales told to create leverage. In sports and non-sports negotiations, the most prevalent lie is about how interested potential bidders really are in your goods or services.

LYING
When establishing leverage, honesty is essential. Anyone can have success with a single deceitful act – maybe even several successes. Caution: In your preparation, develop your game plan regarding competing offers carefully. But, of course, if you lie and get away with it, you may have substantially improved your position, unless your lie is uncovered.

LEVERAGE VIA TIMING
There are two issues related to timing and leverage that are important. The first is that leverage is fleeting. The other timing issue is how the parties view the future value of a deal.

LEVERAGE FROM CONSISTENCY
Leverage is often supported, too, by the element of consistency. People want the same standard applied to them that was applied to others. People want to be perceived as being reasonable and want to act consistently for that reason. This is especially the case where there is public information on similar previous deals.

Focus on Relationships and Interests
This chapter takes you beyond the monetary side of deals and focuses your attention on the other benefits that flow from them. For an athlete, such a side benefit may be a supportive relationship with the hometown crowd, as opposed to moving to a new city as a free agent for more money. In business, this benefit may be likened to a long-term relationship with a vendor or boss.

VALUING RELATIONSHIPS
The best negotiators incorporate a focus on relationships into their initial preparation as well as during the negotiation itself.

INTERESTS
Those most successful in courting relationships take the time and make the effort to understand the interests of their clients. In most deals, this means that you need to comprehend what there is in a relationship with a counterpart that is important beyond the dollars and cents of the deal.

ALIGNING INTERESTS
In creating your game plan, leave adequate time for thinking about relationships. The value of those relationships will be individual as well as cultural. If you are negotiating in another country, or with someone from a different country, be aware of the special issues that might be presented by virtue of this diversity.

Closely coupled with relationships is the importance of understanding the interests of the other side and those associated with them.

Often those interests, the real reasons why someone wants to get a deal done, are non-monetary. The two are intertwined, as you cannot always get to a party’s interests unless you extend the effort to develop a relationship.

RELATIONSHIPS IMPACTING FUTURE NEGOTIATIONS
Fully contemplate the importance of current and future negotiations. Make sure, too, that you understand your counterpart’s true interest in closing the deal. To be a successful negotiator, you must embrace the negotiating process and be fully engaged in seeking the best deal your circumstances allow.

Negotiate Like a Pro
Winning certainly has a different meaning in every negotiation. Achieving that desired outcome is most likely to occur when we use all of the skills that we possess in a carefully prepared manner.

The important point is that you must be prepared. Do the “practice” phase as thoroughly as possible.

Your bets get even better if your preparation is done at the highest level.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service.  Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States.  For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com.