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Kirkus Book Review

Moderate, generalized negotiating guidelines--primarily for business situations--adapted from the author's consulting newsletter. Most of what Calero and Oskam say here, at considerable length, is valid enough--but a lot of it is self-evident too. ""Your disposition affects your chance for success as much as anything else does."" ""Good will is an intangible quality, but it can lead to very tangible results."" ""Humor works like nothing else to keep or put things in manageable perspective."" Injunctions of this sort, elaborated but almost never concretely illustrated, take us more than a third of the way through the book. The balance is not more concrete--not a single negotiating situation, real or invented, appears anywhere--but some of the text is more directly applicable: pointers on choosing a negotiating site, for example, or on responding to a threat. It's never possible to see the negotiating process as a whole, however, and exceptions to the prevailing lack of sophistication are few (countering diversionary tactics come closest). On a mundane level Calero and Oskam do sometimes connect: ""Sooner or later almost everyone makes a bad purchase decision"": don't panic, you may be able to renegotiate (nobody wants to be stuck with a bad debt either). Rudimentary by comparison to Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes and not nearly as sharp or specific, on a popular level, as Tessa Warschaw's Winning by Negotiation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.