Essential Managers:  Negotiating Skills
It's true that negotiating skills are learned over a lifetime, but this  itty-bitty handbook aims to distill a lifetime's worth of deal-making lessons  into 72 snazzily laid-out pages... and often even succeeds. Neatly divided into  the three phases of a negotiation--preparation, conducting, and closing--it  covers all aspects of the bargaining process, including identifying your own  objectives and assessing the opposition's, choosing a strategy and creating the  right atmosphere, making and/or responding to a proposal, strengthening your  position while weakening the other party's (nicely, of course), and moving to a  close, handling a breakdown in progress, and even using a mediator or going to  arbitration if you have to. On every page, boxed tips, checklists, flow charts,  and mini case studies walk you through the entire process. Granted, if you're  looking for very specific or in-depth guidance, you may find this book too  cursory and general in its approach. But if you're looking for a thumbnail guide  to the basics, it'll do you just fine.It's worth mentioning that the book is  also part of reference publisher Dorling Kindersley's Essential Managers  series--20 itty-bitty li'l books on business and career topics ranging from  communication, leadership, and decision making to the management of time,  budgets, change, meetings, people, projects, and teams. Combining theFor  Dummiesbook series's talent for breaking down a lot of information into  bite-size bits and sidebars with Dorling Kindersley's signature design style of  crisp, classy graphics on a gleaming white backdrop, they don't represent the  cutting edge of business thinking, and they don't necessarily reflect any unique  individual perspective. Instead, it's as though someone collated the best  general thinking on these 20 topics and rolled them out into 72 brightly  designed and easy-to-read pages, studded along the way with boxed tips, color  shots of a multiracial cast of "coworkers" animatedly hashing through the  workplace issues of the day, and a self-test of one's skills in the topic at  hand on the last few pages of each volume. Again, they're not for anyone looking  for more in-depth or focused help on any of the subjects they cover, but they're  perfect as a quickie general-interest reference... and let's face it, they're so  cute and look so smart in a neat little stack or row that you'll probably want  to buy a whole bunch to give to your entire staff or department.--Timothy  Murphy