Negotiate and Win: Proven Strategies from the NYPD’s Top Hostage Negotiator

Chances are you aren’t negotiating a life-and-death decision like Dominick J. Misino, a negotiator with the New York City Police Department, but there are many things you can learn from him that can save your financial life!

This book has a number of good tips and interesting anecdotes.

The one point I’ll highlight here is to realize that it is better to negotiate as a team, comprised of the commander who makes the decisions, the negotiator who handles the negotiations and a scribe who take notes.

The beauty of this plan is that the negotiator is apt to get personally involved or emotionally involved in the process and might lose sight of the goals. That’s the commander’s job: To make sure the objective is reached.

The scribe is essential (and probably overlooked by small businesses and entrepreneurs used to doing deals on a handshake) because he records what was discussed and agreed to. That record will be essential when you write the final contract to ensure that all the terms you wanted are listed properly.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, Bruce M. Patton, and William L. Ury

Getting to Yes is one of the most influential negotiation books of all time. I read it, underlined it, highlighted it and dog-eared it like mad. There’s a lot of great material here for beginning negotiators. It is essential reading for people who negotiate.

One of the key points of this book is to remove the emotion from negotiation. Instead, use facts and figures from impartial outside sources to set realistic numbers. In other words, you might say your property is worth X and your opponent might say it is worth Y. In that case, you should get outside experts to evaluate the property to get a fair assessment. In fact, you might want 3 opinions and settle on the average so it is even more realistic, or fair to all concerned.

This is a wonderful way to let bastards know that their opinion doesn’t makes something right or valued at a certain level.

Try this in your negotiations and see if it helps!

Let me know if you think this is helpful!