No: The Only Negotiating Strategy You Need for Work and Home

Negotiating expert Jim Camp teaches his readers how to be less emotional and close more deals—whether job interviews or sales—in this useful, occasionally hyperbolic guide. "The 'No' system is not just contrarian," he promises in the introduction. "It creates an entirely new paradigm for negotiation—one that makes common sense, then intellectual sense, then practical sense in your life and work." He also warns against popular compromise-based negotiating: "If you're a devotee of required compromise and endless assumption, there are many businesspeople—I'm one of them—who have you for lunch every day." Instead, he introduces a 12-chapter program on how to avoid neediness in a negotiation, how to develop a mission for your deal and vision for your overall business, how to find the real decision maker and use practical techniques like repeating the crux of your negotiation three times. He's most insightful about not letting desire get the best of you and the power of silence; the mission and vision sections are more familiar. Sometimes negotiation slips into manipulation, as when the author steers his wife toward buying a boat by convincing her that the purchase was her idea. Still, many of his tactics clearly work. (May)