THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’S FINS BLOG RANKED THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, GETTING MORE, AS “THE #1 BOOK TO READ FOR YOUR CAREER IN 2011.” TO BE COMPETITIVE, YOU NEED TO KNOW WHAT IT SAYS.
GETTING MORE: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World is a proven game changer. Based on Prof. Diamond’s award-winning (and most popular) course at The Wharton Business School, Getting More outlines a new model of human interaction that has helped thousands of people get much better jobs or quickly advance in their careers, made billions of dollars for some of the world’s leading companies, and is now the model Google, the most desired employer according to a recent survey by The Wall Street Journal, is using to train its 30,000 employees.  

“Practical, immediately applicable and highly effective,” is the way Evan Wittenberg, chief talent officer for Hewlett Packard and former head of leadership development at Google, describes Getting More.

Revolutionary, even if counterintuitive, in its focus on people and emotions instead of power and logic, Diamond’s career-focused approach is different—he does not teach a one-size-fits-all solution. “Effective negotiation is situational,” Diamond says. As opposed to cookie-cutter career advice, Diamond offers readers very situation-specific guidance and a wealth of real-life examples from his negotiation course at Wharton. His advice for success is centered on a few simple steps: think about your goals; think about any problems you might encounter in obtaining those goals; identify the parties that can help you; then think about their needs and how you can help.

In the past, the traditional working world tradeoff was that employees would contribute their loyalty, skill and time in return for job stability and a living wage. In recent years, however, the balance of power has clearly shifted to employers in most areas. In such an environment, savvy negotiation skills are critical.

Workplace negotiation strategies covered include:

· Valuing and understanding emotions and perceptions is much more persuasive in negotiations than using power, leverage or rationality. In fact, making a human connection is six times more likely to meet one’s goals, 90% versus 16%.
· Gather intelligence. Find out who’s been there forever and knows secrets to success: it can be a relatively low-level employee, like the cleaning staff, security guards or lifelong administratives, and contact people who have left the company as they are great resources.
· Make yourself more valuable to the company by finding out what it fears and fixing it: whether staffing at certain times, or a language skill, or some other resource.
· Don’t ask for a lot at once. Be incremental and keep bootstrapping yourself.
· It’s much better to ask...