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American Negotiating Behavior: Wheelers-Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies and Preachers. By Richard H. Solomon and Nigel Quinney. Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press Press 2010. 357 pages. $40.00. Reviewed by Captain James D. Heffernan, USN, Director of Leader Development and Principal Faculty Coordinator and Instructor for the Negotiations Elective, Department of Command Leadership and Management, US Army War College.
American Negotiating Behavior will be the seminal book for conducting effective international negotiations in the future. Cross-cultural negotiating has been a consistent research theme of the United States Institute of Peace for years. Their comprehensive studies in the past, however, have viewed negotiations typically from the United States' perspective and within a bilateral framework. This book is different; it understands the dyadic process which is bilateral negotiations and looks at the US from the eyes of those who were on the receiving end of American negotiating behavior.
The most significant and perhaps most troubling revelation in the book was that high ranking and disparate negotiators from thirty countries and six continents easily developed a consensus opinion about how the US negotiates. If the American negotiating behavior can be that easily categorized, then effective strategies can just as easily be devised to counter these negotiating approaches. The book's concentration on "how" Americans negotiate and not "how well" they negotiate is refreshing.
Synthesizing the interviews with more than fifty seasoned international negotiators, Richard H. Solomon and Nigel Quinney develop and define four...