I just finished and really enjoyed Negotiating the Impossible: How to Break Deadlocks and Resolve Ugly Conflicts by Deepak Malhotra. It’s the next negotiation book in quite a line of them that I am reading. Malhotra is a prof at the Harvard Business School.
Malhotra organizes this book around 3 main themes that are essential for handling difficult conflicts and situations: framing, process, and empathy. Under each of these themes he explores how different ways of applying wisdom in these areas can be used to negotiate or resolve conflict. Malhotra covers a lot of ground, but there was a simplicity of structure in his presentation that I thought made it really easy to follow.
I enjoyed the negotiation theory in the book but I loved the many examples from history and the contemporary world to illustrate. This is what made the book for me. I loved how Malhotra connected principles of empathy to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the introduction of television in Saudi Arabia. I loved how framing was connected to the most recent NFL collective bargaining agreement and process to the development of the United States Constitution. I loved the history that was unpacked here through the lens of leaders negotiating across difference in some extraordinary or highly difficult moments.
This book was highly practical and I will use much in this moving forward in practice and in teaching. My favorite negotiation book still is Daniel Shapiro’s Negotiating the Non-Negotiable because he does deeper dives into some areas that I really think are critical, but this is a great resource too for leaders who find themselves trying to navigate competing interests.
