Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight

ONE OF THE COUNTRY'S MOST EMINENT PRACTITIONERS of the art and science of negotiation offers practical advice for the most challenging conflicts -- when you are facing an adversary you don't trust, who may harm you, or who you may even feel is evil.

The head of Harvard's famed Program on Negotiation, Robert Mnookin provides tools for confronting devils of all kinds -- in business, politics, and family life. Bargaining with the Devil guides the reader on how to make wise decisions about whether to negotiate or fight. Mnookin explains what it means to make a "wise decision" and identifies the emotional, strategic, and political traps to avoid.

Drawing from a remarkable range of real-life stories, Mnookin offers his thoughtful guidance in disputes of all sorts where the temptation is to demonize:

The CEO of a small high-tech company learns that his joint-venture partner, a big foreign corporation, has been secretly cheating him under a license agreement; IBM discovers that Fujitsu, its largest competitor, has copied its software; the San Francisco Symphony is torn apart by poisoned labor-management relations; divorcing spouses, each feeling wounded and betrayed, disagree about custody and support; three siblings are in conflict about what to do with a jointly inherited vacation property.

Mnookin also examines decisions made in conflicts with evil regimes, where lives and liberty were at stake. He analyzes Winston Churchill's fateful choice in May 1940 -- Britain's darkest hour -- to reject negotiations with Adolf Hitler and to carry on the fight. He compares Nelson Mandela's decision to initiate negotiations with the South Africa apartheid government that had imprisoned him for life with the imprisoned Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky's decision not to negotiate with the KGB for his freedom. And Mnookin evaluates with sensitivity the Hungarian Jew Rudolf Kasztner's still controversial decision to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann in the hope of saving lives.

This lively, informative, indispensable book identifies the tools one needs to make wise decisions about life's most challenging conflicts.