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Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts ReviewMichael Watkins and Susan Rosegrant--a Harvard Business School professor and a Kennedy School case writer respectively--have written abook that succeeds on several levels but that is ultimately less powerful than it might have been, probably as a result of trying to serve too
many masters. The authors provide really fascinating accounts of four post-Cold War negotiations--nuclear arms proliferation talks between
the U.S. and North Korea; the Israeli-Palestinian talks leading to the Oslo Accords; the creation of the Gulf War coalition (1991); and the
confrontation between the US (and Europe) and Serbia that led to the Dayton Peace Accords--that each resulted, in their view, in some kind
of major breakthrough, some difficult to achieve result. These accounts are based on what must have been extensive interviews with key
players, who are quoted frequently and who share the concerns and concepts that influenced them. The book would be worthwhile even if
all it contained were these detailed, often thrilling, narratives of several significant recent foreign policy conflicts.
But, in addition, these four negotiations provide the authors with the jump off points for extensive discussions of the personalities involved
and the tactics they used. The book is published by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and in many ways it represents an
attempt to bring the Socratic method out of the class room and on to the written page. In parenthetical asides they ask the reader to consider
why certain players took certain actions or how a key decision may have influenced the whole course of events, etc.. As you read, the
authors are virtually present, pushing and prodding (in a helpful way) to make sure that you are conscious of the negotiating ploys that
participants utilize.
Meanwhile, in their own analysis of events, they spell out the four core concepts of what they call "breakthrough negotiation" :
(1) Diagnosing structure
(2) Identifying barriers to agreement
(3) Managing conflict
(4) Building momentum
and seven principles that guide breakthrough negotiators :
(1) Breakthrough Negotiators Shape the Structure of Their Situations
(2) Breakthrough Negotiators Organize to Learn
(3) Breakthrough Negotiators are Masters of Process Design
(4) Breakthrough Negotiators Foster Agreement When Possible But Employ Force When Necessary
(5) Breakthrough Negotiators Anticipate and Manage Conflict
(6) Breakthrough Negotiators Build Momentum Toward Agreement
(7) Breakthrough Negotiators Lead from the Middle
They use innumerable examples to illustrate these concepts and principles and the overall structure certainly provides a framework that
would be useful to anyone involved in negotiations. In this regard, they have produced what will likely be an excellent textbook for use in
the classroom.
So far so good; but the book also seems to be at least partially intended for a wider audience, and here it runs into some difficulties, largely
as a result of the textbook format and of the choice of geopolitical negotiations as a subject matter. As a threshold matter, I don't believe
that these negotiations between nation states hold terribly many lessons for business executives, who are presumably a significant portion of
the intended wider audience, because one or both of the participants in these cases usually lack the option of just ending the negotiation, an
option which is almost always available in the business setting. Coca-Cola can simply decide not to buy Joe's Cola and can walk away, but
Serbia can't really ignore the United States and Western Europe. No businessman, not even a Bill Gates, is ever likely to have the
overwhelming leverage that the U.S. brings to the negotiating table.
The biggest problem though is that if you apply the first of the authors' own core concepts (diagnosing structure) to their chosen four
examples you see that the breakthrough generally occurred prior to, or at, the moment negotiations started. Thus, the actual content of the
Oslo Accords was pretty much insignificant; what really mattered was the implicit admission by the parties that Israel and a Palestinian state
were each realities that the other side needed to cope with. Even today, with the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians at its all
time nadir, they are relatively close to a final accord. Israel will eventually declare a Palestinian state unilaterally and the Palestinians will
be forced to accept the boundaries that Israel imposes. The breakthrough occurred with Oslo when the two sides, just by entering
negotiations, acknowledged each others existence as a political fact.
(...)
Mind you, the authors are so thorough, insightful, and honest that they do discuss many of these issues, even if only tangentially, and they
are forthright in depicting "breakthrough negotiators" as those folks (Richard Holbrooke and James Baker, for example) who keep their eye
on the big picture and don't get distracted by the particulars of agreements. (...)Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts Overview
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