Chapter 1
Negotiation fundamentals
What is negotiation?
Negotiation is not actually very important. Nor is the agreement that follows, nor the contract, nor the signatures. They’re all quite unimportant.
So, then, why write a book on it?
To answer this, let us first define our terms: what exactly is negotiation? Now, there are probably as many definitions of the word as there are negotiators, but a good working definition might read something like:
The process through which two or more parties come to an agreement on an action to be carried out.
Uncontroversial. And yet it makes explicit a critical fact that is often overlooked: that a negotiation is part of a bigger process. In fact, it is the first stage of the bigger process which unfolds ...
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