Everybody negotiates at various points every day, be it in life or business, and it's important to get it right.

On average, people leave about 20% of potential mutual gains untapped in any negotiation. This is akin to taking 20% of the value in any deal and dumping it into a garbage canister. Finding that hidden 20%, the sweet spot, is a skill that takes practice but is also one that anybody can learn.

Leigh Thompson offers best practices and tools within this book to use in daily negotiations and conflict situations. She calls these strategies hacks because they work but don't require a lot of investment, training, expense, and time. You don't have to be a CEO, senior VP, or regional brand manager to learn how to find the sweet spot in life's negotiations.

In Negotiating the Sweet Spot, benefits include learning the following:

• Understanding where the sweet spot is in the deals you negotiate
• Adopting a big-picture mind-set when approaching any negotiation
• Seeing negotiations less as win-lose battles and more as opportunities to use problem-solving skills
• Utilizing a tool kit of hacks that will work in any negotiation and have been proven effective by a top expert in the field

Negotiating the Sweet Spot walks people of all skill and experience levels through simple and proven techniques that are sure to result in better outcomes for all parties and that uncover the hidden value that exists in any negotiation.

Embracing the Counterintuitive Side of Collaboration

Think of your to-do list at work. Chances are the most important tasks require you to work with others--and the success of those endeavors depends on the effectiveness of your collaboration.

According to management expert Leigh Thompson, collaboration that is conscious, planned, and focused on generating new ideas builds excitement and produces what she calls a creative conspiracy. Teams that conspire to organize themselves, motivate one another, and combine their talents to meet creative challenges are the hallmark of the most successful organizations.

In this book, Thompson reveals the keys to the kind of collaboration that allows teams to reach their full creative potential and maximize their results. She also reveals a host of surprising findings; for example:

- Left to their own devices, teams are less creative than individuals
- Providing rules to teams actually increases inventiveness
- Striving for quality results in less creativity than striving for quantity
- Fluctuating membership enhances a team's innovation
- Most leaders cannot articulate the four basic rules of brainstorming

Thompson combines broad-ranging research with real-life examples to offer strategies and practices designed to help teams and their leaders capitalize on what actually works when it comes to creative collaboration. Creative Conspiracy challenges managers to adopt an unconventional approach to leading teams that, done right, will lead to the creative success of every team--and every organization.

Learn to be a world-class negotiator: get what you want and need out of any negotiation! Here, top negotiations expert Leigh Thompson brings together 50+ proven negotiation principles and bite-size, easy-to-use techniques that work! Now fully updated, this edition contains brand-new truths for negotiating successfully across generations and cultures, negotiating in virtual environments, and more. Thompson provides realistic game plans that work in any negotiation situation and shows how to create win-win deals by leveraging carefully collected information. Thompson also helps you effectively lay claim to part of the win-win goldmine, and more. You'll learn how to handle less-than-perfect situations, such as getting called on a bluff, establishing trust with someone you don't trust, recognizing when to walk away, negotiating with people you don't like -- and conversely, negotiating with people you love. Thompson guides you every step of the way, helping you plan strategy, understand your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, make the first offer, control the process (and your emotions), resolve difficult disputes, and achieve the goals that matter most.

For undergraduate and graduate-level business courses that cover the skills of negotiation.

Delve into the mind and heart of the negotiator in order to enhance negotiation skills.

The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator is dedicated to negotiators who want to improve their ability to negotiate--whether in multimillion-dollar business deals or personal interactions. This text provides an integrated view of what to do and what to avoid at the bargaining table, facilitated by an integration of theory, scientific research, and practical examples.

This program will provide a better teaching and learning experience-for you and your students. Here's how:

• Provide Students with Practical Real-World Examples: Each chapter opens with a case study that illustrates a real business situation.
• Offer In-Depth Information on Business Negotiation Skills: This text provides practical take-away points for the manager and executive on integrative negotiation and contains a series of hands-on principles that have been proven to increase the value of negotiated deals.
• Keep your Course Current and Relevant: New examples, exercises, and statistics appear throughout the text.

For undergraduate or graduate management courses in Organization Behavior, Group Dynamics, or Teamwork.

Equips team leaders and members for success with theory and real-world applications

Making the Team shows leaders how to design teams to function optimally, and focuses on the skills needed to become productive team members. The 6th Edition combines cutting- edge theory with the latest information and research, while its real -world applications and examples help team leaders and members succeed in the business world.

The chapters in this book were presented at a conference held at the Kellogg School of Management in June 2005 entitled Conflict in Organizational Groups: New Directions in Theory and Practice. The Kellogg Team and Group Research Center (KTAG) and the Kellogg School of Management cosponsored the conference. The goal of the conference was to bring together both junior and senior scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss their newest ideas and current trends in group conflict research. The chapters in this book represent perspectives from the fields of business, political science, sociology, and psychology.

The idea to organize a conference about conflict in organizational groups arose from three interrelated and exciting opportunities for theory and practice--both the academic and business press have focused growing attention on the management challenges of organizational groups; the academic community has begun to integrate various disciplinary perspectives, as evidenced by a growing number of cross-disciplinary coauthorships and thematic conferences; and several statistical and methodological advances have allowed scholars to better model variables across levels of analysis.

Taken together, these three reasons inspired the assembling of the interdisciplinary mix of seasoned and newly minted authors who in this volume tackle important and complex questions about group conflict. Their chapters represent cutting-edge advances in theory, methodology, and challenges to dominant perspectives.