Getting Back to the Table

The co-founder of Harvard's Global Negotiation Initiative and a renowned global guru in negotiations, presents a dynamic strategy for overcoming stalled or failed negotiations that empowers individuals to return to the table with increased strength and resilience, carefully learning from the challenges they encountered.

When negotiations fail it can be hard to start over. Some people give up, others forget and move on, but the truly successful negotiator learns. Celebrated negotiation thought-leader and advisor to the UN Mediation Unit, Joshua N. Weiss, introduces an evidence-based model for when negotiations stall or fail.

Getting Back to the Table explores the reality of failure in negotiation. It lays out the types of failure that can happen, how to cope with it when it does, and how we can be resilient in the face of it. Using Weiss’s easy-to-use framework, readers can successfully get back to the negotiation table. Failing in negotiations is inevitable, but learning and growing from failure is not.“In negotiation as in life, we can learn perhaps even more from failures as from successes. That’s why Weiss has done us a great service in providing us not only vivid examples of negotiation failures but a comprehensive framework for how we can learn from them. Highly useful for becoming a better negotiator!”
—William Ury, coauthor of Getting to Yes

“Weiss brilliantly deconstructs, as only he can, negotiation failures to spare us all the agony we will encounter and turn losing into a transformative growth experience that will last us a lifetime.”
—Joe Navarro, author of Be Exceptional

“The best negotiators learn the fastest from failure – whether temporary setbacks or catastrophic collapses. Weiss provides a lens for seeing our mistakes, and a lifeline for learning and re-finding our footing.”
—Sheila Heen, Professor, Harvard Law School and coauthor of Difficult Conversations

“The very best negotiators expect they will encounter frustration and failure. Weiss skillfully guides us to the path of success with a highly useful process we all can follow.”
—Scott Tillema, retired SWAT hostage negotiatorJoshua N. Weiss is co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard, where he also teaches. He is a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project and a senior trainer with William Ury Associates, and he heads his own consultancy, Negotiation Works. He is also on faculty at Bay Path University and has held adjunct faculty positions at ten different universities, including MIT, Harvard, UMass, UC Denver, and American University of Beirut. He is listed as one of the Top 30 Global Gurus for negotiation, and he serves on the United Nations Mediation Team.