2011-05-29

One Minute Book Review: Getting Past No

Last month I finally finished reading a book I've been wanting to read for a long time: William Ury's
Getting Past No: Negotiating with Difficult People.

Negotiation is really only about one thing: getting what you want. The prize can be anything from the choice of dinner for this evening, to the amount of your next raise or the details of a new strategic partnership. Private or professional life, it doesn't matter. We negotiate all the time and the outcome of our negotiations greatly influences our lives.

And yet, this is a skill most of us in software engineering didn't receive any formal training in. Professionally the matter is even worse. Most of our "opponents", ranging from managers to sales people, have both more practice and better training. This leaves us fighting an uphill battle!

We must stand up and level the playing field!

I found William Ury to be a powerful ally for this quest.

Highly recommended.

 

---

About Axel Fontaine

Axel Fontaine is the founder and CEO of Boxfuse the easiest way to deploy JVM and Node.js applications to AWS.

Axel is also the creator and project lead of Flyway, the open-source tool that makes database migration easy.

He is a Continuous Delivery and Immutable Infrastructure expert, a Java Champion, a JavaOne Rockstar and a regular speaker at many large international conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, Jfokus, JavaZone, QCon, JAX, ...

You can follow him on Twitter at @axelfontaine