In a nutshell, why I should read this book?
With ever more urgent needs for effective diplomacy and negotiation, who are the true masters of these arts? With my co-authors, Nick Burns and Bob Mnookin, I'm often asked this question. Complex and skilled, if controversial, Henry Kissinger clearly merits this distinction. For example, Walter Isaacson, Kissinger's sometimes-critical biographer, called him the "foremost American negotiator" of his time; when recently polled, over 1600 international relations experts—from across the political spectrum— overwhelmingly rated Kissinger as the most effective secretary of state during the last half-century. What can we learn from his record about the most effective approaches to public and private dealmaking?
Kissinger undertook his most crucial negotiations in a national atmosphere of rancorous political and social antagonisms, especially over the Vietnam War. (Sound familiar?) In this challenging context, the former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner played central negotiating roles in key U.S. foreign policy achievements: the opening to China after decades of mutual hostility, detente and the first nuclear arms control treaty with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, the Paris peace accords with North Vietnam after years of bitter conflict (though the deal collapsed after two years), and Egyptian and Syrian disengagement deals with Israel following their 1973 war—that have largely endured to this day. In addition, Kissinger worked out a significant but largely forgotten agreement with Rhodesia's Ian Smith to accept black majority rule years before the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Kissinger's geopolitical insights, foreign policies, and individual negotiations have been extensively analyzed. Yet perhaps surprisingly, no serious cross-cutting study of his overall approach has extracted its lessons for current diplomatic and business negotiations. We wrote Kissinger the Negotiator to fill this gap.
For decades, our careers as academics and practitioners have centrally focused on negotiation. We have worked closely with and studied dozens of remarkable negotiators, both public and private, from around the world. In one of our joint projects, we have interviewed seven former U.S. secretaries of state about their most challenging negotiations (with plans to interview the others soon). With this backdrop, we undertook Kissinger the Negotiator after lengthy conversations with him as well as careful study of his writings. We also consulted many others, both critical and supportive, who have produced books and articles about him.
We sought to create an engaging narrative, focused on Kissinger's successes and failures, that would offer useful answers to several questions: How did he approach these negotiations? What strategies and tactics worked and what failed? Why. how, and under what conditions? What ethical challenges does this approach present? Though our subject was historical, our driving objective was to produce effective, forward-looking diagnostic and prescriptive advice for those facing tough negotiation challenges, in business as well as diplomacy. [Click here for more specifics]
To this day, the mere mention of Henry Kissinger can evoke strong reactions about some of the policies with which he is associated. Acknowledging this (see here), we point interested readers to sources that reflect conflicting assessments of Kissinger's record, but do not weigh in on this debate. We neither aim to judge Kissinger nor to set the historical record straight. Rather, by plumbing a career of extraordinary effectiveness, we sought to learn as much as possible, extracting useful insights into the art and science of negotiation from Kissinger's dealmaking at the highest level.
This is my effort at a "nutshell" case for reading this book; you may find the views of others to be informative; see the comments of Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone). John Chambers (Cisco), James A. Baker. Ill (Secretary of State), and Walter Isaacson (Kissinger biographer and best-selling author).