Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Book review - Brief review

Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating, by Michael Watkins. Harvard Business School Press, 196 pages. $26.95.

Michael Watkins wrote a previous best-seller, The First 90 Days, about what executives should do when they first join a company. He's still on that theme: in this book, "new" doesn't refer to some refined model of leader but to someone who is literally new at a company. And, to Watkins, a professor at INSEAD, the international management school, and a founder of leadership consultancy Genesis Advisors, a critical realization is the power of relationships in creating success in a new environment.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"The basic theme of this book is that effective leaders negotiate their way to success in their new roles," he writes in the introduction. "Because if you can't engage in effective negotiation (and its close relatives, influence and alliance building), the best analysis and planning isn't going to take you anywhere."

Indeed, Watkins argues that relation-ships are arguably...