Negotiation is dead; let’s “Newgotiate."

Author Frank V. Zerunyan, J.D., offers insight into the emerging academic and practical topics that impact succesful public servants, and what he dubs the art and science of "Newgotiation." 

I met my colleague and co-author Yann Duzert in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), one of the premier private universities in that country where I taught for three consecutive years our International Laboratory class at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy (USC Price).

Yann and I became friends very quickly because of our common upbringing in France as well as our interest in “collaboration” as an academic topic but for different reasons.

Yann has written 6 books to describe the topic of negotiation through cognitive science but more importantly through collaboration as opposed to competition. I have written articles and still teach a graduate class at USC Price on intersectoral leadership using collaboration as a framework to add value to each public, private and not for profit sectors. Not to mention my interest and practice of collaboration as a mayor and council member in a city that contracts for municipal services. Yann and I were intrigued at the similarities of the topics and decided to use the public administration framework in collaborative governance and facilitative leadership to articulate “Newgotiation for Public Leaders.”

This short, to the point and readable eBook offers an insight to negotiating for public leaders by developing both academic and practical topics that directly impact the daily life, behavior, comportment, habits and skills of successful public servants in the art and science of what we call “Newgotiation.” 

For decades, negotiation has been taught in business schools and law schools as a competitive platform and process, a platform that creates winners and losers. The latter part of the 20th century and of course the beginning of the 21st, ushers the era of collaboration versus competition to solve public and private problems.

While many academic books and some practice manuals have been written on the single thematic subject of “Negotiation,” none that we could find addresses public leaders and their negotiations in the context of the new paradigm labeled “governance” as opposed to “government.” We therefore, borrow extensively from public administration concepts of collaborative governance and facilitative and appreciative leadership to create a common language for Newgotiation.

In this eBook we create a unique 4-10-10 Newgotiation Technique as a unified dialect, which helps public leaders, individuals and organizations to speak the same language of Newgotiation. The 4-10-10 Newgotiation Technique allows readers and practitioners to apply 4 simple steps to 10 elements and evaluate implementation with 10 indicators in each and every negotiation. Newgotiation creates a process that is common to all to improve relationships and trust leading to better outcomes in deal making. We hope our readers and practitioners join us to shift from hard power to smart cognitive power to encourage the making of creative and collaborative decisions. Last but not least, we wrote this eBook to improve the probability to close a better deal, to improve the value of a deal by inventing and to improve the productivity to close a deal by sharing and collaborating.     

To purchase "Newgotiation for Public Leaders: The Art of Negotiation for a Better Outcome," click here.