NOTE: Next week, I'd like to start an irregular series written by you, on your proudest moments in librarianship. Send me your stories. Maybe they're about impossible reference questions you answered when Google could not, that left your patrons saying, "How did you do that?"; or about children you enticed into a lifelong love affair with reading; or about people you matched up with the exact author they needed to hear at that moment in their lives; or about new Americans you welcomed into the library; or about house-bound people you delivered books to; or about book clubs or programs that touched people's hearts and minds; or about how resources you created and made available over the net touched people's lives; or about anything else that hasn't occurred to me to mention.
One of ALA's mottoes is, "libraries change lives" (though I personally prefer, "librarians change lives"). Please tell me, and my other readers, about those moments when you felt pride in knowing that's exactly what you had done.
REVIEW: NEGOTIATE THIS!
Herb Cohen. Negotiate This!. Warner Books, 2003. 0-446-52973-7. $24.95.
Reviewed by Marylaine Block
Normally, the books I review are about librarianship, information, research, or the internet. But this book has applications for all librarians because negotiating is part of our professional lives. We negotiate reference questions, negotiate with angry patrons, negotiate with vendors, negotiate with unions, negotiate with the city council and mayor for our budgets, and negotiate our own salaries and those of the people we hire.
A look at salaries in our profession is enough to tell you we could use a little help with our negotiation skills.
Herb Cohen is a professional negotiator whose successful negotiations have included the National Football League strike and the Iran hostage crisis. His clients have included theatrical agents, presidents, CEOs, and the State Department. Think we could learn a trick or two from him when we're trying to strike a deal?
With plenty of good illustrations drawn from negotiations he has conducted, Cohen lays out basic tips and strategies. The first trick is in the subtitle of the book: "by caring, but not t-h-a-t much." Of course when it's your own ego, your own department's budget, or your own salary that's on the line, it's a little hard to be insouciant. That's why Cohen thinks that the higher the personal stakes are for you, the more you should enlist somebody else as your negotiator -- somebody who is professionally obligated to get as good a deal as possible for you, but who won't bleed over each and every little concession, every little sweetener that makes the deal happen.
Whether or not you can do that, you do need to plan your negotiation, he says. Information is vital, so do your research before you get to the table -- find out what kinds of deals vendors have made with comparable libraries for the same databases, what the pay scales are for comparable jobs at that library, what budget cuts other city departments have or have not taken in the current fiscal crisis (along with a detailed breakdown of all the cuts your own library has made), etc.
But once you get there, you should still be collecting information, this time from the people you're negotiating with. Listen more and talk less, he says, so you understand their assumptions, and what they're hoping to achieve. Pose non-threatening questions, he says, like "What's the basis of your position?" and "How did you come up with that?" Give them your full attention, take notes, and repeat back to them your understanding of what they've said, to give them a chance to elaborate on what they want. Explore areas of agreement first, and make the tone of the discussion respectful and collaborative from the very beginning.
If their assumptions are unrealistic, he says, you have to deal with that immediately. If you're negotiating with employees who have gotten 7% increases in each of the last three years, they're going to be expecting that this year, too. If that's out of the question because of current budget problems, you need to explain economic reality up front.
He says a negotiation should ideally be a problem-solving exercise that benefits both partners, so your negotiation plan needs to include a list of the essential things that you must have in the final agreement, and things that you're prepared to be flexible about. (One added benefit of the time you've spent listening to the other party is that you may find additional small ways of pleasing the other party that cost you next to nothing but add to the sense that you're making reasonable concessions.)
A really nice example of negotiation as problem-solving is a contract Cohen negotiated for a woman being hired as a producer for a TV series. The company really wanted her, but couldn't pay her more than it was paying people they already had in comparable positions. So Cohen told them, "my client really wants this job, so she'll go along with the salary, even though it's not great. But you know, in Boston, she gets everyplace she needs to go on the T. Will she need to buy a car in LA?" "Well, duh, of course, this is LA." "And she pays $550 a month for a rent-controlled apartment; would she be able to find something comparable in LA?" "Well, no." Cohen had successfully enlisted the company's negotiators in solving the problem of getting what they both wanted, e.g., this woman in this job, by finding a compensation strategy that would be fair to her and wouldn't raise objections from existing staff. The solution? Throwing in a car allowance and rent subsidy.
There's a lot more useful advice here, and Cohen makes it an entertaining read besides. I think librarians should read this book. We could start getting better deals for ourselves and our libraries if we learned and applied his strategies.
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COOL QUOTE:
[Here's a negotiation strategy for you. Re a proposed city council plan to reduce funding for the library, this Tacoma reporter rejects a council member's assumptions and suggests an alternative way to frame the issue]
All this "new" thinking by the council is based on two assumptions - both faulty. The first is that the Internet makes libraries as physical spaces obsolete. Forget for a moment that Internet access is hardly universal and tends to bypass the poor and elderly. Look instead at studies that show increased library visits and increased circulation of materials over the past five years. And Tacomans use their libraries more than most. A recent statistical analysis of the nation's libraries by Thomas Hennen placed Tacoma in the 89th percentile in library visits per capita and the 87th percentile in circulation per capita.
The second faulty concept is that libraries are simply "storehouses of knowledge," as Phelps put it. They are that, for sure, but much more.
Let's think inside the box for a moment. Because it's inside those brick-and-mortar boxes where community lives. Tacoma's 10 libraries are the living rooms of 10 neighborhoods. They are places where latchkey kids can feel safe in the afternoons, where community groups have meetings, where seniors go to read papers and stay current, where people without internet access at home go online, where parents give children the gift of reading.
Peter Callaghan. "Councilman's Plan To Cut Libraries Is Far from Courageous." The News Tribune, Tacoma, WA, October 1, 2002. http://www.tribnet.com/news/local/story/1872253p-1986445c.html
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