Negotiation Books

Looking for books on the art of negotiation? Many of these are located on the 5th floor, clustered around the BF 637 call number. Don't forget to check our e-books as well.

Here's another link to negotiation from a slightly more management (not sales) perspective.

Recommended for everyone doing a deal, dealing with group dynamics, buying something, or just looking for insight into human psychology. My personal favorite insight so far: structuring a deal so that the parties are emotionally satisfied. It doesn't always involve the best price for the buyer or seller....

You'll learn to recognize recurring patterns, as well as the standard repetoire of shady tactics that some people use (and how to respond). Many authors include a list of these tactics.

Example: "going back for a second bite," i.e. a salesperson leaving to "check" with his/her manager and then attempting to alter the deal.

Lots of good countermeasures in these books.

Finding Sales Books

The catalogers strike again. If you're looking for books in the library about selling techniques, you want to search selling as a subject.

Also, don't miss the related topics pages located here.

Congressional Budget Office Analyzes Government Policies

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a well regarded research arm of the legislative branch of government. Over the years, it has earned a fairly good reputation for thoughtful, non-partisan research.

I suggest you look here for some excellent analyses of pending bills and their impact on taxes, fiscal policy, money, and the larger economic picture.

Cap and trade, the stimulus package, raising or lowering taxes, trade policy, etc... all get the policy wonk treatment here.

Book Review: When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

Here's how to lose billions of dollars over your next vacation.

In the mid 1990s, some of the brightest stars of the investing and academic universe came together to found Long Term Capital Management - the ultimate low-risk hedge fund. This was the death knell for the shoot from the hip investment broker type. Wall Street was now in the hands of the quants (people who believed in quantitative analysis to the exclusion of everything else).

Or so they thought. Using data from decades of Wall Street futures, options and equity prices, LTCM deceived themselves into thinking they had discovered immutable laws of the universe. If a price deviated from the historical norm, LTCM rushed in to make up the difference. After all, wouldn't the market eventually come to its senses, thereby benefiting the hedge fund?

The trouble with the universe, is that it is always evolving and developing new norms. LTCM began life with stellar performance. But over-reliance on mathematical models that were fundamentally incomplete ultimately spurred fantastic losses. Billions of dollars went up in smoke.

This experience in the late 1990s completely changed Wall Street. Gone were hubristic, mathematical Rube Goldberg-esque models of the universe, backed to the hilt with ridiculous amounts of leverage. Well actually, that didn't happen.

When Genius Failed, The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management is gifted financial writer Roger Lowenstein's account of the big electronic money bonfire that was LTCM.

Read it for a critique of quantitative analysis as well as deepening your sense of Wall Street history. You'll be less likely to fall for the latest thing.

Rankings of Global Competiveness

The World Economic Forum is one of those nebulous organization that publishes information and lists like this (most competiveness economies). They have a mysterious compound in Switzerland. One halfway expects to see armed guards milling around as the top of the building opens and a death ray machine pops up....

Here's a good link to more detailed country information and how they made the list. In between sipping Tokay and dispatching Number Two to a sauna in the English countryside.

Nevertheless the snark, take a look at the list because it will give you some ideas about what makes a good economy and how to sift different factors in the information soup.

FWIW. Reading other people's analyses will help you with your own.

LIBOR Rate

Ever hear of LIBOR (the London Inter Bank Offer Rate)? It's the rate for banks borrowing unsecured funds from each other in the London money market. It has international significance, even for banks not using the London market.

Here's my favorite way to get LIBOR - on Bloomberg.

Oh right, we also have it in ECONOMAGIC. This link contains different currencies and time horizons.

Book Review: How To Lie With Statistics

This is a classic little book that summarizes basic rules of probabilities and statistics and how they are often misused to produce official sounding statistics.

I love the humorous and accessible writing in this book. It's a greatest hits of statistical sleights of hand and snake oil medicine.
You may already know concepts like median, mean and mode, but I'll wager that your statistics professor didn't spend too much time on how they are misused in the real world.
And folks, these tricks, get used over and over again, year-in and year-out. After reading this book, I can spot this stuff in the news everyday.
One of my favorite bits: the section on typical graph tricks (you'll have to check it out!)