If you watch American TV, you owe Stuart Diamond a thank-you. He's the guy who broke the 2008 deadlock between Hollywood writers and the studio executives and got Lost back on air.

What did this bearded professor do that all the highly-paid professional negotiators couldn't achieve? Did he make intricate deals? Use shuttle diplomacy? No. He had the two sides engage in small talk: "Are you happy?", "What would you like to see from this process?", "How do you like your eggs in the morning?" By getting the adversaries to recognise and act on each other's goals and values, Diamond eliminated much of the emotional volatility from the conflict, allowing the substantive issues to be solved with less strife.

This is the core of Diamond's philosophy of negotiation: don't be an ignorant jerk; know who you're talking to. That seems simplistic and obvious, but God, as Diamond says, is in the details. Every true negotiation, he insists, is complex and unique because every person is complex and unique, especially emotionally. By understanding their perceptions, the "pictures in their heads", you can achieve an enormous amount.

Again, that comes across not as a revelation, but as the very premise of negotiation. However, Diamond argues that when most people say "negotiation" they really mean "the exercise of power". And power corrupts negotiations by making people defensive, uncooperative or even vengeful. Diamond urges the reader instead to regard their negotiating counterpart not as an adversary but as a genuine partner.

What Diamond is trying to do is to move dealmaking from the competitive framework of Adam Smith and social Darwinism to the more collaborative approach favoured by pioneering game theorists such as Thomas Nash, who discovered cooperation can yield bigger results for all parties in a negotiation. There does not have to be a loser; everybody can win.

It is a powerful argument which, unfortunately for Diamond, makes more sense in a mathematical proof than it does in narrative form. Getting More isn't so much a sustained argument as an accumulation of observations and testimonies. That's fine, especially when the stories are persuasive. But sometimes you want an author – especially one offering you the keys to the kingdom – to cut to the chase. Of course, that kind of impatience will doom your next deal.

Getting More
By Stuart Diamond
Portfolio
€14.99