The latest issue of the weekly Mediate.com newsletter links to an article by mediator Barbara Brown which provides a “A Practical Bibliography of Books for the Mediation Practitioner“.
It is a comprehensive list of influential texts for ADR professionals, and I salute Brown for taking the time and thought to compile what is plainly a labor of love. This will undoubtedly be a useful resource for practitioners, and I already looked it over to see if anything essential was missing from my own collection of books on conflict resolution and negotiation.
The one problem is that it’s a very, very long list. With only so much money in the budget for books and limited time to read them, how does a mediator, particularly a new one trying to build a useful reference library, figure out which ones to acquire? That’s a question a number of folks often ask me.
So here’s my short list – absolutely essential titles that mediators and other dispute resolution practitioners should read. (Although it may provoke cries of protest, I do not include Getting to Yes, in part because it’s so obvious but also because it’s on my list for Reading to Complete Before Taking a Mediation Training.)
- Challenging Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding, by Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein of the Center for Mediation in Law
- The Dynamics of Conflict Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide, by Bernard Mayer
- Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, by G. Richard Shell
- The Negotiator’s Fieldbook, edited by Andrea Kupfer Schneider and Christopher Honeyman
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini
- The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, by Scott Plous
So…what’s on your short list?
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