Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating.

Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating, by Michael Watkins. Harvard Business School Press, 196 pages. $26.95.

Michael Watkins wrote a previous best-seller, The First 90 Days, about what executives should do when they first join a company. He's still on that theme: in this book, "new" doesn't refer to some refined model of leader but to someone who is literally new at a company. And, to Watkins, a professor at INSEAD, the international management school, and a founder of leadership consultancy Genesis Advisors, a critical realization is the power of relationships in creating success in a new environment.

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"The basic theme of this book is that effective leaders negotiate their way to success in their new roles," he writes in the introduction. "Because if you can't engage in effective negotiation (and its close relatives, influence and alliance building), the best analysis and planning isn't going to take you anywhere."

Indeed, Watkins argues that relation-ships are arguably more important as sources of leverage than such critical issues as strategies, structures and systems that a new leader might choose to put in place.

Watkins creates a figure, Paul, a senior sales manager negotiating to take on the role of vice president of sales, and builds the book around his archetypal experiences. In the course of the narrative, Paul is required to think strategically, match his strategy to the situation, learn and influence, and "shape the game."

Good charts and diagrams help amplify the author's ideas, but the use of a central figure like Paul does even more to help pull the reader through this stimulating book and understand some of the central tensions inherent in the all-too-human conditions evident in every workplace.