Ertel is a founding partner of Vantage Partners and head of its outsourcing practice; an award-winning author and leading authority on negotiation and relationship management; and chairman of Janeeva. Gordon is also a founding partner of Vantage Partners; a senior adviser to the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School; co-founder of Conflict Management Group, which focuses on disputes of international public concern; and a director of Mercy Corps.

The Point of the Deal seeks to explain why so many business deals that look good on paper end up in shreds when implementation time comes around. The fault, the authors say, lies with deal-makers who treat the signed contract as the final destination in their bargaining journey instead of the start of a cooperative venture. The book seeks to show what negotiation looks like when the players involved strive to make the deal work in practice, rather than just in print.

And the advice is still clearly badly needed. Ertel says the authors work with some very smart executives at some of the world's leading companies, yet frequently find themselves asked to help remediate situations where implementation teams are spinning their wheels without accomplishing the real business purposes of the deal.

"When we looked at what the common causes of these problems were, across different kinds of partnerships, outsourcing relationships, distribution deals, and even internal shared services arrangements, we found that it was the way the deal was negotiated that led to problems with stakeholders; created mismatched expectations; and promoted a sense that the other side was stubborn, hard to work with, or just plain untrustworthy," he says.

"We asked ourselves why so many truly excellent CIOs, CFOs, COOs and other leaders in so many great companies were consistently failing to get the value out of the deals their teams negotiated. We found that most of what passed for 'best practice' and most of the books and articles out there about negotiation focused on the wrong thing: doing the deal. But what is the point of closing a deal that is going to fail during implementation? We tried to take a step back and ask the question: 'How should you negotiate differently, when implementation matters?'."