The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Negotiating While Black by Damali Peterman

If you are an avid follower of our Non-Obvious Book Awards program, you might recognize this week’s selection: Negotiating While Black. It was our pick for the Most Useful book of the year in 2024 for a few key reasons. Firstly, while the book’s title might indicate you’ll need to be Black in order to read it—the beautiful thing about how its written is that the book is most useful for anyone who finds themselves in a negotiating situation where they may be underestimated. That’s most of us regardless of our racial background.

In the book, Peterman seamlessly integrates her own personal stories and experiences with broader lessons that any of us can take away to transform our negotiation savviness in any situation. From adopting a curious mindset to “minding the gap” in conversations (ie - the moment when things seem to take a turn for the worse), the suggestions in this book are immediately helpful, practical and easy for anyone to implement if they are aware and thoughtful about taking the advice Peterman offers.

Ultimately, the goal of this book is to help you negotiate in moments where there is a real-life, implicit bias against you for any reason, whether it is your age, gender, race, inexperience, over experience or anything else. All of us will find ourselves in a situation where we need to do this, and Negotiating While Black is an ideal text to help you find a way to get what you want even when you’re underestimated.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.