Strategic Negotiation in Organizational Transformation: A Practitioner's Guide to the Conversations That Determine Whether Change Succeeds

Most transformation programs do not fail loudly. They erode quietly, in the distance between what people agreed to in a steering committee and what they are actually doing three months later. No open opposition. No visible crisis. Just a slow divergence between stated commitment and real behavior, until momentum is gone and no one can explain exactly when it left.

Strategic Negotiation in Organizational Transformation is built around a single observation: the conversations that determine whether change succeeds are not the ones on the agenda. They happen before the meeting, after it, and in the one-on-ones that never make it into the governance record. Conducting them well is a discipline, and most transformation professionals have never been given it directly.

Drawing on more than fifteen years of practitioner experience across financial services, medical technology, and enterprise consulting, Adolfo M. Carreno offers a structured approach to the negotiation that transformation actually requires: not deal-making with external counterparties, but the ongoing internal work of surfacing hidden interests, reading resistance before it hardens, and building agreements durable enough to hold under real organizational pressure.

The book covers the full range of what this work demands. How resistance operates as a system rather than as individual opposition. How to distinguish what stakeholders say they want from what they are actually protecting. How leverage, BATNA, and ZOPA function inside organizations where no one can simply walk away. How behavioral bias and coalition dynamics create patterns that rational plans cannot resolve. And how to rebuild alignment when a crisis has already fractured it.

The final section addresses something most books in this space leave out: how to develop this capability across teams, so that a program's ability to negotiate does not depend on two or three people and disappear when they move on.

Written for program managers, change leaders, functional heads, and senior sponsors who carry real responsibility for making change hold.