Samuel B. Bacharach is the McKelvey-Grant Professor in the Department of Organizational Behavior at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. His is the director of the New York City-based Institute for Workplace Studies and the Smithers Institute. He is the author and editor of over twenty books on management, organizational behavior, and industrial relations. His research has been published in most of the major academic journals.

Get Them On Your Side is Professor Bacharach’s effort to transform his 30 years of academic research on negotiation, organizational behavior, industrial relations, and leadership into a book that is practical and accessible to practitioners. His primary concern is to teach individuals that they are capable of political competence and that these skills are teachable. He believes that change can only be brought about by proactive leaders who have developed the skills of political competence.

Professor Bacharach teaches the discipline of political competence to executives, politicians, managers, and students around the world. He has developed and runs workshops and individual consulting engagements, and teaches these concepts in-depth to undergraduate and graduate students at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Recently his research has been adapted into four online courses on proactive leadership and offered to the public as a certificate program by eCornell.