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Jared Kelner considers his new book a guide to success in any day-to-day negotiations, and given his background, the East Brunswick Jewish Center member doesn't hesitate to apply its lessons to synagogue life or the Middle East.

In "The Chamberlain Negotiation Principles," Kelner, an appliance services manager for Cisco Systems, relays what he calls five "building blocks" for the art of negotiation through a fictional story of how Richard Cast, a young salesman with a demanding boss, seeks advice from the unlikeliest of sources -- Chamberlain Zacharias Taylor III, a man who ran his father's North Carolina textile factory into the ground before exiling himself to a life as a New York City subway dweller.

Each time Richard makes a mistake on a sales call, he gives Chamberlain food in exchange for a pearl of wisdom, and by the end of the story Richard learns five key principles: a negotiation is a marathon, not a sprint; it takes a lot of bricks to build a house; recognize when you are negotiating with gravity; know who's cast in the play; build bridges with truth, honesty, and integrity.

For negotiating against gravity, meaning an attempt to extract a concession the other side absolutely cannot make, Kelner said a Jewish example would be a woman trying to negotiate her way to pray on the men's side of the Western Wall, something he said simply will not happen. Staying in the Middle East, Kelner explained that his fifth principle -- truth, honesty, and integrity, is lacking from Arab-Israeli peace negotiations because neither party has the other side's best interests in mind.

"If you have a negotiation that's absent of those elements, it becomes really impossible to achieve long-term success, long-term peace," Kelner, 38, told The Jewish State.

Regarding knowing who's cast in the play, which means understanding the authority of the person you are negotiating with before trying to sign an agreement, Kelner compared the principle to a family planning a bar mitzvah or a wedding. A family in that situation, Kelner said, shouldn't offer to pay a specific price for the affair before they know if they are negotiating with the owner of the hall, the caterer, or another player who may or may not have the power to actually sign the contract.

At East Brunswick Jewish Center (EBJC), where Rabbi Aaron Benson is in his second year as the congregation's leader, the synagogue remains in a transitional phase during which questions like "Am I at the right congregation for me?" and "What will this congregation become?" come up, Kelner said.

"There are negotiations going on all the time," he said. "Some people want change, some people want it to stay exactly the way it is."

In "The Chamberlain Negotiation Principles," Richard, frustrated with a string of low-paying temp jobs coming out of college, sneaks into an orientation for the sales team of an X-ray company owned by Dr. Alan Branch, who closely monitors his team's every move and fires 15 of the 20 salespeople within two weeks. Richard makes critical negotiation errors on his first few sales calls, but each time has the chance to salvage his job with a proper explanation of his mistake the following day.

Richard gets the answers he needs from Chamberlain and goes on to close his first big sale, but is alarmed when he discovers Chamberlain's checkered past. When Richard runs to Chamberlain for an explanation, he finds him dead on the street. Upon reading Chamberlain's diary, Richard learns that the unethical business practices of Chamberlain's father were the real downfall of the textile factory, and that Chamberlain simply suffered the consequences of his father's sins.

Kelner said that because the concept of a tragic hero burying his father's sins has a "Christian feel," he intentionally used the figure of 613 for the number of people who suffered from the textile factory's collapse to stay true to his roots and prompt Jewish readers to say "Ah, I wonder if that's got anything to do with Judaism," because 613 is also the number of mitzvot in the Torah.

The genre of Kelner's book, which weaves a fictional tale with business analysis, is called "business fable." Kelner, who like Richard was once a "green sales guy who stumbled along the way," said he has always learned more about business from this type of book than from a straightforward self-help book.

"I felt that yet another non-fiction negotiation book was going to be irrelevant," Kelner said.

In 2006, Kelner founded The Infinite Mind Training Group, which offers interactive memory improvement training seminars to corporations and the general public. Kelner said his early-career managers weren't as abusive or demanding as Branch, but that they were similar in that they often said "let's do a debrief" to help Kelner understand his mistakes and "move past the roadblock."

"The debrief is critical to long-term success," Kelner said.

Kelner, who grew up in Manalapan, met his eventual wife while studying in the Young Judaea Year Course after high school. Since his wife was from California, Kelner moved out West after graduating from Montclair State University, but returned with his family to the East Coast to advance his career. Kelner said that at the time, his family wanted a "Jewish community where we felt like we could make a home, not just make a house."

For business-savvy readers, Kelner said his book gives them a nice story as well as analysis that isn't necessarily in-depth but provides the "meat" they need, while the average reader gets more analysis than they might have expected. Kelner said that among his five principles, negotiating with truth, honesty, and integrity has perhaps the broadest implications and can be the most difficult to implement.

"It's definitely a challenge to do when the other party does not have your best interests at heart," he said.

For more information on "The Chamberlain Negotiation Principles," visit Kelner's Web site, http://memory-trainers.com/default.aspx.