Take It Or Leave It: The Only Guide to Negotiating You Will Ever Need

Tweet

One way or another, all the experts advise that you leave behind simple-minded dickering based on gamesmanship and emotion and attain a new mindset, an almost Zen-like state of rationality. In Getting to Yes, the great leap is to focus not on your adversary and his or her position, but rather to negotiate "on the merits." The idea is to "attack" not the other negotiator, but the underlying issue. The emphasis is on seeing negotiation not as a zero-sum game, but as something that might be resolved by discovering a "creative solution" that simple haggling obscures. This is illuminated by the Parable of the Orange: Two parties each want an orange and agree finally to split it in half. But it turns out that one side simply wanted the juice, and the other side wanted the rind. If only they had worked together to solve the problem, each side could have gotten what it wanted. The Parable of the Orange pops up a lot.

Almost all of the experts endorse using out-and-out silence as a negotiating strategy.

What the experts make of it varies a bit, but a point that pretty much everyone makes is that the outcome of most negotiations has less to do with how vehemently you argue in the moment than it does with how well you prepared beforehand. You are advised, everywhere, to research the issue extensively. How much are other vendors selling that brass dish for? What do your competitors charge for the service you're offering? How much does a person with your experience usually get paid? What you're looking for is a standard, and your real goal, of course, is to find the standard that suggests the best deal for you.

Bargaining for Advantage, the book by Wharton professor G. Richard Shell, often backs its arguments with tidbits drawn from psychological research. For example, the "consistency principle" refers to people's need to appear reasonable. You can take advantage of this by "skillful use of standards" to make other people feel they need to use your standards to feel reasonable. And the more authoritative your standards seem, the better. You Can Negotiate Anything, probably the most entertaining of the books, skips any allusion to scholarship about the human tendency to defer to authority, instead citing an old Candid Camera episode in which a surprising number of highway drivers confronted with the sign "Delaware Closed" actually turned around. And, of course, you want to give special attention to sussing out what your opponent really wants.

The other key thing that preparation should give you is alternatives. Getting to Yes talks about arriving at your BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Others command you to never, ever negotiate without good alternatives.

Of course, when you start trying to apply advice about research to your own situation, you may run into the problem of limited information. One of the things that makes us feel weak as negotiators -- and it's those of us who feel weak that are likely to go looking for advice -- is the sense that the other side has more information than we do. That guy in the bazaar sells brass dishes all day, every day; I'm just walking by and haven't given brass cookware a thought. How am I supposed to know that he desperately needs cash to meet short-term rent payments on his stall? Or where I might find alternative cookware?

The advisers who get most specific about information gathering are the memoirists -- the re-nowned negotiators offering their own glorious past as the model you should emulate. But their real-life anecdotes don't always help. When sports agent Leigh Steinberg says in Winning With Integrity that you should "surround yourself" with a support team to gather information, he is probably right, but not in a way that will help you get a raise next month. It would be great to have a staff of 20, as he does, to help you with every negotiation, but you probably don't. At one point he recounts a negotiation with the Minnesota Vikings. As the team made its case to Steinberg, one of his minions took its written presentation into another room, "worked out a detailed set of responses, and delivered them to me just as [the team was] wrapping up." Sounds nice. I'll try to remember that at the used-car lot.

When it comes to the brass-tacks moment of actually facing your negotiating adversary, the advice tends to agree on a small number of practical, basic points. In general, for example, the experts say it's better to let your adversary make the opening offer. The Power of Nice describes an exercise from the authors' seminars, in which attendees are paired off, each playing either the "agent" or the "publisher" in working out a book deal. Each pairing of agent and publisher gets the same canned set of facts -- yet the deals the pairs end up with range from $550,000 to $2.95 million. The authors often say they have found the side that makes the first offer tends not to do as well in the negotiation. Why? Because people often underestimate their own strengths and exaggerate those of their rivals. Presumably, the best way to deal with this in a real negotiation is with better preparation.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Sales and Marketing Newsletter

Email Address: