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

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Unsurprisingly, most also say you should ask for more than you think you'll get. The more learned-sounding books position this point as asking for the most you can reasonably defend. More interestingly, while we might imagine that the likely winner is the one who makes a forceful and overbearing presentation, the experts tend to agree that this is wrong: You are better off doing more listening and questioning than bloviating.

In fact, practically everyone endorses out-and-out silence. Let's say you're faced with an opponent who behaves irrationally; resist the temptation to respond in kind, counsels Getting to Yes. You might counter with a question ("How did you arrive at that figure?") or you might not counter at all. "Silence is one of your best weapons....The best thing to do may be to just sit there and not say a word." Cohen agrees: "You often force the other person to talk, if only out of discomfort" -- and that person is likely to revise his or her position and reveal useful information in the process.

Questions, the experts suggest, are useful for fending off someone else's question that you're not prepared to answer. (It's tempting to imagine two negotiators stuck on the crucialness of queries, sinking into an infinite loop of statement avoidance.) And they are useful in figuring out what the other side's logic is -- meaning that you should ask questions even when you think you know the answer. Shell cites studies showing that the most successful negotiators also happen to be the most persistent question-askers -- and listeners. "You often get more by finding out what the other person wants than you do by clever arguments supporting what you need." As he later adds, "It almost never hurts to talk less."

One psych-out technique is to exaggerate the significance of issues that you don't actually care about.

Negotiation gurus Roger Dawson and Chester Karrass, among others, not only support this idea but note that questions beginning with who, where, what, why, and how are better than yes-no queries. Jim Camp, a negotiation coach whose book Start With No was published last year, goes into considerable detail on "interrogative-led" questions. For example "What is the biggest issue we face?" is better than "Is this the biggest issue we face?" for the simple reason that it invites your adversary to give more information. Camp's thinking is that in any conversation, it's the listener who has the power. "People have a weakness for talking," he writes, and questions should "invite the adversary to indulge this weakness." Getting to Yes urges the reader to phrase confrontational questions as neutrally as possible to avoid sinking into emotional bickering: "Did we overpay?" is better than "Did you screw us over?"

Many experts offer examples of inquisitorial jujitsu. Imagine your adversary, before you are ready, asks, "What is the most you would pay if you had to?" This is not an uncommon tactic, and just the sort of thing that flusters the anxious negotiator into saying something stupid (like naming a figure) or unimpressive (like a fumbly "Um, I don't know.") Here's the Getting to Yes response: "Let's not put ourselves under such a strong temptation to mislead. If you think no agreement is possible, and that we may be wasting our time, perhaps we could disclose our thinking to some trustworthy third party, who can then tell us whether there is a zone of potential agreement."

The Power of Nice offers another example. "If your company agrees to be merged into ours," asks your adversary, "how many of your employees can be laid off to achieve economies of scale?" Your answer: "Which of our branch offices would you be keeping and which would you close?" The authors write that this crafty reply leads to "a real information gain."

And indeed those are very impressive responses. But can you really imagine yourself saying anything remotely like that in the heat of negotiation? When you've just been asked something that really ticks you off? In the middle of a deal that you really want to close? And if you really can't see yourself showing that sort of poise, is it possible to change yourself so thoroughly?

The appeal of the "win-win" style is obvious: You can get what you want without being a jerk. But a number of rival experts revel in taking shots at this approach. Roger Dawson snorts that the Parable of the Orange is nice, but in the real world such neat solutions are rare. Even The Power of Nice cautions that win-win thinking is often "a loser's excuse for surrender." You can get a pretty good sense of what Jim Camp thinks about Getting to Yes from the title of his book, Start With No. Inside he is more blunt. He quotes the Getting to Yes definition of a wise agreement -- "One that meets the legitimate interests of each side to the extent possible, resolves conflicting interests fairly, is durable, and takes community standards into account" -- as something that might work in a perfect world. But in this world, he says, it's "hopelessly misguided," "mush," and "lame," a style used by "naive amateurs" that "will get you killed," since your adversary may be waiting to exploit your search for compromise. As if that weren't enough, he goes on to say that the win-win approach is "partially responsible" for the "fair amount of mediocrity in American business" today (see "Can a Negotiating Coach Help Me?" page 78). Mocking his ivory tower rivals, Camp asserts that he is out there in the trenches, coaching real executives through real negotiations.

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