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.
Whenever one of these experts goes off on win-win, the reader starts to expect the imminent arrival of some concise list of secret tricks of the trade -- five little things we can memorize to become better negotiators without some huge, life-changing effort. That list never materializes. Dawson may come the closest, advocating various bits of acting among his tactics. His most amusing gambits include making sure you visibly flinch at the other side's proposals, and that at the close of a negotiation that you feel you've won, you should say something like, "Wow, you did a fantastic job negotiating that. You were brilliant." One of Cohen's psych-out techniques is to exaggerate things you don't actually care about: When the refrigerator salesman has finished reciting all 32 colors available, at your request, you should be disappointed, blurting, "That's it? We have a psychedelic kitchen. Those colors are much too square."
But in the end, a lot of the intra-guru potshots are themselves a bit theatrical. Camp writes that the importance of questions is "overlooked in every other book on negotiating I've ever seen," when, of course, it's evergreen advice. Dawson wraps up The Secrets of Power Negotiating by advocating, of all things, win-win deals: "Instead of trying to dominate the other person and trick him into doing things he wouldn't normally do, I believe you should work with the other person to figure out your problems and develop a solution with which you can both win."
It turns out that even those who stress particular negotiation behaviors and attitudes see those things not as hollow gambits but as the natural performance traits of the smarter negotiator you must become -- by way of better preparation, rational thinking, and so on. Consider, for example, "the Columbo effect" described by Camp. This boils down to lulling your opponent into underestimating you and getting overconfident. You might drop your pen, for example. Columbo, Camp points out, "solved every crime" this way. Dawson's book also cites Columbo as a role model. Neither author really dwells on the fact that the brilliant detective is a fictional character.
Reading the drop-your-pen suggestion, it's tempting to characterize Camp as the Stanislavsky of negotiation-think. But he doesn't want you to act differently than you do, he wants you to become different. He offers a blizzard of techniques -- "reversing," "blank-slating," "painting the pain" of your rival, etc. -- some of which go down easier than others. An easy one: Addressing opponents with an honorific needlessly elevates them, so stick to first names. A harder one: Never need anything; overcome all fear of rejection. It's all good advice, likely to make you not just a more effective negotiator but a more effective human being. But that doesn't make it any easier.
