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

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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.

Of course, much of this advice depends on what kind of negotiator you are in the first place. In Bargaining for Advantage, Shell urges the reader to figure out his or her own hard-wired approach to negotiation, perhaps by way of a psychological test like that Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, which will tell you whether you are a "competitor" or a "collaborator." His point is that you need this framework both so that you can work with what you've got and so that you know which aspects of your style might be causing you problems. If you're too competitive, you should probably reel that in; if you would rather just avoid negotiating altogether, you need to convince yourself that this attitude is costing you. Your mindset, he says, is more important than tactics: "Effective negotiation is 10% technique and 90% attitude."

And in varying ways, all negotiation advice says the same thing. It seems the best negotiators rely not on overwhelming personalities or that secret list of five tricks anyone can memorize, but rather on something closer to a specific state of being. Shell suggests that to achieve the right attitude you need "realism, intelligence, and self-respect." Power of Nice commands you to "Be a better listener." Camp says that "high self-esteem" is "absolutely required." Chester Karrass says much the same, noting that "this feeling of self-worth should come from a history of getting things done satisfactorily." He notes elsewhere that the best negotiators have "the ability to think clearly under stress." Getting to Yes advises a stoicism in the face of adversarial attacks that is almost saintly. "Figure out what you fear most," Dawson advises the intimidated, "and do it." Steinberg describes himself as having (and the reader as needing to acquire) "utter clarity," a thorough understanding of one's self, "the ability to be in an absolute state of denial about the ultimate catastrophe of an unsuccessful negotiation," complete self-assurance, "as comprehensive a knowledge base as possible about every conceivable subject," "extraordinary stamina," and the ability to "rapidly factor figures" in one's head while negotiating. How long would it take to acquire all that? Camp is perhaps the most honest about how difficult it is to enact the behavioral changes he recommends when he cites "theories of learning" that estimate that "we humans need about 800 hours to truly master a complex subject and the habits necessary for its application."

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