The Naked Negotiator

Having written 3 books on negotiation it’s not often I find a book that reframes the way we should look at negotiation.
In Getting More: How You Can Negotiate To Succeed In Work and Life, leading negotiator Stuart Diamond outlines 12 strategies that I combined amount to a fresh way of looking at negotiation.

Here are Diamond’s 12 strategies.

1. Goals Are Paramount: Goals are what you want at the end of the negotiation that you don’t have at the beginning. Many, if not most, people take actions contrary to their goals because they are focused on something else.

2. It’s About Them: You can’t persuade people of anything unless you know the pictures in their heads: their perceptions, sensibilities, needs, how they make commitments, whether they are trustworthy.

3. Make Emotional Payments: The world is irrational. And the mroe important a negotiation is to an individual, the more irrational he or she often becomes.

4. Every Situation Is Different: In a negotiation, there is no one-size-fits-all. Even having the same people on different days in the same negotiation can be a different situation. You must analyze every situation on its own.

5. Incremental Is Best: People often fail because they ask for too much all at once. They take steps that are too big.

6. Trade Things You Value Unequally: All people value things unequally. First find out what each party cares and doesn’t care about, big and small, tangible and intangible, in teh deal or outside the deal, rational and emotional.

7. Find Their Standards: What are their policies, exceptions to policies, precendents, past statements, ways they make decisions? Use these to get more.

8. Be Transparent and Constructive, Not Manipulative: This is one of the biggest differences between Getting More and the conventional wisdom. Don’t decieve people.

9. Always Communicate, State the Obvious, Frame the Vision: Most failed negotiations are cause by bad communication, or none at all.

10. Find the Real Problem and Make It an Opportunity: Few people find or fix the real, underlying problem in negotiations. Ask, “What is really preventing me from meeting my goals?”

11. Embrace Difference: Most people think different is worse, risky, annoying, uncomfortable. But different is actually demonstrably better: more profitable, more creative.

12. Prepare - Make a List and Practice with It: The List is like a pantry, from which you choose items for every meal.

This list however doesn’t do Diamond justice. Read this book then read it again. Highly recommended

Popularity: 12% [?]

Research into the social nature of the brain by David Rock, the founding president of the Neuro Leadership Institute and the author of Your Brain at Work (Harper Business, 2009) has coined a couple of useful models encapsulated by the acronym SCARF which can help negotiators anticipate some of the problems caused by the toxic or negative emotions that too often overwhelm negotiators and prevent collaborative agreements.

SCARF itemizes the particular qualities that the brain perceives as threats.

Threat One: Status problems

Anything that fundamentally threatens the status of the other side will trigger a negative response.

Threat Two: Certainty Challenges

Humans like certainty. It allows us to operate on automatic pilot. Create huge uncertainty and you will trigger a primal threat response.

Threat Three: Lack of Autonomy

A perception of reduced autonomy - for example - can easily generate a threat response.

Threat Four: Relatedness Problems

When humans are cut off from social interaction with their friends and colleagues, threat levels escalate.

Threat Five: Problems of Fairness

Hostility and trust diminishes when a person’s perception of fairness is undermined.

Putting on the SCARF

If you are a negotiator you need to be conscious of offers or positions that undermine perceived levels of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Negotiators are persistently, and irrationally overconfident. Research shows dealmakers consistently overrate their talents, knowledge and skills. When overconfidence combines with arrogance or excessive pride the result is hubris.

The best and most persuasive evidence of overconfidence and hubris comes from the world of corporate mergers and acquisitions. Empire-building CEO’s have created what is now a multi-trillion-a-year making orgy.

Yet study after study- carried out over the last 30 years - shows up two out of three mergers and takeovers fail. Instead of creating wealth for the buyer, they destroy it.

A prime reason: An overconfident ego-driven buyer paid too much for the acquisition in the first place.

In Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap, author Matthew Hayward says while overconfidence is essential for business success it can also be highly destructive.

Ego Check identifies four sources of overconfidence. The first source is “excessive or exaggerated pride.” The symptoms are needing to impress others and inflating data to exaggerate their achievements.

The second source of destructive overconfidence is “isolation.” The isolated person shuts herself off from negative feedback. Hayward uses former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Forina as his prime example. In the days before her fall she surrounded herself with protective assistants - who were unwilling to tell her that she was wrong.

The third source of destructive overconfidence is in “selective judgments.” Whenever you get feedback that doesn’t fit in with your view of the world you discount or ignore it.

The fourth source of destructive overconfidence is “underestimating the consequences” of their decisions. Failing to think about tomorrow fuels hubris in decision making today.

If any of Matthew Hayward’s four sources of overconfidence are present in your organisation, Beware.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Colorado Surgeon Michael Woods found himself being sued for malpractice when a medical student accidentally punctured an artery during an appendectomy. In the end, the appendix was successfully removed, but there were complications and the patient became upset.

Woods took advice from his lawyer who recommended - no response and no interaction between him and the patient.

In court, when the patient was asked why she had chosen to sue she said, “I sued because he acted like what happened to me was no big deal. He just didn’t care.”

Woods realized it wasn’t the injury or the outcome that had led to the lawsuit — it was her perception that he didn’t care. It was his failure to offer a sincere apology that caused the suit.

In his insightful book Healing Words: The Power of Apology in Medicine Woods says,

“The business world has internalized a truth that medicine has yet to discover and embrace. Apology isn’t about money, or being right or wrong - for either the buyer (patient) or the vendor (doctor). It’s about the provider showing respect, empathy, and a commitment to patient satisfaction; and then about those receiving the apology having the grace to see the provider as human and fallible — and worthy of forgiveness.”

Since 2002, hospitals in the University of Michigan Health System have been pushing their doctors to apologize. Their attorney legal fees have dropped by two-thirds and the number of malpractice suits have halved.

Sincere apologies lower emotional temperatures and establish the foundations for a positive, constructive re-engagement.

Popularity: 14% [?]