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: 14% [?]

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California examined twenty-thousand forecasts made by three hundred experts, from sixty countries, delivered over fifteen years.

He found it was “impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms, less still sophisticated, statistical ones”.

Tetlock’s research however shows there are a group of experts who are much better than their peers.

So, what distinguishes the best experts from the rest? What distinguishes an expert’s ability to forecast or predict well is how they think.

Tetlock split experts into two groups; hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs know one big thing to try to explain everything through that lens. Foxes tend to know a little about a lot of things and are not married to a single explanation for complex problems.

Foxes are consistently better forecasters because they use “diverse sources of information”.

Popularity: 12% [?]

No sense of humor…

My wife and I were watching Who Wants to be A Millionaire while we were in bed.

I turned to her and said, “Do you want to have sex?”

“No!” she answered.

I then said, “Is that your final answer?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Then I said, “I’d like to phone a friend.” That’s the last thing I remember.

The wife in this story gets to have the final say.

In most sales negotiations however, the customer has the final say.

Their threat to “phone a friend (re:competitors)” is always there.

Customers are rarely chained to you by the vows of marriage.

Popularity: 10% [?]

You are ambling down the street and you spot a dime on the pavement. You bend over, pick it up, just as a $10 bill flies by. Because you concentrated on picking up the dime, someone else grabs and pockets the $10 bill.

The opportunity cost of pocketing the dime is $9.90.

Profitable deal making invariably involves opportunity costs — the costs of not landing an alternative deal.

In deal-making, before you even start negotiating, you need to assure yourself you are talking with the right party. If you want to achieve your Best Possible Agreement (BPA) you must talk to the right people.

Too many deal-makers pursue sub-optimal deals with the wrong party. So, instead of ending up with the Best Possible Agreement (BPA) they end up with a Barely Acceptable Deal (BAD).

In a recent webcast I ran with over 200 C level executives, over 60% in an online poll reported over half of their deals could be classified as Barely Acceptable Deals. If you have a high proportion of BAD deals you need to review your dealmaking process now!

Popularity: 10% [?]

As negotiations drag out, the practical responses you have to solve a problem run out.

As your options shrink, time pressure increases, you concede more and the deal turns from your Best Possible Agreement (BPA) to at best Barely Acceptable Deal (BAD).

The triangle of doom warns us:

1. We need to spend more time, investigating and strengthening our alternatives.
2. We need to monitor, capture and analyze problems in real time if possible.
3. For large, complex negotiations projects you need a real time reporting and response process. Some times the best deals you make are the ones you walk away from.The more time we invest in a deal, the more committed we become to sealing a deal – regardless of its consequences.

Popularity: 18% [?]