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

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The most exciting research to emerge from brain research is the work on pattern recognition. In Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, Michael S. Gazzaniga, the director of the University of California at Santa Barbara’s SAGE center for the study of the mind, makes the point that the brain may not even ‘think’.

It may be a memory and prediction machine that functions by retrieving and applying patterns learned from the past to new situations. Experts (think master chess players) can recall up to 50,000 past chess games in their heads. When they look at a chess board, they look for a similar ‘past’ pattern. They then select their next move.

In our work on negotiation we have experienced great success by teaching trainee negotiators to read the patterns of success. When up-skilling negotiators, it’s remarkably easy to accelerate progress of experienced managers who have participated in lots of deals. With young graduates, no matter how bright they are, it’s much harder. Young graduates usually don’t have the body of experience that allows for skilful pattern recognition.

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One of Maubisson’s insightful comments in his must read book Think Twice (2010) is how to recognise the difference between skill and luck.

Many human activities are a mix of skill and luck. Compare a golfer’s scores over 3 or 4 rounds. An exceptional score over one round is often the result of skill combined with exceptional luck. That’s why exceptionally skilled players triumph over 4 rounds. Great luck rarely holds for four rounds. Over time skill shines through as luck runs out.

If you can deliberately lose a game then skill is the driving factor. If you can’t, it’s luck.

Think of chess. Chess is a game of skill. You can deliberately lose. Roulette by contrast is a game of luck. You can not deliberately lose.

Negotiation is a process of combining skill and luck. However the prime driver of success is skill. It is clearly a game you can deliberately lose.

To lessen the role of luck, negotiators should focus on management of the process. That’s the best way to drive results.

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