Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Thinking Differently
My run slowed to a jog as we approached the gate for our flight to Paris. The plane was still there, but the door to the Jetway was shut. The gate agents were quietly sorting tickets. They had already retracted the hood connecting the Jetway to the airplane door.
“Hi, we’re on this flight!” I panted.
“Sorry,” said the agent. “We’re done boarding.”
“But our connecting flight landed just ten minutes ago. They promised us they would call ahead to the gate.”
“Sorry, we can’t board anyone after they’ve closed the door.”
My boyfriend and I walked to the window in disbelief. Our long weekend was about to fall to pieces. The plane waited right before our eyes. The sun had set, and the pilots’ downturned faces were bathed in the glow of their instrument panel. The whine of the engines intensified and a guy with lighted batons sauntered onto the tarmac.
I thought for a few seconds. Then I led my boyfriend to the center of the window right in front of the cockpit. We stood there, in plain sight, my entire being focused on the pilot, hoping to catch his eye.
One of the pilots looked up. He saw us standing forlornly in the window. I looked him in the eye, plaintively, pleadingly. I let my bags slump by my feet. We stood there for what seemed an eternity. Finally, the pilot’s lips moved and the other pilot looked up. I caught his eye, as well, and he nodded.
The engine whine softened and we heard the gate agent’s phone ring. She turned to us, wide-eyed. “Grab your stuff!” she said. “The pilot said to let you on!” Our vacation restored, we clutched each other joyously, snatched our bags, waved to the pilots, and tumbled down the Jetway to our plane.
—rayenne chen, Wharton Business School, Class of 2001
The story above, told to me by a student in my negotiation course, was clearly an account of a negotiation. Completely nonverbal, to be sure. But it was done in a conscious, structured, and highly effective way. And it used six separate negotiation tools that I teach that are, in practice, invisible to almost everyone.
What are they? First, be dispassionate; emotion destroys negotiations. You must force yourself to be calm.
Second, prepare, even for five seconds. Collect your thoughts.
Third, find the decision-maker. Here, it was the pilot. There was not a second to waste on the gate agent, who was not about to change company policy.
Fourth, focus on your goals, not on who is right. It didn’t matter if the connecting airline was late, or wrong in not calling ahead to the gate. The goal was to get on the plane to Paris.
Fifth, make human contact. People are almost everything in a negotiation.
And finally, acknowledge the other party’s position and power, valuing them. If you do, they will often use their authority to help you achieve your goals.
These tools are often very subtle. But they are not magic. They helped this young couple in a way they will remember for a lifetime. And they help to bring about successful negotiations, day in and day out, for those who have learned these tools from my courses. From getting a job to getting a raise, from dealing with kids to dealing with colleagues, the kind of negotiation practiced here has given upwards of thirty thousand people more power and control over their lives.
My goal with this book is to re-create my course on the page, making it available to readers everywhere. It offers a set of strategies, models, and tools that together will change the way you view and conduct virtually every human interaction. These teachings are very different from what you have read or studied about negotiation. Based on psychology, they don’t depend on “win-win” or “win-lose.” They don’t depend on being a “hard” or “soft” bargainer. They don’t depend on a rational world, on who has the most power, or on phrases that make much of negotiation seem inaccessible and impractical. Instead, they are based on how people perceive, think, feel, and live in the real world. And they will help anyone do what this book suggests: get more.
And that’s one of those instinctive human desires, isn’t it? More. Whenever you do almost anything, don’t you wonder if there’s more? It doesn’t have to mean more for me and less for you. It just has to be, well, more. And it doesn’t necessarily mean more money. It means more of whatever you value: more money, more time, more food, more love, more travel, more responsibility, more basketball, more TV, more music.
This book is about more: how you define it, how you get it, how you keep it. Whoever you are, wherever you are, the ideas and tools in this book were meant for you.
The world is full of negotiation books telling you how to get to yes, get past no, win, gain an advantage, close the deal, get leverage, influence or persuade others, be nice, be tough, and so forth.
But of those who finish reading them, few can go out and do it. Besides, sometimes you may want to get to no. Or you want to get to maybe. Or you just want to delay things. But, instinctively, you always want to get more of what you want.
In Getting More, I present this information in such a way that you will actually be able to use it—immediately—whether ordering a pizza or negotiating a billion-dollar deal or asking for a discount on a blouse or a pair of pants. This is what people who take my course are required to do. I tell them to use the strategies the same day, write them down in their journals, practice them, and use them again.
WHY IS THIS SO IMPORTANT?
Negotiation is at the heart of human interaction. Every time people interact, there is negotiation going on: verbally or nonverbally, consciously or unconsciously. Driving, talking to your kids, doing errands. You can’t get away from it. You can only do it well or badly.
That doesn’t mean you have to actively negotiate everything in your life all the time. But it does mean that those who are more conscious of the interactions around them get more of what they want in life.
There is an old maxim about the difference between expert and nonexpert knowledge. A nonexpert looks at a field and sees flat land. An expert looks at the same field and sees small peaks and valleys. It takes no more time and energy for the expert to collect the greater amount of information from that landscape. But the expert can make much better use of that information to pursue opportunities or minimize risks.
What we are talking about in Getting More is learning better negotiation tools so that you become exquisitely more conscious of the topography of your dealings with others. The result will be a better life.
Like Rayenne Chen at the opening of the book, most of those who have taken my course are ordinary people. But they have learned to achieve extraordinary results by negotiating with greater confidence and skill. More than one woman from India in my class, using tools from the course, persuaded her parents to let her out of her own arranged marriage. My advice on the negotiation process helped to end the 2008 Writers Guild strike. It is the same kind of advice taught in my classes and outlined in Chapter 2.
A business student who hadn’t made it past the first-round interview with eighteen firms took the course, applied my negotiation tools, and got twelve consecutive final-round interviews and the job of his choice. Parents get their young children to brush their teeth without complaint.
We added up the money made and saved by students using these tools: $7 here, $132 there, $1 million or more in some cases. The total exceeded $3 billion for about a third of the stories we have collected. And that doesn’t count the marriages saved, the jobs obtained, the deals concluded, the parents who were persuaded to go to the doctor, the kids who did just what they were asked.
Most of the more than 400 anecdotes in this book use the actual names of the people involved. They will tell you how they got a raise, achieved satisfaction after buying defective merchandise, got out of a speeding ticket, got their kids to do their homework, closed a deal—how, in a million ways, their lives became better. How they got more.
For me and the tens of thousands of people I’ve taught, unless these tools work in real life, we’re not interested.
Who are these people? They come from all walks of life, and myriad cultures. Senior executives of billion-dollar companies, housewives, students in school, salespeople, administrative assistants, executives, managers, lawyers, engineers, stockbrokers, truckers, union workers, artists—you name it. And they come from around the world: the United States, Japan, China, Russia, Colombia, Bolivia, South Africa, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France, England, Brazil, India, Vietnam, and so forth.
These tools work for all of them. And they will work for you, too.
Like Ben Friedman, who almost always asks the companies whose services he uses if new customers are treated better than existing, loyal customers like himself—for example, with discounts or other promotions. By asking that question one day, Ben got 33 percent off his existing New York Times subscription.
Or Soo Jin Kim, who looks for connections everywhere. One day she saved $200 a year for her daughter’s after-school French program. How? Before asking for a discount, she made a human connection with the school’s manager, talking about her trips to France. These strategies will save you a little here, a little there. But it can add up to many thousands of dollars a year.
Some make millions at the start. Paul Thurman, a management consultant in New York, reduced a large client’s expenses by 35 percent, an “incredible” twenty points more than he had been able to do before the course. He used standards, persistence, better questions, relationships, and being incremental, as learned in the course. The first-year savings was $34 million; by now it’s over $300 million, he said. “I have a major advantage in the marketplace,” he said.
Richard Morena, then the chief financial officer of the Asbury Park Press, got $245 million more for the company in its sale, and $1 million more for himself, by using standards, framing, and other course tools. “I’ll keep practicing,” he said. To benefit from the strategies in the book, as Richard did, you have to think differently about how you deal with others.
HOW THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT
What follow are the twelve major strategies that together make Getting More very different from what most people think negotiation is all about. These strategies will be expanded throughout the book, including the tools that support them and the perspectives that go with them. The strategies will be followed by chapters on how they are used in specific familiar applications, such as parenting, travel, and jobs.
To sum up, emotions and perceptions are far more important than power and logic in dealing with others. Finding, valuing, and understanding the picture in their heads produce four times as much value as conventional tools like leverage and “win-win” because (a) you have a better starting point for persuasion, (b) people are more willing to do things for you when you value them, no matter who they are, and (c) the world is mostly about emotions, not the logic of “win-win.”
The strategies together amount to a different way of thinking about negotiation. It’s the difference between saying “I play football” and “I play professional football.” The two are barely even the same game.
1. Goals Are Paramount.
Goals are what you want at the end of the negotiation that you don’t have at the beginning. Clearly, you should negotiate to meet your goals. Many, if not most, people take actions contrary to their goals because they are focused on something else. They get mad in a store or relationship. They attack the wrong people. In a negotiation, you should not pursue relationships, interests, win-win, or anything else just because you think it’s an effective tool. Anything you do in a negotiation should explicitly bring you closer to your goals for that particular negotiation. Otherwise, it is irrelevant or damaging to you. You need to ask, “Are my actions meeting my goals?”
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. Find out what third parties they respect and who can help you. How do they form relationships? Without this information, you won’t even know where to start. Think of yourself as the least important person in the negotiation. You must do role reversal, putting yourself in their shoes and trying to put them in yours. Using power or leverage can ultimately destroy relationships and cause retaliation. To be ultimately more effective (and persuasive), you have to get people to want to do things.
3. Make Emotional Payments.
The world is irrational. And the more important a negotiation is to an individual, the more irrational he or she often becomes: whether with world peace or a billion-dollar deal, or when your child wants an ice-cream cone. When people are irrational, they are emotional. When they are emotional, they can’t listen. When they can’t listen, they can’t be persuaded. So your words are useless, especially those arguments intended for rational or reasonable people, like “win-win.” You need to tap into the other person’s emotional psyche with empathy, apologies if necessary, by valuing them or offering them other things that get them to think more clearly.
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. Averages, trends, statistics, or past problems don’t matter much if you want to get more today and tomorrow with the people in front of you. Blanket rules on how to negotiate with the Japanese or Muslims, or that state you should never make the first offer, are simply wrong. There are too many differences among people and situations to be so rigid in your thinking. The right answer to the statement “I hate you” is “Tell me more.” You learn what they are thinking or feeling, so that you can better persuade them.
5. Incremental Is Best.
People often fail because they ask for too much all at once. They take steps that are too big. This scares people, makes the negotiation seem riskier, and magnifies differences. Take small steps, whether you are trying for raises or treaties. Lead people from the pictures in their heads to your goals, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, a step at a time. If there is little trust, it’s even more important to be incremental. Test each step. If there are big differences between parties, move slowly toward each other, narrowing the gap incrementally.
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 the deal or outside the deal, rational and emotional. Then trade off items that one party values but the other party doesn’t. Trade holiday work for more vacation, TV time for more homework, a lower price for more referrals. This strategy is much broader than “interests” or “needs,” in that it uses all the experiences and synapses of people’s lives. And it greatly expands the pie, creating more opportunities, at home as well as the office. It is rarely done the way it should be.
