– and One That I Made Up
Once every several weeks, I do a live webcast for our Japanese subscribers. It’s a bit of an improv. They ask me anything they want. I answer their questions as well as I can. I like it because (a) I don’t have to prepare for it, and (b) often the questions prompt me to reconsider or expand upon ideas that I felt were safely stashed in the “Complete-and-Final Material, Do Not Alter or Emend” file cabinet of my brain.
This happened last week. Someone asked, “What do I need to do to become a really good negotiator?”
I had a Complete-and-Final answer ready. It was a story about what I’d learned about negotiating from JSN and BB, two of a half-dozen men and women that most influenced my values and my thinking today.
I’ve told this story before. (It’s filed under “The Tale of Two Negotiators” in that file cabinet in my brain.)
What I learned from JSN – probably the most accomplished (and feared) negotiator I ever knew – was six crazy-powerful techniques that you can use in any kind of negotiation. And what I learned from BB – probably the least scary negotiator I know – was the secret of anti-negotiating, which is the only strategy you should use in your most important negotiations. (Do you remember this one? It’s about the difference between transactional and relationship negotiations.)
In any case, as I was about to recite “The Tale of Two Negotiators,” another story popped into my head. It was about LW, who, I realized, was also a major mentor of mine, even though what I’d learned from him was mostly about what not to do in business.
So, I went off script and talked about how, when I was working for him, LW coerced me to try to get a major car company to pay him for the cost of repairing damage to the engine of one of his cars – even though the warranty had expired and LW had caused the damage by running the car for months without any oil in the engine. It is an arduous story of irrational intentions and willful neglect of common sense. It took me from a nice young woman in the customer service department of our local dealership to the VP of a Fortune 500 corporation.
I realized in telling that story that the negative lesson I’d learned from that experience was as real and, in many ways, as valuable as the lessons I’d learned from JSN and BB. So, I backed up a bit and said what was logically demanded at that moment: i.e., that there are many ways to negotiate and none of them are suitable for every type of negotiation.
“Think of it,” I said, still extemporizing. “We start negotiating as infants. We negotiate when we are hungry, or in pain, or sitting in dirty diapers. At that stage, we have only one tactic to get what we want. We cry. If crying doesn’t work, we cry harder. And if that doesn’t work, we cry even harder.”
That sounded pretty good, I thought. So I continued with the analogy.
“There are at least three kinds of negotiating,” I said, “each of which we learn to use at different stages of our lives.” And I explained it like this…
Stage One: Negotiating Like an Infant
In infants, the prefrontal cortex of the brain is not sufficiently developed to engage in any conscious form of negotiating. But luckily, the reptilian brain is fully prepared to do what it’s programmed to do – which is to giggle, smile, cry, and/or scream. You might not think of these as negotiating tactics, but they are. Very good ones. (I’m guessing you know, from your own experience, how effective they can be.)
Stage Two: Negotiating Like a Child
Children acquire a second negotiating technique – one that can express itself through the prefrontal cortex but is deeply rooted in the limbic brain, the seat of our emotional intelligence. It’s the negotiating technique of bartering – i.e., “I’ll give you this if you give me that.” A more complicated strategy than the reptilian one used by infants, it involves conscious deliberation on the value of each bartered item to each bartering partner. It’s not very sophisticated. Nevertheless, it is a strategy that some people use throughout their lives because it’s the only tool in their toolboxes.
Stage Three: Negotiating Like a Teenager
As teenagers and young adults, we develop a third negotiating skill, which, for the purpose of my analogy, I call countertrading. Think of countertrading as an advanced form of bartering in that it involves persuading the negotiating partner that the item up for exchange is worth more or less than it would objectively seem. This is done through a complex series of stated and unstated (mostly) psychological rewards and punishments. For most people, this is considered the highest form of negotiating. It encompasses the tricks and techniques covered in 95% of the books and courses on how to negotiate.
Step Four: Negotiating Like an Adult
As mature adults, we can, if we are lucky, discover an entirely different and significantly better form of negotiating. I’m referring to BB’s “zen” strategy – negotiating by not negotiating. It’s about how to achieve the very best outcome with very little or no bartering at all. And its power is that it can make all future negotiations and all future experiences with the person you’re dealing with simpler, easier, and increasingly more beneficial.
There you have it. Consider this to be Part 1 of a multi-part series of short (less than five-minute) essays on how to be a master negotiator. I’m excited about this idea, because it feels like it’s going to be fun and useful. But of course, you’ll be the judge of that.
