【Chris Voss: Never split the difference】

2022-10-31

Never split the difference

by Chris Voss

Prepare a negotiation one sheet | 准备谈判单
 Influence system 1 to guide system 2 rationality
Skill 1. Be a mirror: how to quickly establish rapport
Skill 2. Tactical empathy: don’t feel their pain, label it
Skill 3. Yes/No: How to generate momentum and make it safe to reveal the real stakes
Skill 4. Trigger the two words that immediately transform any negotiation: that’s right
Skill 5. Bend their reality: How to shape what Is fair
Skill 6. Calibrate questions: create the illusion of control
Skill 7. Guarantee execution
Skill 8. Bargain hard
Skill 9. Finding the black swan

The first step to achieving a mastery of daily negotiation is to get over your aversion to negotiating. You don’t need to like it; you just need to understand that’s how the world works. Negotiating does not mean browbeating or grinding someone down. It simply means playing the emotional game that human society is set up for. In this world, you get what you ask for; you just have to ask correctly. So claim your prerogative to ask for what you think is right.

掌握谈判的第一步是克服你对谈判的厌恶。你不需要喜欢它；你只需要理解这就是世界的运作方式。谈判并不意味着对别人横加指责或磨难。它只是意味着去玩人类社会所设定的情感游戏。在这个世界上，只有你要求，你才可能得到，而你需要正确地要求。因此，正大光明地去要求你认为正确的事情。

Prepare a negotiation one sheet | 准备谈判单

SECTION I: THE GOAL

Think through best/worst-case scenarios but only write down a specific goal that represents the best case.

Typically, negotiation experts will tell you to prepare by making a list: your bottom line; what you really want; how you’re going to try to get there; and counters to your counterpart’s arguments. But this typical preparation fails in many ways. It’s unimaginative and leads to the predictable bargaining dynamic of offer/counteroffer/meet in the middle. In other words, it gets results, but they’re often mediocre.The centerpiece of the traditional preparation dynamic—and its greatest Achilles’ heel—is something called the BATNA.

Roger Fisher and William Ury coined the term in their 1981 bestseller, Getting to Yes, and it stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. Basically, it’s the best possible option you have if negotiations fail. Your last resort. Say you’re on a car lot trying to sell your old BMW 3-series. If you already have another dealer who’s given you a written offer for $10,000, that’s your BATNA.

The problem is that BATNA tricks negotiators into aiming low. Researchers have found that humans have a limited capacity for keeping focus in complex, stressful situations like negotiations. And so, once a negotiation is under way, we tend to gravitate toward the focus point that has the most psychological significance for us.

In that context, obsessing over a BATNA turns it into your target, and thereby sets the upper limit of what you will ask for. After you’ve spent hours on a BATNA, you mentally concede everything beyond it. God knows aiming low is seductive. Self-esteem is a huge factor in negotiation, and many people set modest goals to protect it. It’s easier to claim victory when you aim low. That’s why some negotiation experts say that many people who think they have “win-win” goals really have a “wimp-win” mentality. The “wimp-win” negotiator focuses on his or her bottom line, and that’s where they end up.

So if BATNA isn’t your centerpiece, what should be?

Think about the outcome extremes: best and worst. If you’ve got both ends covered, you’ll be ready for anything. So know what you cannot accept and have an idea about the best-case outcome, but keep in mind that since there’s information yet to be acquired from the other side, it’s quite possible that best case might be even better than you know.

Remember, never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. Once you’ve got flexibility in the forefront of your mind you come into a negotiation with a winning mindset.

Let’s say you’re selling old speakers because you need $100 to put toward a new set. If you concentrate on the $100 minimum, you’ll relax when you hear that number and that’s what you’ll get. But if you know that they are for sale in used audio stores for $140, you could set a high-end goal of $150, while remaining open to better things.

Now, while I counsel thinking about a best/worst range to give my clients the security of some structure, when it comes to what actually goes on your one sheet, my advice is to just stick with the high-end goal, as it will motivate and focus your psychological powers, priming you to think you are facing a “loss” for any term that falls short. Decades of goal-setting research is clear that people who set specific, challenging, but realistic goals end up getting better deals than those who don’t set goals or simply strive to do their best. Bottom line: People who expect more (and articulate it) get more.

Here are the four steps for setting your goal:

Set an optimistic but reasonable goal and define it clearly.
Write it down.
Discuss your goal with a colleague (this makes it harder to wimp out).
Carry the written goal into the negotiation.

SECTION II: SUMMARY

Summarize and write out in just a couple of sentences the known facts that have led up to the negotiation.

You’re going to have to have something to talk about beyond a self-serving assessment of what you want. And you had better be ready to respond with tactical empathy to your counterpart’s arguments; unless they’re incompetent, the other party will come prepared to argue an interpretation of the facts that favors them.

Get on the same page at the outset.

You have to clearly describe the lay of the land before you can think about acting in its confines. Why are you there? What do you want? What do they want? Why?

You must be able to summarize a situation in a way that your counterpart will respond with a “That’s right.” If they don’t, you haven’t done it right.

SECTION III: LABELS/ACCUSATION AUDIT

Prepare three to five labels to perform an accusation audit.

Anticipate how your counterpart feels about these facts you’ve just summarized. Make a concise list of any accusations they might make—no matter how unfair or ridiculous they might be. Then turn each accusation into a list of no more than five labels and spend a little time role-playing it.

There are fill-in-the-blank labels that can be used in nearly every situation to extract information from your counterpart, or defuse an accusation:

It seems like _________ is valuable to you.
It seems like you don’t like _________.
It seems like you value __________.
It seems like _________ makes it easier.
It seems like you’re reluctant to _________.

As an example, if you’re trying to renegotiate an apartment lease to allow subletters and you know the landlord is opposed to them, your prepared labels would be on the lines of “It seems as though you’re not a fan of subletters” or “It seems like you want stability with your tenants.”

SECTION IV: CALIBRATED QUESTIONS

Prepare three to five calibrated questions to reveal value to you and your counterpart and identify and overcome potential deal killers.

Effective negotiators look past their counterparts’ stated positions (what the party demands) and delve into their underlying motivations (what is making them want what they want). Motivations are what they are worried about and what they hope for, even lust for.

Figuring out what the other party is worried about sounds simple, but our basic human expectations about negotiation often get in the way. Most of us tend to assume that the needs of the other side conflict with our own. We tend to limit our field of vision to our issues and problems, and forget that the other side has its own unique issues based on its own unique worldview. Great negotiators get past these blinders by being relentlessly curious about what is really motivating the other side.

Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has a great quote that sums up this concept: “You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.”

There will be a small group of “What” and “How” questions that you will find yourself using in nearly every situation. Here are a few of them:

What are we trying to accomplish?
How is that worthwhile?
What’s the core issue here?
How does that affect things?
What’s the biggest challenge you face?
How does this fit into what the objective is?

QUESTIONS TO IDENTIFY BEHIND-THE-TABLE DEAL KILLERS

When implementation happens by committee, the support of that committee is key. You’ll want to tailor your calibrated questions to identify and unearth the motivations of those behind the table, including:

How does this affect the rest of your team?
How on board are the people not on this call?
What do your colleagues see as their main challenges in this area?”

QUESTIONS TO IDENTIFY AND DIFFUSE DEAL-KILLING ISSUES

Internal negotiating influence often sits with the people who are most comfortable with things as they are. Change may make them look as if they haven’t been doing their job. Your dilemma in such “a negotiation is how to make them look good in the face of that change.

You’ll be tempted to concentrate on money, but put that aside for now. A surprisingly high percentage of negotiations hinge on something outside dollars and cents. Often they have more to do with self-esteem, status, autonomy, and other nonfinancial needs.

Think about their perceived losses. Never forget that a loss stings at least twice as much as an equivalent gain.For example, the guy across the table may be hesitating to install the new accounting system he needs (and you are selling) because he doesn’t want to screw anything up before his annual review in four months’ time. Instead of lowering your price, you can offer to help impress his boss, and do it safely, by promising to finish the installation in ninety days, guaranteed.”

QUESTIONS TO USE TO UNEARTH THE DEAL-KILLING ISSUES

What are we up against here?
What is the biggest challenge you face?
How does making a deal with us affect things?
What happens if you do nothing?
What does doing nothing cost you?

How does making this deal resonate with what your company prides itself on?

It’s often very effective to ask these in groups of two or three as they are similar enough that they help your counterpart think about the same thing from different angles.

Every situation is unique, of course, but choosing the right mix of these questions will lead your counterpart to reveal information about what they want and need—and simultaneously push them to see things from your point of view.

Be ready to execute follow-up labels to their answers to your calibrated questions.

Having labels prepared will allow you to quickly turn your counterpart’s responses back to them, which will keep them feeding you new and expanding information. Again, these are fill-in-the-blank labels that you can use quickly without tons of thought:

> It seems like __________ is important.  
It seems you feel like my company is in a unique position to __________.  
It seems like you are worried that __________.

SECTION V: NONCASH OFFERS

Prepare a list of noncash items possessed by your counterpart that would be valuable.

Ask yourself: “What could they give that would almost get us to do it for free?” Think of the anecdote I told a few chapters ago about my work for the lawyers’ association: My counterpart’s interest was to pay me as little cash as possible in order to look good in front of his board. We came upon the idea that they pay in part by publishing a cover story about me in their magazine. That was low-cost for them and it advanced my interests considerably.

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Influence system 1 to guide system 2 rationality

Economist Amos Tversky and psychologist Daniel Kahneman launched the field of behavioral economics—and Kahneman won a Nobel Prize—by showing that man is a very irrational beast. Through decades of research with Tversky, Kahneman proved that humans all suffer from Cognitive Bias, that is, unconscious—and irrational—brain processes that literally distort the way we see the world. Kahneman and Tversky discovered more than 150 of them. Kahneman later codified his research in the 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. Man, he wrote, has two systems of thought: System 1, our animal mind, is fast, instinctive, and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberative, and logical. And System 1 is far more influential. In fact, it guides and steers our rational thoughts.

System 1’s inchoate beliefs, feelings, and impressions are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. They’re the spring that feeds the river. We react emotionally (System 1) to a suggestion or question. Then that System 1 reaction informs and in effect creates the System 2 answer.

Now think about that: under this model, if you know how to affect your counterpart’s System 1 thinking, his inarticulate feelings, by how you frame and deliver your questions and statements, then you can guide his System 2 rationality and therefore modify his responses. That’s what happened to Andy at Harvard: by asking, “How am I supposed to do that?” I influenced his System 1 emotional mind into accepting that his offer wasn’t good enough; his System 2 then rationalized the situation so that it made sense to give me a better offer.

Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.

心理治疗研究表明，当人感到被倾听时，他们往往会更仔细地倾听自己，并坦诚地评估和澄清自己的想法和感受。此外，他们往往变得不那么防备和反对，更愿意倾听其他观点，这让他们冷静下来，能讲逻辑，从而成为好的Getting to Yes问题解决者。

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Skill 1. Be a mirror: how to quickly establish rapport

Identify wants and needs through active listening

The goal is to identify what your counterparts actually need (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) and get them feeling safe enough to talk and talk and talk some more about what they want. The latter will help you discover the former. Wants are easy to talk about, representing the aspiration of getting our way, and sustaining any illusion of control we have as we begin to negotiate; needs imply survival, the very minimum required to make us act, and so make us vulnerable.

目标是确定对方实际上需要什么（金钱上、情感上或其他方面），并让他们感到足够安全，以便谈论、谈论并进一步谈论他们想要什么。后者将帮助你发现前者。想要的东西很容易谈论，它代表了我们的愿望，并在我们开始谈判时维持任何控制的假象；需要意味着生存，是使我们采取行动的最低要求，因此使我们容易受到伤害。

Neither wants nor needs are where we start; it begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin.

Basics

A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find.

Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously.

People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.

To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say.

Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built.

Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart.

The voice

You can use your voice to intentionally reach into someone’s brain and flip an emotional switch. Distrusting to trusting. Nervous to calm. In an instant, the switch will flip just like that with the right delivery.

The late-night FM DJ voice: Use selectively to make a point. Inflect your voice downward, keeping it calm and slow. When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness.
The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking.
The direct or assertive voice: Used rarely. Will cause problems and create pushback.

Mirroring

Mirroring, also called isopraxism, is essentially imitation. It’s another neurobehavior humans (and other animals) display in which we copy each other to comfort each other. It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, and tone of voice. It’s generally an unconscious behavior—we are rarely aware of it when it’s happening—but it’s a sign that people are bonding, in sync, and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust. While mirroring is most often associated with forms of nonverbal communication, especially body language, as negotiators a “mirror” focuses on the words and nothing else. Not the body language. Not the accent. Not the tone or delivery. Just the words.

Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring or positive reinforcement. Average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.

How disagree without being disagreeable

Use the late-night FM DJ voice.
Start with “I’m sorry …”
Mirror.
Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart.
Repeat

Example:

One of my students experienced the effectiveness of this simple process at her workplace, where her impulsive boss was known for his “drive-bys”: an infuriating practice by which the boss would suddenly swing by one’s office or cubicle unannounced with an “urgent,” poorly thought out assignment that created a lot of unnecessary work. Past attempts at any kind of debate created immediate pushback. “There’s a better way” was always interpreted by this boss as “the lazy way.”
Such a drive-by occurred toward the end of a long consulting engagement, one that had generated literally thousands of documents. The boss, still skeptical of anything “digital,” wanted the security of paper copies. Popping his head into her office, the boss said, “Let’s make two copies of all the paperwork.”
“I’m sorry, two copies?” she mirrored in response, remembering not only the DJ voice, but to deliver the mirror in an inquisitive tone. The intention behind most mirrors should be “Please, help me understand.” Every time you mirror someone, they will reword what they’ve said. They will never say it exactly the same way they said it the first time. Ask someone, “What do you mean by that?” and you’re likely to incite irritation or defensiveness. A mirror, however, will get you the clarity you want while signaling respect and concern for what the other person is saying.
“Yes,” her boss responded, “one for us and one for the customer.”
“I’m sorry, so you are saying that the client is asking for a copy and we need a copy for internal use?”
“Actually, I’ll check with the client—they haven’t asked for anything. But I definitely want a copy. That’s just how I do business.”
“Absolutely,” she responded. “Thanks for checking with the customer. Where would you like to store the in-house copy? There’s no more space in the file room here.”
“It’s fine. You can store it anywhere,” he said, slightly perturbed now.
“Anywhere?” she mirrored again, with calm concern. When another person’s tone of voice or body language is inconsistent with his words, a good mirror can be particularly useful.
In this case, it caused her boss to take a nice, long pause—something he did not often do. My student sat silent. “As a matter of fact, you can put them in my office,” he said, with more composure than he’d had the whole conversation. “I’ll get the new assistant to print it for me after the project is done. For now, just create two digital backups.”
A day later her boss emailed and wrote simply, “The two digital backups will be fine.”

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Skill 2. Tactical Empathy: don’t feel their pain, label it

The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient. The psychotherapist pokes and prods to understand his patient’s problems, and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior. That’s exactly what good negotiators do.

Labeling

Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack. Labeling has a special advantage when your counterpart is tense. Exposing negative thoughts to daylight—“It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail”—makes them seem less frightening.

Labels almost always begin with roughly the same words:
It seems like …
It sounds like …
It looks like …

Neutralize the negative, reinforce the positive. The best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.

Basics

Imagine yourself in your counterpart’s situation. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas (you may well find them crazy). But by acknowledging the other person’s situation, you immediately convey that you are listening. And once they know that you are listening, they may tell you something that you can use.

The reasons why a counterpart will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they will make a deal, so focus first on clearing the barriers to agreement. Denying barriers or negative influences gives them credence; get them into the open.

Pause. After you label a barrier or mirror a statement, let it sink in. Don’t worry, the other party will fill the silence.

Label your counterpart’s fears to diffuse their power. We all want to talk about the happy stuff, but remember, the faster you interrupt action in your counterpart’s amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear, the faster you can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust.

List the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can. Performing an accusation audit in advance prepares you to head off negative dynamics before they take root. And because these accusations often sound exaggerated when said aloud, speaking them will encourage “the other person to claim that quite the opposite is true.

Remember you’re dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood. So use labels to reinforce and encourage positive perceptions and dynamics.

Example 1:

Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s cranky, but the underlying emotion is a sad sense of loneliness from his family never seeing him.
Instead of addressing his grumpy behavior, you acknowledge his sadness in a nonjudgmental way. You head him off before he can really get started.
“We don’t see each other all that often,” you could say. “It seems like you feel like we don’t pay any attention to you and you only see us once a year, so why should you make time for us?”
Notice how that acknowledges the situation and labels his sadness? Here you can pause briefly, letting him recognize and appreciate your attempts to understand what he’s feeling, and then turn the situation around by offering a positive solution.
“For us this is a real treat. We want to hear what you have to talk about. We want to value this time with you because we feel left out of your life.”

Example 2:

Sensing the potential donor’s growing frustration, and wanting to end on a positive note so that they might be able to meet again, my student used another label. “It seems that you are really passionate about this gift and want to find the right project reflecting the opportunities and life-changing experiences the Girl Scouts gave you.”
And with that, this “difficult” woman signed a check without even picking a specific project. “You understand me,” she said as she got up to leave. “I trust you’ll find the right project.”

Example 3:

In front of him at the gate, a very aggressive couple was yelling at the gate agent, who was barely looking at them as she tapped on the computer in front of her; she was clearly making every effort not to scream back. After she’d said, “There’s nothing I can do,” five times, the angry couple finally gave up and left.
To start, watch how Ryan turns that heated exchange to his advantage. Following on the heels of an argument is a great position for a negotiator, because your counterpart is desperate for an empathetic connection. Smile, and you’re already an improvement. “Hi, Wendy, I’m Ryan. It seems like they were pretty upset.”
This labels the negative and establishes a rapport based on empathy. This in turn encourages Wendy to elaborate on her situation, words Ryan then mirrors to invite her to go further.
“Yeah. They missed their connection. We’ve had a fair amount of delays because of the weather.”
“The weather?”
After Wendy explains how the delays in the Northeast had rippled through the system, Ryan again labels the negative and then mirrors her answer to encourage her to delve further.
“It seems like it’s been a hectic day.”
“There’ve been a lot of ‘irate consumers,’ you know? I mean, I get it, even though I don’t like to be yelled at. A lot of people are trying to get to Austin for the big game.”
“The big game?”
“UT is playing Ole Miss football and every flight into Austin has been booked solid.”
“Booked solid?”
Now let’s pause. Up to this point, Ryan has been using labels and mirrors to build a relationship with Wendy. To her it must seem like idle chatter, though, because he hasn’t asked for anything. Unlike the angry couple, Ryan is acknowledging her situation. His words ping-pong between “What’s that?” and “I hear you,” both of which invite her to elaborate.
Now that the empathy has been built, she lets slip a piece of information he can use.
“Yeah, all through the weekend. Though who knows how many people will make the flights. The weather’s probably going to reroute a lot of people through a lot of different places.”
Here’s where Ryan finally swoops in with an ask. But notice how he acts: not assertive or coldly logical, but with empathy and labeling that acknowledges her situation and tacitly puts them in the same boat.
“Well, it seems like you’ve been handling the rough day pretty well,” he says. “I was also affected by the weather delays and missed my connecting flight. It seems like this flight is likely booked solid, but with what you said, maybe someone affected by the weather might miss this connection. Is there any possibility a seat will be open?”
Listen to that riff: Label, tactical empathy, label. And only then a request.
At this point, Wendy says nothing and begins typing on her computer. Ryan, who’s eager not to talk himself out of a possible deal, engages in some silence. After thirty seconds, Wendy prints a boarding pass and hands it to Ryan, explaining that there were a few seats that were supposed to be filled by people who would now arrive much later than the flight’s departure. To make Ryan’s success even better, she puts him in Economy Plus seating.

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Skill 3. Yes/No: How to generate momentum and make it safe to reveal the real stakes

Basics

Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it.

“No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti-“Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it really often just means “Wait” or “I’m not comfortable with that.” Learn how to hear it calmly. It is not the end of the negotiation, but the beginning. After that ask solution-based questions or simply label their effect:
“What about this doesn’t work for you?”
“What would you need to make it work?”
“It seems like there’s something here that bothers you.”

“Yes” is the final goal of a negotiation, but don’t aim for it at the start. Asking someone for “Yes” too quickly in a conversation—“Do you like to drink water, Mr. Smith?”—gets his guard up and paints you as an untrustworthy salesman.

Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you. That’s why “Is now a bad time to talk?” is always better than “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively.”

Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.

If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No”-oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders. The point is that this one-sentence email encapsulates the best of “No”-oriented questions and plays on your counterpart’s natural human aversion to loss. The “No” answer the email demands offers the other party the feeling of safety and the illusion of control while encouraging them to define their position and explain it to you. Just as important, it makes the implicit threat that you will walk away on your own terms.

“No”—or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other party won’t say “No,” you’re dealing with people who are indecisive or confused or who have a hidden agenda. In cases like that you have to end the negotiation and walk away.

There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment.

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Skill 4. Trigger the two words that immediately transform any negotiation: that’s right

With each party having its own set of objectives, its own goals and motivations, the truth is that the conversational niceties—the socially lubricating “yeses” and “you’re rights” that get thrown out fast and furious early in any interaction—are not in any way a substitute for real understanding between you and your partner.

The power of getting to that understanding, and not to some simple “yes,” is revelatory in the art of negotiation. The moment you’ve convinced someone that you truly understand her dreams and feelings (the whole world that she inhabits), mental and behavioral change becomes possible, and the foundation for a breakthrough has been laid.

Creating unconditional positive regard opens the door to changing thoughts and behaviors. Humans have an innate urge toward socially constructive behavior. The more a person feels understood, and positively affirmed in that understanding, the more likely that urge for constructive behavior will take hold.

“That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs.

Use a summary to trigger a “that’s right.” A good summary is the combination of rearticulating the meaning of what is said plus the acknowledgment of the emotions underlying that meaning (paraphrasing + labeling = summary). Identify, rearticulate, and emotionally affirm “the world according to …”

Example:

In her first appointments, the doctor dismissed her product. He said it was no better than the ones he was already using. He was unfriendly. He didn’t even want to hear her viewpoint. When she presented the positive attributes of her product, he interrupted her and knocked them down.
Making the sales pitch, she soaked up as much as possible about the doctor. She learned that he was passionate about treating his patients. Each patient was special in his eyes. Improving their sense of calm and peace was the most important outcome for him. How could she put her understanding of his needs, desires, and passions to work for her?
At her next visit, the doctor asked what medications she wanted to discuss. Rather than tout the benefits of her product, she talked about him and his practice.
“Doctor,” she said, “the last time I was in we spoke about your patients with this condition. I remember thinking that you seemed very passionate about treating them, and how you worked hard to tailor the specific treatment to each and every patient.” He looked her in the eyes as if he were seeing her for the first time.
“That’s right,” he said. “I really feel like I’m treating an epidemic that other doctors are not picking up on—which means that a lot of patients are not getting treated adequately.”
She told him he seemed to have a deep understanding of how to treat these patients, especially because some of them didn’t respond to the usual medications. They talked about specific challenges he had confronted in treating his patients. He gave her examples. When he was finished, she summarized what he had said, especially the intricacies and problems in treatment.
“You seem to tailor specific treatments and medications for each patient,” she said.
“That’s right,” he responded.”
This was the breakthrough she had hoped to reach. The doctor had been skeptical and cold. But when she recognized his passion for his patients—using a summary—the walls came down. He dropped his guard, and she was able to gain his trust. Rather than pitch her product, she let him describe his treatment and procedures. With this, she learned how her medication would fit into his practice. She then paraphrased what he said about the challenges of his practice and reflected them back to him.
Once the doctor signaled his trust and rapport, she could tout the attributes of her product and describe precisely how it would help him reach the outcomes he desired for his patients. He listened intently.
“It might be perfect for treating a patient who has not benefited from the medication I have been prescribing,” he told her. “Let me give yours a try.”

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Skill 5. Bend their reality: How to shape what Is fair

All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared.

Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides.”

Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests.

You can bend your counterpart’s reality by 1) Anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. 2) When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, 3) Use a range to seem less aggressive. 4) Pivoting to nonmonetary terms. After you’ve anchored them high, you can make your offer seem reasonable by offering things that aren’t important to you but could be important to them. Or if their offer is low you could ask for things that matter more to you than them. 5) Use odd numbers. Numbers that end in 0 inevitably feel like temporary placeholders, guesstimates that you can easily be negotiated off of. But anything you throw out that sounds less rounded—say, $37,263—feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation. Such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart, so use them to fortify your offers.

People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.

F-word—“Fair”

The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them.
E.g.
“We just want what’s fair.”
“Okay, I apologize. Let’s stop everything and go back to where I started treating you unfairly and we’ll fix it.”
E.g.
“We’ve given you a fair offer.”
“Fair?” you’d respond, pausing to let the word’s power do to them as it was intended to do to you. Follow that with a label: “It seems like you’re ready to provide the evidence that supports that.”
E.g.
The last use of the F-word is my favorite because it’s positive and constructive. It sets the stage for honest and empathetic negotiation. Here’s how I use it: Early on in a negotiation, I say, “I want you to feel like you are being treated fairly at all times. So please stop me at any time if you feel I’m being unfair, and we’ll address it.”

Negotiate a better salary

BE PLEASANTLY PERSISTENT ON NONSALARY TERMS
Pleasant persistence is a kind of emotional anchoring that creates empathy with the boss and builds the right psychological environment for constructive discussion. And the more you talk about nonsalary terms, the more likely you are to hear the full range of their options. If they can’t meet your nonsalary requests, they may even counter with more money, like they did with a French-born American former student of mine. She kept asking—with a big smile—for an extra week of vacation beyond what the company normally gave. She was “French,” she said, and that’s what French people did. The hiring company was completely handcuffed on the vacation issue, but because she was so darned delightful, and because she introduced a nonmonetary variable into the notion of her value, they countered by increasing her salary offer.

SALARY TERMS WITHOUT SUCCESS TERMS IS RUSSIAN ROULETTE
Once you’ve negotiated a salary, make sure to define success for your position—as well as metrics for your next raise. That’s meaningful for you and free for your boss, much like giving me a magazine cover story was for the bar association. It gets you a planned raise and, by defining your success in relation to your boss’s supervision, it leads into the next step …

SPARK THEIR INTEREST IN YOUR SUCCESS AND GAIN AN UNOFFICIAL MENTOR Remember the idea of figuring what the other side is really buying? Well, when you are selling yourself to a manager, sell yourself as more than a body for a job; sell yourself, and your success, as a way they can validate their own intelligence and broadcast it to the rest of the company. Make sure they know you’ll act as a flesh-and-blood argument for their importance. Once you’ve bent their reality to include you as their ambassador, they’ll have a stake in your success.
Ask: “What does it take to be successful here?”
Please notice that this question is similar to questions that are suggested by many MBA career counseling centers, yet not exactly the same. And it’s the exact wording of this question that’s critical.
Students from my MBA courses who have asked this question in job interviews have actually had interviewers lean forward and say, “No one ever asked us that before.” The interviewer then gave a great and detailed answer.”
The key issue here is if someone gives you guidance, they will watch to see if you follow their advice. They will have a personal stake in seeing you succeed. You’ve just recruited your first unofficial mentor.

Example:

To show how this can be done to near perfection, I can think of no better example than my former MBA student Angel Prado.
While Angel was finishing up his MBA, he went to his boss and began to lay the groundwork for his work post-MBA (which the company was paying). During his last semester, he set a nonspecific anchor—a kind of range—by suggesting to his boss that once he graduated and the company was done investing in his MBA (around $31,000 per year), that money should go to him as salary.
His boss made no commitment, but Angel was pleasantly persistent about it, which set the idea as an anchor in his boss’s mind.
Upon graduation, Angel and his boss had their big sit-down. In an assertive and calm manner, Angel broached a nonfinancial issue to move the focus away from “How much?”: he asked for a new title.
Angel’s boss readily agreed that a new role was a no-brainer after Angel’s new degree.
At that point, Angel and his manager defined what his roles and responsibilities would be in his new role, thereby setting success metrics. Then Angel took a breath and paused so that his boss would be the first to throw out a number. At last, he did. Curiously enough, the number showed that Angel’s earlier efforts at anchoring had worked: he proposed to add $31,000 to Angel’s base salary, almost a 50 percent raise.
But Angel was no rookie negotiator, not after taking my class. So instead of countering and getting stuck in “How much?” he kept talking, labeling the boss’s emotions and empathizing with his situation (at the time the company was going through difficult negotiations with its investors).
And then Angel courteously asked for a moment to step away and print up the agreed-upon job description. This pause created a dynamic of pre-deadline urgency in his boss, which Angel exploited when he returned with the printout. On the bottom, he’d added his desired compensation: “$134.5k—$143k.”
In that one little move, Angel weaved together a bunch of the lessons from this chapter. The odd numbers gave them the weight of thoughtful calculation. The numbers were high too, which exploited his boss’s natural tendency to go directly to his “price limit when faced by an extreme anchor. And they were a range, which made Angel seem less aggressive and the lower end more reasonable in comparison.
From his boss’s body language—raised eyebrows—it was clear that he was surprised by the compensation request. But it had the desired effect: after some comments about the description, he countered with $120,000.
Angel didn’t say “No” or “Yes,” but kept talking and creating empathy. Then, in the middle of a sentence, seemingly out of the blue, his boss threw out $127,000. With his boss obviously negotiating with himself, Angel kept him going. Finally his boss said he agreed with the $134,500 and would pay that salary starting in three months, contingent on the board of directors’ approval. As the icing on the cake, Angel worked in a positive use of the word “Fair” (“That’s fair,” he said), and then sold the raise to his boss as a marriage in which his boss would be the mentor. “I’m asking you, not the board, for the promotion, and all I need is for you to agree with it,” he said.
And how did Angel’s boss reply to his new ambassador?
“I’ll fight to get you this salary.”
So follow Angel’s lead and make it rain!”

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Skill 6. Calibrate questions: create the illusion of control

Calibrated, or open-ended questions can remove aggression from conversations by acknowledging the other side openly, without resistance. In doing so, it lets you introduce ideas and requests without sounding pushy. It allows you to nudge. It’s really as simple as removing the hostility from the statement “You can’t leave” and turning it into a question: “What do you hope to achieve by going?.

As an old Washington Post editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation.

Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information (when or where). These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back.

Bite your tongue. When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question.

There is always a team on the other side. If you are not influencing those behind the table, you are vulnerable.

How to calibrate questions

Ask calibrated questions that start with the words “How” or “What.” By implicitly asking the other party for help, these questions will give your counterpart an illusion of control and will inspire them to speak at length, revealing important information.

Calibrate your questions to point your counterpart toward solving your problem. This will encourage them to expend their energy on devising a solution.

Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.

Non-calibrated	Calibrated
No.	How am I supposed to do that?
You can’t leave.	What do you hope to achieve by going?
Does this look like something you would like?	How does this look to you?/What about this works for you?/What about this doesn’t work for you?
Why did you do it?	What caused you to do it?

Skill 7. Guarantee execution: How to spot the liars and ensure follow-through from everyone else

“Yes” is nothing without “How.”

Ask calibrated “How” questions, and ask them again and again. Asking “How” keeps your counterparts engaged but off balance. Answering the questions will give them the illusion of control. It will also lead them to contemplate your problems when making their demands.

Use “How” questions to shape the negotiating environment. You do this by using “How can I do that?” as a gentle “version of “No.” This will subtly push your counterpart to search for other solutions—your solutions. And very often it will get them to bid against themselves. Other versions of “no”: “Your offer is very generous, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work for me.” or “I’m sorry but I’m afraid I just can’t do that.”

Don’t just pay attention to the people you’re negotiating with directly; always identify the motivations of the players “behind the table.” You can do so by asking how a deal will affect everybody else and how on board they are. “How does this affect the rest of your team?” or “How on board are the people not on this call?” or simply “What do your colleagues see as their main challenges in this area?”

Is the “Yes” real or counterfeit? Test it with the Rule of Three: use calibrated questions, summaries, and labels to get your counterpart to reaffirm their agreement at least three times. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction. There are two key questions you can ask to push your counterparts to think they are defining success their way: “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in. Other questions you can ask: “What’s the biggest challenge you faced? What are we up against here? What do you see as being the most difficult thing to get around?”

A person’s use of pronouns offers deep insights into his or her relative authority. If you’re hearing a lot of “I,” “me,” and “my,” the real power to decide probably lies elsewhere. Picking up a lot of “we,” “they,” and “them,” it’s more likely you’re dealing directly with a savvy decision maker keeping his options open.

Use your own name to make yourself a real person to the other side and even get your own personal discount. Humor and humanity are the best ways to break the ice and remove roadblocks

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Skill 8. Bargain hard

Identify your counterpart’s negotiating style. Once you know whether they are Accommodator, Assertive, or Analyst, you’ll know the correct way to approach them. time = preparation; time = relationship; time = money

type	meaning of time	meaning of silence
Accommodator	relationship	anger
Assertive	money	either you don’t have anything to say or you want them to talk
Analyst	preparation	they want to think

Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation. So design an ambitious but legitimate goal and then game out the labels, calibrated questions, and responses you’ll use to get there. That way, once you’re at the bargaining table, you won’t have to wing it.

Get ready to take a punch. Kick-ass negotiators usually lead with an extreme anchor to knock you off your game. If you’re not ready, you’ll flee to your maximum without a fight. So prepare your dodging tactics to avoid getting sucked into the compromise trap. First, deflect the punch in a way that opens up your counterpart. Successful negotiators often say “No” in one of the many ways we’ve talked about (“How am I supposed to accept that?”) or deflect the anchor with questions like “What are we trying to accomplish here?” Responses like these are great ways to refocus your counterpart when you feel you’re being pulled into the compromise trap. You can also respond to a punch-in-the-face anchor by simply pivoting to terms. What I mean by this is that when you feel you’re being dragged into a haggle you can detour the conversation to the nonmonetary issues that make any final price work. You can do this directly by saying, in an encouraging tone of voice, “Let’s put price off to the side for a moment and talk about what would make this a good deal.” Or you could go at it more obliquely by asking, “What else would you be able to offer to make that a good price for me?” “And if the other side pushes you to go first, wriggle from his grip. Instead of naming a price, allude to an incredibly high number that someone else might charge.

Set boundaries, and learn to take a punch or punch back, without anger. The guy across the table is not the problem; the situation is.

Prepare an Ackerman plan. Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100 percent. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want. On your final number, throw in a nonmonetary item (that they probably don’t want) to show you’re at your limit.

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Skill 9. Finding the black swan: how to create breakthroughs by revealing the unknown unknowns

Here are some of the best techniques for flushing out the Black Swans—and exploiting them. Remember, your counterpart might not even know how important the information is, or even that they shouldn’t reveal it. So keep pushing, probing, and gathering information.

Let what you know—your known knowns—guide you but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Remember the Griffin bank crisis: no hostage-taker had killed a hostage on deadline, until he did.

Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around).

Work to understand the other side’s “religion.” Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That’s where Black Swans live.

Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss.

Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground.

When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information.

Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart’s verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments—at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.

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