David Sally - One Step Ahead: Mastering the Art and Science of Negotiation

THE EMPTY-HANDED PROFESSOR

(or, Where does this book come from?)

I have taught negotiation for the last twenty-five years with two simple aims: to demystify the subject for the MBAs and executives in my classroom, and to help them appreciate the intricacies and subtleties of being a great negotiator.

Each student begins with a different baseline, in terms of both their understanding of how negotiation really works and their comfort level. But theres a fundamental insight that separates the sophisticated negotiators from everyone else. They recognize that while there are different approaches to bargainingaggressive versus conciliatory, demanding versus persuasivethe key to negotiation is realizing that its a psychological and social process in which being able to recognize certain things about the person with whom you are negotiating, and adapting your approach accordingly, is crucial. Hence your ability to develop a particular set of observational skills, so that you can suss out your counterparts strategy and anticipate their tactics, and directorial skills, so that you can guide their performance, frame their perceptions, prime their words, and arouse their wants, is essential.

These advanced negotiation skills are extremely teachable. But their development takes hard work and time. A week with executives or a couple of months with the MBAs is enough for them to reduce their fears, gain insights into the game, significantly improve their performances, and in the end realize that this one course is not sufficient. Consequently, many of them come to me with a question I used to dread: What can we read to keep learning? My answer had always consisted of three parts: (1) How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936), (2) Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury (1981), and (3) But neither of those books will get you all the way there. That requires becoming an analytical observer of the people around you. Read novels and biographies, go to plays, watch movies and television, take notes on your families and co-workers, and draw out your own lessons about how people really negotiate and interact.

Number three wasnt that helpful, because the students really didnt know what to look for or how to organize their observations. And so I followed my own advice and started to gather data, studies, theories, experiments, ideas, characters, and stories that illuminated with particular clarity the qualities of the most sophisticated negotiators. Drawing on what Ive learned in my class about the preconceptions people bring to the subject of negotiation (some of which my own research has shown to be both debilitating and dead wrong) and utilizing the insights of economics, psychology, and sociology, I set out to write a book that reveals the real world in which negotiations take place.

Why is this book called One Step Ahead? Well explore the research and the details in the chapters to come, but for now, Ill tell you that its based on my simple observation that the best negotiators, the ones who manage to craft creative deals that achieve the ambitious targets theyve set for themselves while leaving their counterparts happy and ready to bargain again in the future, dig deeper into every element of a negotiationthe alternatives, the social pressures, the interests, the biases, the drama, the emotions, the words, the numbersthan their counterparts do. Also, because any negotiation is a constantly evolving process, and every person and situation is different, the best negotiators do not completely predetermine their actions or follow a set bargaining recipe. Rather, they read their counterpart and react; they mold the situation to create the necessary pressures; they improvise.

The need for One Step Ahead and the newness and comprehensiveness of its approach will become clearer if we examine the strengths and weaknesses of its two illustrious predecessors.

Though his book How to Win Friends and Influence People continues to sell briskly, Dale Carnegies personal history is largely forgotten. He grew up on farms in Missouri during the years in which the twentieth century sprouted out of the plowed-under nineteenth. As a young man he attended a local teachers college. Hungry for success and female attention, and unable to throw either a curveball or a spiral, he entered scholastic public speaking contests. One acolyte wrote that Carnegie practiced his talks as he sat in the saddle galloping to college and back and as he milked the cows. By his senior year, he was a trophy-winning speaker.

After an initial attempt to make his living selling bacon, soap, and lard, he lit out for New York City in 1911, enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Despite the training, Carnegie remained more ham salesman, alas, than Hamlet and was not offered any steadily paying acting jobs. Not wanting to return to sales or the Midwest, he convinced several YMCAs in the city to allow him to offer classes on public speaking. The attendance at his courses grew steadily, he aggressively marketed the benefits to potential students, and his renown spread.

Over Carnegies twenty-plus years of training, he shifted his lessons from public speaking to all forms of the fine art of getting along with people in everyday business and social contacts. He went searching for a book that was a practical, working handbook on human relations and, failing to find one, set out to write one himself. He read biographies and magazine profiles of great men and women, studied the old philosophers and the new psychologists, and personally interviewed scores of successful people.

From all of these sources Carnegie distilled a set of precepts that he encouraged attendees of his training sessions to apply out in the world and then recount their successes to future classes. Some of Carnegies principles were fine pieces of wisdom, and you will find echoes of them in the pages that follow. One of his three fundamental principles in handling counterparts was to arouse in the other person an eager want. To support the rule Become genuinely interested in other people, which is a necessary counterweight to our natural egoism, he cited a relevant statistic:

The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have guessed it: it is the personal pronoun I. I. I. It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations. I. I. I. I.

He saw that getting along with other people is a game, one that can be played honestly and with integrity, but in which you sometimes need to throw down a challenge: