Start with No: The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don't Want You to Know

by Jim Camp

We believe that a shared prosperity—a win-win prosperity—is the sustainable one.

I think it’s astonishing that top executives don’t understand that it is precisely the win-win negotiations that are grinding their businesses into the ground.

No, I began to challenge win-win because I quickly learned that it’s all too often win-lose. Make no mistake about it: a simply terrible but supposedly win-win deal is signed every minute in this country. The promise is just manipulation. It’s all double-talk.

Some readers—I’m among them—tend to skim or even skip book introductions. Please don’t do so this time. In order to understand my system, you must understand the dangers inherent in win-win.

Lopez and his cohort at GM developed PICOS, or Program for the Improvement and Cost Optimization of Suppliers.

“cost optimization” was a politically correct euphemism for bludgeoning suppliers into submission.

way for the giant automaker to drive down costs by putting the squeeze on its thousands of suppliers, no matter the result to them.

similar programs for cost optimization or “supply systems

management,”

“If your terms aren’t good enough, we’ll put it up for bid on the Net.” I have no idea how this will all shake out in the years ahead, but I do know it represents more leverage for the big boys.

Many negotiators play the win-win game with an implicit invitation to debilitating early compromise on

the part of their unwary adversaries, who are, in turn, almost programmed into this fatal mistake by the mantra of win-win.

GM acquired the deserved reputation of being a bully, so it and all the other big purchasing companies learned to be even more diligent in their use of win-win rhetoric, playing on our old-fashioned, all-American, Dale Carnegie instinct to win friends and influence people.

They play on the time-honored American tradition of collective bargaining. In fact, almost every recent book on negotiation—many dozens, if not hundreds, including academic texts and popular paperbacks alike—structure their wisdom and advice around legally mandated collective bargaining in labor relations (the National Labor Relations Act of 1935): negotiating in good faith, give-and-take, compromise. In collective bargaining, a negotiator can be sent to jail for failing to bargain in good faith—for rejecting win-win, in effect. It should be no surprise that many win-win gurus in this country were educated and trained in this field.

Please remember this: The negotiators for many of the dominant multinationals are tigers. Most if not all of the great businessmen and businesswomen are tigers.

And I can assure you that negotiators in Saudi Arabia and Japan don’t know about our American tradition of collective bargaining—or if they do, it’s in order to take advantage of the negotiator who comes to their table with that mind-set.

The furthest thought from Ho’s shrewd mind was negotiating

a “wise agreement,” as defined in Getting to Yes, the leading win-win

“A wise agreement can be defined as one that meets the legitimate interests of each side to the extent possible, resolves conflicting interests fairly, is durable,...

Why in the world compromise before you’re certain you have to? Sometimes you do, and that’s fine, but often you don’t, and that’s better. The key point is that with the win-win mind-set, you’ll never know which it is.

No, it’s not a war, and while I realize that the word “adversary” may carry confrontational connotations, I define it as “respected opponent.”

Emotion-Based versus Decision-Based Negotiation

while the various purchasing agents and departments are well skilled in one of the theories of supply systems management that are designed to take advantage of win-win vendors.

the absurdity, and do they understand that both the win-win and the PICOS paradigms are self-defeating?

Both sides were in an emotional box, committed to abstract theories of negotiation, and neither side made good decisions.

This book is a refutation of all such emotion-based negotiating. As an alternative, I present for your consideration decision-based negotiating.

mistake after mistake, that I could not directly control the actions and decisions of my adversary, but I could, through trained habits, better manage my assessment of my adversary and make certain that it was accurate.

Likewise, I couldn’t absolutely control my emotions—no one can—but I could keep them under check, I could keep them from overly influencing my actions,

I focused on what I could control—the means—not what I could not control—the end. The focus of this book is teaching you how to do the same during negotiation, because too many negotiators do just the opposite. They focus on what they cannot control—the end—while losing sight of what they can control—the means.

A lot of things can happen in the end, so Bonds and Sosa can only focus on the means to the end: putting a pure, sweet swing on the ball.

think only in terms of maintaining power and leverage in the process of the swing. If they think in terms of homers, they lose power and leverage by overswinging and lunging at bad pitches.

You cannot control the other party’s actions and decisions—not directly—but you can control your assessment of your adversary’s situation, and you can, with a great deal of work and discipline, control your own actions and decisions, and you can keep your emotions

under check. My system teaches you how to control what you can control in a negotiation. When you do so, you can and will succeed (understanding that success sometimes means walking away with a polite good-bye).

My principle (and title), “Start with No,” is based on the understanding that “no” is a decision. An early “yes” is probably a trick, and “maybe” is just that, maybe, and gets you nowhere. But “no” is a decision that gives everyone something to talk about, tha...

Another rule is “No ...

Large deals, and even smaller ones, don’t “close” in the usual sense of the term. They come together, through vision and decision, over weeks and months and maybe years.

if closing this deal is your goal, your preoccupation, maybe even your life’s dream, then you’re concentrating on what you cannot control and forgetting about what you can control. When negotiating with real pros, you’ll pay the price in the end for this misguided behavior. In my system, you forget about winning and concentrate on the fundamentals of sound decision making.

Win-win is often win-lose because it invites unnecessary compromise, because it is emotion-based, not decision-based, and because it plays to the heart, not to the head. And one more thing: Win-win is not based on definitive principles; it’s based on mush like the definition of a “wise agreement” I’ve already cited.

I know CEOs who are proud of their deal making, but they have no discipline, no real basis for making their decisions. They’re shooting from the hip under the assumption that everyone else is shooting from the hip. But some of their adversaries aren’t. Some are shooting with a telescopic lens and the unwary win-win adversary is the target. It’s not a fair fight.

My book introduces a system. With it, you do know how much discount should have been offered, and you do not offer one dime more.

system, you focus on goals and behavior you can control and ignore results you cannot control. The system is pretty simple to understand, I believe,

The list is endless, and the principles and system I introduce in this book apply to all of them.

The content of this book is contrarian, but the structure couldn’t be more straightforward: fourteen chapters that introduce, one by one, the principles and practices of my system.

I’m inclined to give credence to the theories of learning that suggest we humans need about eight hundred hours to truly master a complex concept and the habits necessary for its application.

If you work hard to understand and put to good use the principles and practices revealed in this short book, you will become an immeasurably better negotiator. That’s a fact.

In my work I often use the image “dance with the tiger,” because the tiger is viewed or even worshiped around the

world as the ultimate predator. To dance well—to negotiate well—we must hear the music, we must feel the music, we must be tuned in to our partner—our “adversary”—at all times, we must follow carefully established steps with discipline. This book provides such a discipline and such a system.

This is nuts-and-bolts material that you will immediately be able to apply in your business negotiations as well as in all other aspects of your life. You will learn how to lay out a negotiation on paper and control it step-by-step, how to react effectively to anything that happens at the negotiating table, how never to be caught flat-footed, even how to walk away with a smile, if need be.

Like all predators, we humans often take advantage of the fear-racked, the distressed, the vulnerable, the needy. We’re capable of wonderful altruism as well, but we don’t find too much altruism in the business and negotiation world,

In your life as a negotiator, even in your life as a private citizen of the world, you are dealing with some serious predators who are looking for the slightest sign of distress and neediness. It is absolutely imperative that you as a negotiator understand the importance of this point. You do NOT need this deal, because to be needy is to lose control and make bad decisions.