Negotiation

Questions and model answers

1. How do you usually approach a negotiation?

   I ask what they need first, which sounds like a tactic and started as cowardice. I hated stating a number, so I would get them talking until I could work out what actually mattered to them, and it turns out that is the useful half anyway. Most of what looks like a disagreement about price is a disagreement about timing or risk. The mistake I still make is walking in wanting one thing. If there is only one variable you are just haggling and somebody has to lose. With three you can trade. A landlord taught me that by refusing to drop the rent by a single dollar and then cheerfully giving me two months of notice instead.

2. Is it better to hide your emotions during a negotiation?

   Hide the reaction, show the interest. Those two get collapsed into one instruction and they are opposites. If the other side can read that a delay would hurt me, that information is now theirs and they will price it, so I keep my face still about pressure. But hiding what I actually want is just inefficient. They cannot give me the thing if they do not know which thing it is, and pretending not to care about something I care about wastes the whole conversation working out what we are even discussing. The version of poker face that people teach is mostly about not looking desperate, and that is a much smaller claim than never showing anything at all.

3. Tell me about a negotiation you remember.

   Buying a used car with my father, and he did almost nothing, which turned out to be the lesson. He asked the price, the seller said it, and then my father simply did not respond. It was not a tactic he had read about somewhere. He is a slow person and he was thinking. The silence ran maybe eight seconds and the seller filled it himself by lowering the number, unprompted, while nobody had argued about anything. I have tried to copy it since and I am much worse at it, because I know why I am doing it and it comes out as a technique rather than as a pause. What made it work was that he genuinely had nothing to say yet.

4. Would you prepare differently for a negotiation that really mattered?

   Yes, though most of what people call preparation is rehearsing what they will say, and that is the part that matters least. Three things are worth knowing before you walk in. What you will do if there is no deal, which sets the floor and is the only real source of calm in the room. What the other side is measured on, which is rarely the same as what they are asking for. And which of your requirements are actually requirements, because I have gone in with five and discovered under pressure that two were preferences I had never examined. Rehearsing sentences prepares you for the conversation you imagined. Knowing those three prepares you for the one you get.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.