NEGOTIATION BOOKS BY JIM CAMP

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

By Jim Camp

Introduction

How often over the past couple of decades have we read or heard the phrase "win-win"? Hundreds-thousands. Could anyone possibly disagree that it is the only acceptable paradigm for business negotiation? Yes, I do. Based on my twenty years of experience as a negotiation training coach, I, Jim Camp, believe win-win negotiation is hopelessly misguided as a basis for good negotiating. I simply reject it. Of the various ideas in my negotiation training system I could have chosen for the title of my book, I selected Start with No® expressly to emphasize my profound disagreement with win-win negotiation, which implicitly urges you to get to yes as quickly as possible, by almost any means necessary.

Win-win trained negotiating is the worst possible way to get the best possible deal. My Coach2100® negotiation training system is the best possible way to get the best possible deal.

But haven't 1,500 books and countless monographs and articles been written about the virtues of win-win negotiation training? Can all these professors, consultants, and assorted experts be wrong? Yes. Make no mistake about it: a simply terrible but supposedly win-win negotiating deal is signed every minute in this country. The promise is just manipulation. It's all double-talk. But even as the win-win trained negotiating corpses pile up, the unwary are still legion.

I am not a genius. I am not the first professional negotiator to understand the inherent weakness of the reigning philosophy. Not at all. Many, many corporate opportunists and shrewd negotiators in every field understand that a gung-ho win-win trained negotiator on the other side of the table is a sitting duck. A number of high-level corporate negotiation strategies have been developed for the sole purpose of defeating weak win-win trained negotiators. Consulting companies peddle new procurement software for "interactive electronic commerce" as a way for their clients to dominate their suppliers. The Web will facilitate the growth of huge buying cooperatives, multibillion-dollar initiatives that will allow competitors to combine their buying power in order to drive down suppliers' prices and add another tool to their "cost optimization" arsenal. I have no idea how this will all shake out in the years ahead, but I do know that win-win trained negotiating isn't quite what these conglomerates have in mind.

Major business schools have developed similar negotiation training programs for "cost optimization" or "supply systems management," as they are also labeled. In fact, the school that teaches the win-win negotiation mantra in a training course on negotiation may also teach, right across the hall, a training course in "supply system management" that is expressly designed to destroy the win-win negotiation model! Mind-boggling. In many, many corporations, the sales force adheres to the win-win negotiation paradigm and therefore compromises at every opportunity in its desperation to "get the business," while the various purchasing agents and departments are well-skilled in supply systems management and love nothing better than eviscerating win-win trained negotiation vendors. Do the CEOs understand the contradiction here, the absurdity?

The Fatal Invitation

What is the poison that resides at the heart of the Big Lie that is win-win negotiation training? You've heard of the deadly stuff. It's called compromise. Wily negotiators play the win-win negotiation game by extending an implicit invitation to debilitating early compromise on the part of their unwary prey. These smooth-talking negotiators do not compromise, but they demand that you do. And you are almost programmed into this fatal mistake by the mantra of win-win negotiation training. All the while, however, the predators are careful to put the happy face on their negotiations. They are diligent in their use of win-win negotiation rhetoric-"Let's team up on this, partner"-playing on our old-fashioned, all-American, Dale Carnegie instinct to win friends and influence people.

They also play on the time-honored American tradition of collective bargaining. In fact, almost every recent book on negotiation training structures its 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 negotiation, in effect. It should be no surprise that many of the original win-win trained negotiating gurus in this country were educated and trained in this field.

In and of itself, tightly regulated collective bargaining is fine. So is generic "bargaining in good faith." Of course you want to bargain and negotiate in good faith. I insist on it with my negotiation training clients. But shrewd negotiators prey on the goodwill of weak win-win trained negotiators. When they say, "Now, you have to consider our legitimate interests here. We have to have a little good faith here, a little win-win negotiating," what is the first thought of the earnest win-win trained negotiation team across the table? It's probably that they have to give up something if they need to sign this deal, and of course they do need to sign this deal, it's such a big one for their company.

When naïve, eager-to-earn win-winners are negotiating with cunning tigers who have also read the win-win negotiation training books, they are in terrible jeopardy. I dare you to walk into the negotiating room with these tigers, or with a team of "cost optimization" negotiators, while using one of the win-win negotiation textbooks as your bible. I believe that's "Taps" I hear playing in the background.

Why in the world would you compromise in a negotiation 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 negotiation training mindset, you'll never know which it is. Please think carefully about this for a moment: Win-win negotiation and compromise are a defeatist mindset from the first handshake. Negotiating under the banner of win-win negotiation, you have no way of knowing if you've made good and necessary negotiating decisions leading up to the compromise.

Let me illustrate with a quick, true story. Imagine that you are one of a small crew of young software hotshots in Silicon Valley and a Japanese firm offered to license your state-of-the-art technology for $400,000. You need some capital; here's some nice capital. You and your team live on practically nothing, this money might get you over the hump, and these investors are smart enough to think highly of your work and kind enough to go out on a limb for you. It's a good win-win negotiation deal, right? So this team thought, and they were tempted to accept the initial offer. Then they met me, and I suggested a different approach because I found out that this Japanese firm that had pretended for six months that this $400,000 offer was all they could afford was actually a subterfuge group working on behalf of a major Japanese car manufacturer to buy American technology as cheaply as possible. Such "hit squads," as they're known, are notorious in Silicon Valley, and their equivalents operate in every field of business, large and small, and usually under the humanitarian guise of win-win negotiation. The final negotiated fee for that crew's technology was $8 million. Why? Because that's what it was worth. Win-win trained negotiation would never have netted what that technology was worth.

Sure win-win negotiation training sounds good! That's exactly why it's so dangerous and why you have to be so careful.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

My negotiation training work, my negotiation book, and my Coach2100® negotiation training system are a refutation of all such compromise-based negotiation training, all such emotion-based negotiating. As an alternative, I teach and I coach systematic decision-based negotiating. In the end, I believe you'll agree that the difference between the two is clear and that the choice between the two is easy.

As a pilot in the Air Force, I learned, first in the classroom and then by practice in the cockpit, decision after decision, mistake after mistake, that I could not directly control the actions and decisions of another pilot, but I could manage my assessment of that pilot. With good decision-making skills, I had a chance at maintaining control of the situation. Likewise, I couldn't absolutely control my emotions -- no one can -- but I could keep them under check. With carefully constructed behavioral habits, I could keep them from overly influencing my actions. This is precisely how the surgeon or any other practitioner learns his or her craft: through practice, study, making good and bad decisions, correcting the bad ones, more practice, more study, more decisions, more corrections.

We should focus on what we can control -- the means -- not on what we cannot control -- the end. My negotiation training and coaching work teaches the negotiation client how to do just this. Too many negotiators do the opposite, focusing on what they cannot control -- the huge payday at the end of the negotiation -- while losing sight of what they can control -- the means.

As trained negotiators, we cannot control the other party's actions and decisions, not directly, but we can control our assessment of those actions and decisions, and we can, with a great deal of work and discipline, control our own actions and decisions, and we can keep our emotions under check. My negotiation training system teaches how to control what you can control in a negotiation. When we do so, we can and will succeed (understanding that success sometimes means walking away with a polite goodbye).

To repeat: Win-win trained negotiation is often win-lose because it invites unnecessary compromise, because it is emotion-based, not decision-based. It plays to the heart, not to the head.

A win-win negotiation is not controlled in a clear, step-by-step way. I know many men and women in business who are proud of their deal-making, but they have no negotiation 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 negotiators aren't. Some are shooting with a telescopic lens, and the unwary win-win trained negotiation adversary is the target. It's not a fair fight.

Perhaps you have heard Ross Perot's often-told story about the American who wants to buy a camel, pulls up at a tent with half a dozen camels staked in front, and asks the owner about one particular animal. The bedouin replies, "Oh, that's my son's camel, his pet. I couldn't sell that one." The American looks nonplussed, gets back into his Range Rover and starts to drive off. The bedouin runs after him shouting, "I thought you wanted to buy my camel!"

I agree with Ross Perot: Americans don't know how to negotiate! But how did these businesspeople get to the top, if they're such incompetent negotiators? I'll tell you how. Since win-win trained negotiation isn't a negotiation training system and offers no real basis for judging those who "use" it, negotiation mediocrity flourishes without being detected. So what if the negotiator settled for offering a twenty-seven percent volume discount, while his bosses were hoping he'd only have to offer twenty-four. He tried, and it's only a three-percent difference, and it was win-win trained negotiating, so break out the bubbly. No one has any idea how much, if any, volume discount should have been offered and would have been accepted. Or change the perspective: the buyer was hoping to get a twenty-seven percent discount but only got twenty-four, and under win-win negotiation training who knows how much she could have gotten with better negotiating? So break out the bubbly on the other side of the table, too.

Likewise, any company that relies on Customer Relations Management (CRM) as a key tool is, in effect, negotiating looking in the rearview mirror. Of course you want to know a given customer's purchasing history, but you don't want this history to dictate your negotiating stance in the present, much less in the future. But that's exactly what a lot of CRM companies do. They look at the old numbers, do a little calculating, and -- presto! -- come up with the negotiation strategy for the next sales call. They are living in the past, literally. They have no idea what's going on with this customer now. They have no good vision of the customer's future. It's sad, actually. Worse, it's costly.

The Negotiation Difference

The Coach2100® negotiation training system is utterly different. It delivers a dramatic competitive advantage in negotiation. It not only presents powerful negotiation training principles and guides from A-to-Z, but each negotiation training client is supported and coached by an academic coach and a negotiation coach that help the negotiation training client learn to manage their negotiations in the future not the past.

With the negotiation training system, you focus on goals and behavior you can control and ignore what you cannot control. The negotiation training system is pretty simple to understand, I believe, in its basics, but it does take strict discipline and a great deal of practice to employ successfully. It is not a lot of negotiation training theory dreamed up in an ivory tower that looks pretty good on paper but doesn't pass the smell test (much less the bottom-line test). The negotiation training system was developed in the real world of business negotiations and is used with tremendous success in this real world every day. I've spent a good deal of time studying in the ivory tower, reading about the great decision-makers, but I've never lived or worked there.

The Coach2100® negotiation training program changes the mindset of the negotiator. Out with compromise and emotion, in with decisions -- good decisions. The negotiation training system identifies the thinking and habits of the old, inferior, costly win-win negotiation training mindset and replaces them with the knowledge base and habits of decision-based negotiation training that yield competitive advantage.

Change is difficult, of course. I understand that. It's not possible to erase years of accumulated win-win negotiation training jargon and habits in a day or two. However, it is possible to do so within 120 days. The Coach2100® negotiation training program consists of 17 tutorials; three extensive, interactive negotiation training simulations; and a negotiation training management system. Each negotiation training client spends 60 days in the academic portion and is supported by an academic coach. After the first 20 days of academics the negotiation training client and academic coach are joined by the negotiation coach who for the next 100 days works with the client applying the negotiation training system to real negotiations. Coaching provides support. With this guided effort and study, the negotiation training client learns, the client changes.

The negotiation training lessons introduce the key elements of the negotiation training system and help build the habits of decision-based negotiation. It takes the negotiation training client an average of 30 minutes per day, five days per week, for 60 days to complete the academic portion.

The Coach2100 negotiation training Simulator provides simulations that allow the negotiation training client to learn, train, practice, and make mistakes in a safe environment. The negotiation training system guides the client from his or her wrong negotiation decisions to the right ones. Inevitably, the negotiation training client acquires a clearer understanding of the principles and a better handle on the practices of decision-based negotiating. The negotiation training system allows the client, to demonstrate levels of mastery and qualification.

The Coach2100 Negotiation Training and Management System -- maintained and monitored daily -- develop the disciplined habits of preparation-execution-debriefing that are fundamental to decision-based negotiation training.

I told the readers of Start with No® that they might pull off a successful negotiation -- or at least obtain a serendipitous result -- without the Jim Camp negotiation training system, but they would negotiate many more good deals with this negotiation training system, and that they would not get bogged down or suckered into a single bad negotiation with this negotiation training system. I would have offered a guarantee if I could have figured out a reasonable way to do so.

With the Coach2100® negotiation program of training, I do offer a guarantee. I believe that we have the very finest negotiations training package in the world. We have spent years developing Coach2100 negotiation training and all of its elements. Anyone who does our negotiation training protocol will develop a more powerful mindset, change the way they negotiate and be astonished by the success. If they are not satisfied I will refund their fee in full.

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