NEGOTIATION TRAINING BOOKS BY JIM CAMP

Excerpt from No: The Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home

By Jim Camp

Introduction

The best word in the English language must be "yes." You please the other person. You satisfy their request. You get something done, make a deal. Everyone is happy, break out the bubbly. Likewise, the worst word must be "no." It rubs everyone the wrong way. It implies rejection and intransigence. It stops this deal right in its tracks. It's a killer.

Or so everyone in this compromise and assumption based world seems to believe. In truth, this thinking should be flipped on its head. In negotiation, "yes" is the worst word. It just betrays a fear of failure, a fear of losing this deal, and primes you to please the other side, to rush ahead, to compromise early and often, to come to a deal, any deal. "No" is the best word. It's what you want to be prepared to say and to hear. "No" will liberate and protect you. It releases the emotional pressure in negotiation. It gives you a safe framework with which to determine the best course.

Consider Bill, successful sales rep for Midwest Widgets, who handles the Dupont account. Midwest has enjoyed Dupont's business for seven years, and there's been no indication that the situation is about to change. Midwest makes an excellent widget and gets a fair price for it. Suddenly, though, the largely ceremonial sales call at Dupont takes a nasty turn. Steve, the new purchasing agent, tells Bill: "I'm sorry, but we're changing our widget supplier. I'm fed up with your company's arrogant behavior and have decided to choose from three of your competitors who've been beating down my door for years to get a piece of the action."

Bill, like many salespeople, immediately assumes that Steve and Dupont are actually maneuvering for a price discount, and he believes his only recourse is to immediately give in and compromise. Drop the price, save the business. Bill instantly runs the numbers. How small a discount can he put on the table and keep the Dupont contract? How large a discount would cost him his job? Almost instinctively, he asks Steve what price will be required to keep the account. Steve has to work hard not to gloat in triumph. This was so easy. He already has Bill exactly where he wants him, and he replies: "Well, Bill, I appreciate your willingness to give us a better deal, but I'm not sure you can keep the business at any price. But I'm willing to go to bat for you with my committee if you knock 14 cents off the unit price."

Lose the Dupont account?! Bill might as well get out his resume and put his home on the market. Emotional chaos is not too strong a word for describing his plight at this moment. His emotions are raging, his heart is pounding, but he is able to muster the wherewithal to ask for a time-out, which Steve grants, and he calls Susan, his sales director. It's a new world with Dupont, he tells Susan. The only way to keep the account is with a big discount -- 14 cents per widget. Otherwise, Dupont is going elsewhere.

Now Susan is a partner in the chaos. Bill's failure would be her failure. Just as Bill has taken everything Steve with Dupont has said at face value, she takes everything Bill has reported at straight value. Do you think he'll take 12 cents, Bill? Both assume that the 14 cents is Steve's high number, but he'll knock it down a little. Neither Bill nor Susan has any idea what's really going on with Dupont. All they know is that it's a win-win negotiating world: you ask, I give, it's a deal!

I call this emotion-based negotiation. Steve with Dupont is playing on Bill and Susan's fear of failure, their fear of losing the deal. He is rather crudely trying to manipulate their instinct to say yes and their fear of saying "no." This is the oldest game in the negotiation rules book, but it works a million times a day. Meanwhile, I teach and preach the negotiation training system based on "no" which in a negotiation simply means maintaining the status quo. If Steve wants 14 cents knocked off the price of each widget, a "no" from Bill just holds things in a safe place. From here Bill can then make a decision whether to give all, part, or none of the increase, based on the facts, not the emotion of the moment as he sees his job and possibly his career unraveling.

The impulse to say "yes" (as advocated in Getting to Yes, as well as its many imitators) undermines you, at the very least, while the "no" strategy will liberate and protect you by releasing the emotional pressure in a negotiation. It provides a safe framework with which to determine the best course.

To see how, in brief, let's rewind Bill's story. If Bill is using the "no" system, Steve's bombshell about the 14-cent discount doesn't faze him in the least, because he responds with his negotiation training system rather than fearful assumption driven emotion. As Bill carefully considers Midwest's mission and purpose, he notes that they can't support a significant compromise just because anyone asks for it. Judging Midwest by its own standards, Bill decides that Steve and DuPont will have to do better than that.

Bill will ask Steve several questions, all aimed at building Steve's vision of what it would mean to Dupont to change its widget supplier. Where have we fallen short, Steve? How many failures has Dupont encountered with the Midwest widget on its production line? How much risk of failure can Dupont absorb with a new, unproven widget? Bill would ask these questions in a certain way, and he would listen to the answers in a certain way. Of course, he would already know the real answers: the Midwest failure rate, how much risk Dupont can take, the quality and the price of the competitors' widgets.

In short, Bill will say "no" to the sudden request for the big price discount while giving the negotiation a solid foundation on which to build. So many people in business are afraid that saying "no" in this way will make Steve walk away, but he won't, believe me. After all, Midwest hasn't been Dupont's widget supplier for seven years for no good reason. In the end, Bill and Midwest may give some ground on price -- or they may not. Regardless, that decision would be based on facts, not assumptions, not fearful emotions. That decision will be based on Steve's new vision of what a change in suppliers will actually mean for DuPont. It could well be that this vision will support a price increase, not a discount. I have seen it happen many times.

Regardless, the "no" negotiating system guides Bill and protects him every step of the way, and it will do the same for you. In your personal and working life, you make all sorts of agreements every day. That is, you negotiate. These negotiated agreements -- big and small -- have as great an impact on your life as anything else. They drive your life, really. All of our lives. But how many of us approach these negotiations truly aware of what we're really doing? Not many. Often we get away with this easygoing or oblivious attitude, or so it seems. Sometimes we don't even know we are in a negotiation, let alone prepare for it -- until it's too late. Who hasn't experienced the panic that sets in after some rash decision or agreement you really didn't think about, or whose consequences you didn't realize. Show me the person who hasn't been blindsided when a negotiation has gone off the rails entirely. What just happened?! Now what should I do?

Take my good friend Ralph, a developer who had invested his entire fortune in a project in California. In this region, conservation and protection of natural resources are very important to the community, and Ralph found himself negotiating against a local council that he considered more than difficult; to him, they were impossible. As we enjoyed cocktails and the setting sun on my back deck, he unloaded on me with his woes dealing with what he perceived as a group of people driving him out of business.

Ralph, what do they want?

To give me a hard time. To drive me out of the valley.

No, seriously, what are they after?

Well, what do you mean, Jim?

This is a negotiation. What do they want from it? Something is driving them.

My friend mulled my question in silence and realized he had no idea what they wanted. As we sat on the deck he started making some wild guesses. I listened for a few minutes before I stopped him, stepped inside the house, and returned with a sheet of paper. On the spot, we started to build a negotiation plan. What was the long-term aim, the continuing task and responsibility of Ralph's development? What were the problems to be faced and overcome? What did the community hope to gain from this development? What did "their world" demand?

While Ralph knew what he wanted from the negotiation, that was about it. He had no idea what they wanted -- the local council. He had no idea how to proceed when the negotiation situation got the least bit complicated. He had no thought process to guide his negotiation work, no solid negotiation plan to support and enhance his decisions. In fact, he had never even thought of negotiation as a series of decisions. Instead, he had been negotiating with his emotions -- excitement, maybe some fear. He was burdened with unwarranted assumptions. His crystal ball was very cloudy, which is worse than no crystal ball at all. No wonder he got into trouble and hated to negotiate with that council.

Once Ralph discovered he could negotiate based on decisions and use no to his great advantage, he faced the council with greater negotiation skill and confidence. In the end, his real-estate development was completed to the satisfaction of almost everyone. My purpose in this negotiation book is to provide you with the same new negotiation mindset I provided Ralph 20 years ago and still provide my negotiation training clients today. Negotiation is negotiation, whether it's:

• handling a complex multi-million dollar negotiation deal that could make or break a business,
• submitting a career building proposal to your boss,
• gaining admission to the university of your choice,
• settling a dispute with the pool contractor (or with the homeowner),
• getting your child to agree to go to bed,
• getting that summer internship or landing that first job,
• making progress during a dicey parent-teacher conference.

Using my negotiation training system you can negotiate anything. No more hopes and prayers. No more fear and panic. You will know where you stand at all times, and what to do next. No more guessing and unnecessary giving in. No wasted answers and offers, immediately regretted. You will understand any conflict or issue involving another human being as a negotiation you can reasonably control with planning and solid decision-making.

Chaos does not have to rule, in either your business or everyday life. There is a much better way, and it's not rocket science. My "no" negotiation training system is a set of clear negotiation training principles and practices that you follow step by step by step. My negotiation training system is for mom, dad, the kids, the entrepreneur, the professional corporate negotiator, the CEO, the teacher, the realtor, the banker, the politician, the carpenter, the diplomat.

I want you to think about negotiation a little differently -- a lot differently -- and to see negotiation not as a chore or a nightmare but as a challenge you learn to enjoy -- with no, you have much control over the outcome. No more wondering: What just happened?! Now what should I do?! Those days are gone forever. You're safe now. Your back is covered.

In order to understand the power of "No," you must first understand that no rejects the compromise and assumption driven reigning paradigm in negotiation training today. If this makes you wince -- after all, who doesn't want to "get to yes" -- hang in for a few pages. The "No" negotiation training system is not just contrarian. It creates an entirely new paradigm for negotiation training -- one that makes common sense, then intellectual sense, then practical sense in your life and work.

If you're a devotee of required compromise and endless assumption negotiation training, there are many businesspeople -- I'm one of them -- who have you for lunch every day. They have developed high-level negotiation training strategies whose objective is to take advantage of your negotiation mindset of assumption and compromise. These negotiation training strategies, I want you to know, accomplish their goal without too much trouble, grinding negotiators and their businesses into the dirt day in and day out. Think Steve and Dupont. My plan with this negotiation training book is to enable you to turn the tables on these folks. "No" will give you the upper hand over negotiation training strategies like Steve's and all other negotiating strategies. Throughout these chapters I will include real-life stories of my negotiation training clients achieving great success using my negotiation training system. You'll see firsthand the powerful results produced by "no" every day.

For the fun of it, I sometimes introduce my negotiation training system and the "no" principle with the story about the day I watched my granddaughter Lilly negotiate with her mom over going to bed. I watched as three-year-old Lilly said no to her mom 5 times and in the end got exactly what she wanted. Lilly sure wasn't afraid to say no or hear no, she just kept negotiating. Persistence is important to the success of "no."

If you're a parent, you know that every child hears "no" as the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. As adults, however, we've been conditioned and trained to fear the word, so with audiences and negotiation training clients I slowly and carefully go about proving that politely saying "no," calmly hearing "no," and just inviting "no" has a beneficial impact on any negotiation. In fact, the invitation for the other side to say "no" has an amazing power to bring down barriers and allow for solid beneficial communication. Giving someone permission to say "no" takes pressure off by lowering the intensity of emotions. Since the subject right now is children, let's say you're the parent walking into a parent-teacher conference to discuss your child's lack of self-control and respect for authority. This could be a very tough meeting with trouble possibly brewing. You've already had a talk with Johnny and you have a plan to help solve this and get Johnny on the right track. You are here hoping to gain the teacher's help. This is a negotiation, plain and simple, and you should begin this exchange with a clear statement to the teacher that you have a plan and you want her to feel comfortable rejecting your ideas. You want her to be comfortable in saying "no".

You would be well-advised to say at the first opportunity, "Mrs. Jones, I have noticed some restlessness in Johnny and I have a plan to solve this problem he is creating. I want you to feel comfortable rejecting the plan and feel free to give me your ideas. "That said, my impression right now is that…."

This straightforward invitation for the teacher to say "no" allows him or her to feel comfortable and, if necessary, tell you what's really going on. And you must really mean this, because you probably don't know what's really going on at the school. If you're the teacher, you might begin the conference by saying, "Mr. Smith, I don't know you well at all. I only know Johnny. He's a good boy, but I've been teaching 23 years, and his behavior at times does prompt some questions. May I ask them? Please, set me straight." This is a slightly more subtle invitation to "no" -- and one the teacher should also mean. For both parent and teacher, the simple invited "no" is a liberation. Barriers come down immediately, making room for a concerted effort to solve the problem.

Back to business. Say your company is saddled with a terrible contract ginned up by a negotiator now long gone. You're losing money on every shipment under this deal. Something has to give. A plausible negotiation strategy is a phone call "right to the top" at the other company in which you say flat out, "We did a terrible job negotiating with you. You probably knew that at the time. I didn't. Now I do. We can't continue this way, we're stuck. How can we fix this? When can you and I meet to discuss a solution?"

A lot of people would shy away from such a phone call, others will be flabbergasted at the very idea, but in fact it's the safest thing you can do. It's simply an honest statement of the situation. No, we can't continue down the fatal path my former people put us on, but we can solve this problem. Let's talk. And you know what? The other company will be happy to talk. Why? It is the most effective decision on their part if they want to keep your business.

I emphasize the power of "no" in order to emphasize that good negotiation is all about making good decisions. "No" gives you the new negotiation mindset with which to make good decisions in any negotiation whatsoever. With this negotiation training principle opening the door, you are prepared to handle both the parent-teacher conference and the shipment that's losing money.

I want to be very clear: the "no" principle is not about intransigence. Just the opposite. It's about openness and honesty. The invitation to "no" tells everyone at the negotiation table that we're all adults here, let's talk rationally. Let's slow things down. Let's take away the fear of failure. "No" allows everyone involved to put away the need to be right, to be the strongest, to be the toughest. It allows you to put aside the need to feel safe and secure and liked by the other side, and it prevents you from making terrible negotiation decisions because of your need to feel safe and secure and liked by the other side. "No" says to everyone at the negotiation table, Let's bury any rush to judgment born of the getting-to-yes mentality. Relax, "no" says, I'm not trying to fleece you, and you're not about to fleece me.

If you're having a hard time believing "no" really brings the barriers down and takes the air out of emotion, do me a favor. Try it. Mark your place and don't read another page until you get the opportunity -- or can create the opportunity -- to put "no" to a simple test -- in the home, the office, at school, church, anywhere. Someone is going to ask you to do something or to agree with them on a topic or issue or you can ask someone to do something or to agree with you. Just create a harmless little situation at the water cooler and say, "Gee, Jane, I can't do that, but tell me…." Or, "Now, Jane, if my suggestion doesn't work for you, please tell me no. You won't hurt my feelings. Really. I can handle it. Just tell me no."

You will feel the results instantly. Such a polite "no" does not offend people. On the contrary, it puts them at ease. It invites adult behavior (even from children). It opens the way for good decisions. After all my years coaching negotiation training clients in every imaginable kind of negotiation, I can still be surprised by the almost magical power of "no." The word you have been trained to fear is, in fact, the word that will change your negotiating life forever.

"No" requires a solid, ironclad mission and purpose. It's a well-established idea in the business world, of course, but M&P in the no negotiation training system takes on a contrarian meaning. It's not about you, but them - the other side.

The no negotiation training system also makes you understand the dangers of neediness. Simply put, you do not need this deal, because neediness leads inexorably to unnecessary compromise. "No" will change you as a negotiator almost overnight - and for the better. So will the idea of building vision in the other party ("How much risk of failure can Dupont absorb with a new, unproven widget, Steve?), the instructions about creating agendas that really work, the lessons on how to ask good questions and how to listen to the answers.

Which sounds better to you, good decisions or rampaging emotions? Confidence or neediness? Good questions or unwarranted assumptions and expectations? Concentrating on actions you can control or chasing results you cannot control? Getting what you want is as easy as saying "no."

Before I became a professional negotiation coach I was a pilot, first military, then commercial. That's where I learned the importance of using systems to control complex activities. Without one, you can't fly a plane safely, that's for sure. If you've ever peered into the cockpit as you file through the door of a commercial jet -- and who hasn't? -- you've probably observed the pilots working through their mandatory checklists printed on heavy plastic cards. This is how they monitor and enforce the system. (If you ever crawl into a private plane and the pilot does not go through a checklist before starting the engine, you might consider deplaning on the spot. Seriously. "Feet first" beats the alternative every time.)

Not long ago, a lawyer in Cleveland, a self-styled student of negotiation, read my first negotiation book, Start with No®, and sent it to his daughter, a student at Notre Dame. She liked it so much she enrolled in one of my negotiation training programs, during which one of our negotiation training coaches worked with her in academics and coached her on her negotiation to get one of the prized internships in the White House. A key component of the preparation was the checklist for the all-important interview in Washington. On the big day she flew in, sat down, used her checklist, and got the job practically on the spot. I wasn't surprised. Her story and thousands like it are the reason I still use checklists just as diligently as I did as a pilot.

Negotiation is a complex beast. There's a lot going on. Checklists keep it all under control. They give us such a tremendous advantage, such ease of mind. I will use them throughout this negotiation book, and I will teach you how to use them in your negotiations. In the last chapter I introduce the "short form" of the Checklist and Log and Daily Track that my negotiation training clients use to manage their negotiations all over the world.

Another feature running throughout the negotiation book will be tips for "test driving" the most straightforward negotiation training principles and activities. I've already invited you to find a simple water-cooler situation with which to try out "no." That was a test drive. There will be quite a few others -- quick, simple ways to try things out in fairly risk-free situations. I have no fear of losing you in a negotiation wreck. You might dent a fender, I guess, but you'll also learn that "no" works, that certain specific kinds of questions work, that a specific kind of agenda works.

In the end, I will not only change the way you perhaps think now about negotiating -- out with "yes," in with "no" -- but I will give you the know-how, the how-to, the actual negotiation training tools with which to make it all happen. For any student, businessperson or professional, for parents, children, homeowners, landlords, tenants, employees, employers, debtors, creditors, buyers, sellers-for anyone negotiating anything -- this negotiation training system works.

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