The Art of Bargaining, Positional vs. Interest-Based Negotiation
f3fundit.com
f3fundit.com
The more recent work on negotiations includes things like salience models, which are more about building coalitions to apply leverage on a point person instead of persuading them with reason and principle. It reflects reality better.
Enterprise sales are a good example, where instead of just winning a feature bake off or doing a good pitch, you need a full coalition of parties to prevail over the alternatives and move the sale forward. This makes sales more of a complex political campaign than arguing and demonstrating to win a judgment and verdict.
The strategy in these negotiations is different, and more about eliciting information about needs and motives of coalition parties to align them toward your decision. The tactics involve some traditional negotiation techniques like inventing options and proposing if/then points of incremental agreement, but they are part of a more abstract play.
So, learn negotiation , but short version: the map is not the territory and the fastest way to select-out is to go in with expectations that people conform to a map.
I have to do this daily -- and I'm learning as I go -- but I'm finding books like Getting to Yes (with BATNA and all that) to be a little too theoretical.
Ignore all his complaints about MBA/Ivy league programs and how they teach negotiations. A lot of what he accuses them of are not true - he mostly sets up strawmen arguments against them. The majority of his book is in alignment with what those other books/programs teach, including many of the cases where he claims otherwise.
Consider his rationale for criticizing other books so much. He could have simply written his own book on negotiation without spending so many pages throughout the book complaining about other books. Why does he do this? He's playing psychological/marketing games with the reader. Similar to the dialogue in Thank You For Smoking:
Joey (the son): so what happens when you're wrong?
Nick: OK, let's say that you're defending chocolate, and I'm defending vanilla. Now if I were to say to you: 'Vanilla is the best flavour ice-cream', you'd say...
Joey: No, chocolate is.
(dialogue goes on for a while)
Joey: ...but you didn't prove that vanilla was the best...
Nick: I didn't have to. I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong I'm right.
Chris Voss seems to be playing that game: He's trying to elevate his book by claiming other books are wrong.
The other thing about the book: It works well in a somewhat narrow scope. In particular, some of the advice in the book will damage relationships. This isn't surprising, given his whole negotiation career involved scenarios where he would not have a continuing relationship with his counterpart on the other side.
As an example, his tip on "But how do I do this?" My last manager was very skilled in getting her way with this approach. Within a year of her becoming the manager 3 people had left the team. Sure the tactic works initially, but people will wise up to it if you use it often, and they resent the mind games involved.
A good negotiations book will differentiate between strategies where the relationship is important vs one where it isn't.
Not to deter you from reading the book. It does have some pretty good advice I've not found in other books. And it definitely is more practical than other ones. Just do not stop after reading it.
Any recommendations for other sources?
This is why when you buy a car, (In the US anyway) you usually "negotiate" with a sales person, who will be running to a back office to relay the negotiation with the manager who is actually the decision maker. The sales person will attempt to (or sometimes even genuinely try) to be the "integrative" negotiator while the manager will act as the adversarial negotiator in the process. This can actually work in your favor on occasion, as I've had a great deal of success by understanding the mechanics of the process, and leveraging the sales persons desire to sell the car against the managers desire to make the dealership (more) money. (Usually by establishing myself as a serious buyer, walking away from a bad deal and then getting a call ~3 days later when someone needs to hit their monthly/quarterly number)
Yes! I negotiate compensations on behalf of engineers (as an engineer --> tech leader --> and now technical consultant working for engineers (and tech adjacent professionals) directly, and not as a recruiter paid by companies).
While accepting a job offer in terms of the total package might be "integrative" in some sense, when discussing any one component, say salary, it is very much "positional."
Job negotiations tend to be among the most impactful negotiations we make, so if you're curious for my take: you absolutely want to be polite and work with the recruiter to find the offer package that works for you, but it's more about effective self-advocacy and making constructive, intentional statements than either "positional cageyness" or "integrative creativity."
In my experience, general negotiation advice doesn't generally apply to heavily imbalanced job/salary negotiations. Companies have more information, authority and experience when it comes to job negotiations, so leveling the playing field means increasing your information, leverage and practice in specific ways. It's not like buying a car or selling a rug... you're beginning a long-term relationship with extremely high stakes!
This comment is maybe less helpful than I intended, so if you'd like to learn more, send me a note and I'll make a better attempt at sharing more concrete tips and scripts.
Kayfabe [1] is a concept from wrestling, where an adversarial appearance is staged but portrayed as reality in order to get viewers interested.
Kayfabe is also commonly employed in politics.
Walking away while keeping the door open is almost always the most powerful negotiation technique.
ISTM the comments here have more value than the article (thanks, commenters).
If you optimize for expense alone, you can get things for cheap but you trade off other things like quality and time. Also, ensuring business continuity for good suppliers is an important KPI -- and if you don't take care, in the end you'll end up with only bad suppliers where it's a race to the bottom and everyone loses.
I used to work for somebody who would negotiate until the other side wasn't making any money, and I'd talk to vendors who'd lost money dealing with us. No surprise that they would be attempting the minimum required to get paid.