Never Negotiate Piecemeal. Here’s Why | Hacker News Reader

Never Negotiate Piecemeal. Here’s Why

bothsidesofthetable.com

334 pointsdwynings37 comments

You could look at this by viewing negotiating as a way of arriving at a globally optimal solution that maximizes everyone's happiness, rather than as a way to allocate surplus that's inherently zero-sum.

When you negotiate piecemeal, there's little room for prioritization. There's give & take on each individual issue, and one person is the winner and one person is the loser on that particular issue, and you don't have the flexibility to make sure you win on the issues you care about and lose on the ones you don't.

When you treat the agreement as a whole, you can look at it as an effort in prioritization. Each side will care more about certain issues. You want each side to win on the issues they care about, and lose on the ones that they don't. The negotiation, then, is just a way of teasing those priorities out effectively and making sure that everybody's needs can be met at once.

Surely this:

>a way of arriving at a globally optimal solution //

has very little direct relationship with this:

>the flexibility to make sure you win on the issues you care about and lose on the ones you don't //

This is the statesmanly way to do things. But generally speaking what one cares about and what is "globally optimal", lets say most beneficial for both parties, is seldom coterminous.

If you win on the issues that you care about, the other side wins on the issues they care about, and the two sets don't intersect much, surely you've reached a global optimum?

I think it swings on the definition of optimal being used I'm assuming optimal with respect to an impartial but omniscient third party.

That's where you trust that both parties will fight hard for what they most want. If you fight as hard as you can for your terms, and they fight as hard as they can for their terms, then presumably all the issues will be laid out on the table and the agreement simply won't get signed unless it's as good as it can be.

It's the same reason that adversarial systems law, economics, international relations, etc. tend to work. People have more information about their own desires than that of others, so if you task each person with looking out for his own interests but ensure that they also respect the clearly-expressed interests of others, you end up bringing as much information to bear as you can.

It's also why systems like law, economics, and international relations fail. People don't care about issues which only marginally effect them, so they don't bother.

Take pork barrelling (edit - I used a different example, but it would derail the thread). Nobody (at least, nobody who's notable for anything except being anti-pork) fights to limit it, because no-one loses a huge amount. But a small minority of wealthy vested interests do stand to gain a lot.

But your point is basically correct - the systems mostly work, because people's big issues get dealt with.

Yes, it's called "bundling".

http://businessnegotiationservices.com/bundling-in-negotiati...

I highly recommend everyone learn the basics of negotiation. This isn't rocket science and is one of a set of well-known techniques.

Go buy "Getting to Yes". It's a great primer to negotiation.

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-With...

That book looks great. And cheap too, which is the way I like it.

I wonder if this "bundling" technique could be used in salary negotiations?

I used to work for a small dev shop (~30 devs) where we each had a personal review with the manager at the end of the year. The idea was you would review your performance - but everyone knew it was just waiting until the end of the meeting so he would tell you what your pay rise was, and you would try and haggle for more. I'm sure the scenario is familiar to many here.

Nobody ever got more than the manager's initial offer, and looking back on it, the reason was because he had a checklist of items that he would go through with you. It was impossible to excel at every single item, and those you did excel at he always managed to find a flaw with or find something you could improve on. By the time it came to the pay increase talks he had successfully removed any negotiating power you had, and you felt you had to accept the measly increase. He was excellent at this. People would walk in the room all fired up about what they'd done that year and how much they should get, and walk out depressed. Then we'd all go to the pub at lunch and whine about it.

The only time I ever got a decent pay rise was when I woke up hungover one Sunday morning and, with a flash of inspiration, thought, "hang on, I bloody well deserve an extra 20%! I don't care if it's nowhere near my personal review time." So on the Monday I requested a meeting with him and demanded a 40% pay rise and told him why. He didn't have chance to pick me apart, and eventually had to settle on just negotiating me down to 20%.

That was complete chance though, I don't think I can use getting drunk all Friday and Saturday as a successful negotiating trick in the future.

Wow, what a great piece. Lots of good advice. Made me cringe in recollection at a few times in my life.

Interestingly enough though, my most adversarial negotiation of my life went like this (caught partner embezzling funds after he'd had a personal finance crisis)... interestingly, that one was wound down by email and fax with entirety of the agreement like this, and was the most successful. I didn't get this point back then (I still screw it up, actually, by trying to proactively "fix" things and oftentimes taking things at face value that are just leverage/negotiating moves). Yet -- I got lucky. My ex-partner's father was a lawyer, so we just faxed/emailed drafts back and forth.

That one came out OK, good outcomes even. Many other situations I had a much better position and better odds, but did poorly since I compromised/conceded/"helped"/"fixed" too early and set an expectation that things would continue that way.

Hmm. Expectations are a funny thing.

This is a really great article. Anyone who thinks it's not relevant to them should read it twice, since it covers a hell of a lot of life. Brilliantly put piece.

A good point was made however I really don't like these blog posts which attempt to be a "negotiating for dummies" style resource. Negotiating is a well understood field and there are many textbooks and academic resources for people who would like to learn more. Normally these resources are meant for lawyers but the explanations about why people negotiate following certain patterns should be accessible to most people.

Can you give some free entry points in this topic? I have a book (Shells Bargaining for Advantage), but the scientific papers I read where all not worth the read,at least in time spent vs content learned.

Learning some basic game theory (lots of online sources accessible from Google) will probably go at least as far. The prisoner's dilemma is also a nice metaphor for a lot of human behavior. In various experiments, even without iterations and such, humans tend to cooperate with each other. But if you're ever dealing with a lawyer, a sociopath, an economics professor, or anyone else really who's determined to optimize their share of the chips on the table, you need to know how they will think and game theory's a nice way of letting you know, which lets you know how you should reply so that you're not made into a sure loser.

Isn't that like learning fluid dynamics as a precursor to learning to swim? It should get your there with a deal of hard work but there's better ways to do it.

Now once you've got the basics and want to understand more fully the how and why of swimming/negotiating then learning fluid dynamics/game theory may provide some insight but I very much doubt that knowledge of either is really going to give you much edge over someone who concentrates on learning the practice itself.

> I very much doubt that knowledge of either is really going to give you much edge over someone who concentrates on learning the practice itself.

But then you get an insight and create these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimfin - and win without much effort.

It of course wouldn't help you much in a swimming contest, where the priority is for the whole game to look 'fair' to viewers, not to Just Win. But in real life, you're not always artificially limited by a set of rules that disallow using advanced knowledge for your advantage.

Making a decision is one aspect of negotiating, but it isn't the most important one.

Establishing the scope of the negotiation (ie. what does each side care about?) is what inexperienced negotiators typically miss.

Smart legislators understand this, and use time to defeat opponents. That's why you see so many 11th hour deals.

I do agree that negotiating while considering the entire scope can be useful and beneficial to both parties, but it can be counter-productive to disclose your priorities. If one of your priorities is not a priority for me, I can still pretend that it is a priority for me, and give-in after a lot of tough back-and-forth. Then I can use that as leverage as we go down the list.

I feel that you should test the other side's priorities before you disclose yours. You would not want to trade an elephant for a pawn.

tl;dr Don't negotiation point by point, get all the points first, prioritize them, and then negotiate.

The specific reasoning is key: if you negotiate point by point, each issue becomes a compromise, regardless of importance. It's better to be able to hold fast on important issues, give in on issues the other side thinks are far more important than you do, and compromise on the rest.

Kudos for saying better in 3 sentences what the whole article meant to teach. I totally misunderstood the blog post. Understanding the article as you explain it, I have to agree with it.

Curious if you could explain how you did understand the blog post? This is recently quite an interesting topic for me, why when one person feels like they've communicated as simply as they can, still can get misunderstood by someone else who is probably also actually quite intelligent.

>give in on issues the other side thinks are far more important than you do

One problem is that sometimes you may not actually know which issues are their highest. But this does not invalidate the advice.

"And most of us start with zero training."

I take from this that my life is atypical since both I and my three daughters took up negotiation training at about the age of 3 and worked hard to improve our skills from then on :-)

I liked the article, its true life is negotiation be it with your spouse, your partners, your kids, or even the taxi driver. I think a good take away is that if you have never considered all the negotiating you do, you might think about picking up a couple of books on it.

I can recommend "Getting to Yes" http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-With... as a great place to start.

I have a bunch of negotiating heading my way and i think this is some advice that will really help. We have a lawyer and now i think about it, that is how i recall him working...although i just thought that was how he worked.

Who would have thought problem solving skills would hold us back?

I really don't like these "do this way ALWAYS" or "NEVER EVER do that" advices. In my eyes it will not help the reader. A good plan is not one that magically pops up in your head, but one that you refined many thousand times through sweat and experience. The upper bound (in terms of success) of most strategies is much higher then most people think. Just choose one that makes you feel comfortable. If people want to negotiate piecemeal, they SHOULD! If they do that often and work out how to act in different occuring situations (good and bad ones will come with EVERY strategy), then their plan will gradually improve.

I claim that the worst strategy, but with very well worked out details and executed by a practitioner with a lot of experience and who is well shaped for that strategy, will beat most people applying the best strategy. Of course with 26 years in age, I can't say that my theory is true or not. But my experiences until now support that theory. What do you think?

Can you think of an important, common situation where it is definitely better to negotiate piecemeal? Maintaining leverage and being able to trade off concessions in different areas is very important in a wide variety of situations. "Never do X" advice can be useful as a heuristic when it pays off in the average case.

One probably could develop his own good negotiating techniques over time, but that would only come after being destroyed repeatedly by highly-skilled negotiators. I think it's way better to shorten that process by learning from others.

The funny thing about your request is, that one of the most well known books about negotiation called "Bargaining for Advantage" by G. Richard Shell (was talked a lot here and on other Start-Up/Tech related sites some time ago) starts with an example where it turned out bad for him, to negotiate the package and not point by point.

In the introduction (not to find in the amazon preview, sadly) he bargains with a class mate of one of his children or a neighbors daughter or something like that. She wants to sell fruits in different boxes, he of course not wanting to be impolite but not in need of fruits, orders the cheepest. And then without closing this one point, started by his wife he asks the girl if she can take care of the family pets, while his family is on a trip. So the girl says "Of course, but then you buy the big box, right?"

Is that good enough an example?

Software Development, I see now why the process has been broken for so long, we're emulating corporate law contract negotiation tactics as a model for how to do things.

ALWAYS/NEVER has a lot to do with attracting clicks. You ALWAYS see headlines like this getting voted up, but NEVER see articles titled, "It may usually be a good idea to not negotiate piecemeal," getting much traction.

Your latter claim is debatable but isn't wrong. I would just say that if one is willing and capable of adapting and adjusting to the situation, that you're going to be at least competitive with if not ahead of most people with an inflexible strategy. Only in solved games does the 'fixed' game theory optimal strategy beat anyone who deviates.

I agree with that headlines must be catchy. But I talk about the article and not about the headline. If after clicking I would've read a great, meaningful article, which analyses the pros and cons of bargaining peau a peau and/or comparing both strategies with each other, giving the reader a better sense of when to use which, I would've silently "upped" the article. But the text itself is flawed with that idea, that there is this one strategy that beats all the others and is always correct. At least that is how I understand the authors point. And that is also what I can't agree with. That thinking itself leads to bad results, because after making mistakes (and everybody does) you think "oh gee, I did the wrong strategy again, which else can I choose?", which won't get you anywhere.

Disagree. I don't want to see a title like "Don't Negotiate Piecemeal Most of the Time". Using a little bit of hyperbole is a valid writing technique.

Remember that language is not the same as formal logic. "Never" can easily mean "just about all the time except for these odd circumstances". And that's fine. It makes language more compact and conveys enough useful information. In the case of a headline, its job is to hook you and make you want to read it. The less wordy and the less your brain has to parse, the easier it is for that to happen.

A good plan is not one that magically pops up in your head, but one that you refined many thousand times through sweat and experience.

Certainly true. And articles like these take the result of all that refinement and try to distill it down to some best practices and tips so others don't have to expend the same amount of sweat.

If people want to negotiate piecemeal, they SHOULD! If they do that often and work out how to act in different occuring situations (good and bad ones will come with EVERY strategy), then their plan will gradually improve.

Unlikely. Negotiating piecemeal is sub-optimal. I think the article did an excellent job explaining why. It would be better to focus on the reverse: apply the best strategy in all cases, and try to figure out the (likely few) situations where it may not work out best, and learn from that.

This doesn't really make sense to me. A bad idea with great execution is still a bad idea. Wouldn't you rather focus your energy on developing good strategies instead of wasting time and effort on a flawed model? You're also assuming that most people will apply a good strategy poorly, or at least below average. I don't buy that. At this point it feels like you're disagreeing with the article just for the sake of disagreeing...

I agree with you and have actually seen this in action. Another effect I've seen is with someone whose reputation precedes them -- their reputation for always negotiating piecemeal. No one wants to deal with this person, but since the person is important enough to the negotiated deal that people often compromise without too much effort just to avoid the unpleasantness of dealing with this. So in effect, the piecemeal negotiator has won all their points of negotiation in advance!

Absolutely true. I learned this in an academic setting, after which it seemed so obvious. Very time efficient, and increases the chance that both sides leave happy.

It's weird to me that this guy is jokes so much about Stuart's Jewish parents. Aren't we past that by now?

Maybe Stuart told him how his parents felt.

In my latest contract, I negotiated in a kinda-piecemeal way. I was going to be hired by this big company, and got a fairly shitty contract: they never worked with contractors and got a contract from their parent company. It had unpassable clauses geared towards fucking me over, such as a clause that disabled you from handing over debts to collection agencies. The whole thing had in total about 20 problems I needed to address. I first negotiated the rate. Next, I wrote the CEO with the 16 least important problems. Once he parsed that and agreed to everything (because they weren't things important for him anyways) I wrote him with the outstanding big problems. He admitted to that all, after some argumentation. Finally, one issue was outstanding. I pressed on and he wrote the following to the middle manager: He beat me to a pulp, just agree to everything he wants. Finally, after the contract was signed, I made sure to remind the guys of some things that are implied by the local law that they would have to honor in the end. Doing things this way saved me a lot of trouble and won me a big fat wallet.

Very good advice! I like it.

this is old hat. 13th century, Florence.

now, its just called double-entry bookkeeping system. works for money, and low-and-behold business deals. some people look at their whole life from this perspective.

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