RACHEL: My name is
Rachel K. I work
in our centralized training
function here at Google,
and it is my honor to introduce
to you Professor Stuart
Diamond, who is the
author of "Getting More:
How to Negotiate to Achieve
your Goals in the Real World."
This book has just very
recently been published
and is already off to
incredible critical acclaim.
It has been named number one
on the "Wall Street Journal's"
blog as the best business
book and the number one book
to buy in this year.
It is the number one
on the "USA Today."
And next week, we'll see that
it's number five on the "New
York Times" Best Seller List.
So it's really a pleasure to
have Professor Diamond here.
I would love to run through
all of his accomplishments,
but then you wouldn't
hear from him.
So I'll just give
you a few highlights.
He has a law degree from
Harvard and an MBA from Wharton.
He teaches Wharton's
most popular course,
in the negotiations that
this book is based upon.
And he has experience
in academia.
He's taught at Columbia, at NYU,
Berkeley, Harvard, and more.
And he has experience
in the real world.
The reason that this stuff works
is that he uses it every day.
And as the President
of the Global Strategy
Group, his business,
Professor Diamond
helps many other
clients around the world
achieve what they need
through his techniques.
A few quick highlights.
It was Professor Diamond's
tips and techniques
that helped end the
writer's strike in 2008
in Hollywood that many of you
in this country will remember.
He's also the CEO of an
airline in St. Thomas.
And he's the Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist
of the "New York Times."
So yeah, he's covered
all the bases.
But on a more personal note,
this course, this content,
has actually changed my life.
I had the privilege
of taking his course,
semester-long course, and have
been working with Professor
Diamond here for over
three years as he
brings this material
to Googlers and watch
them use it every day.
But I have to say that the
thing that is most striking
is how Googly he is.
Professor Diamond is very
intent on respecting others,
growing the pie rather
than cheating others out
of their fair share in order to
get what is best for everyone.
He respects and
admires diversity
and looks to surround himself
with that in everything
that he does.
And fairness and collaboration
are a central thread
to all of his business efforts.
So with that, I'd
like to turn it over
to Professor Stuart Diamond.
Thank you so much for
being with us today.
[APPLAUSE]
STUART DIAMOND: Thank
you all very much.
It's an honor to be here.
I want to talk to
you about something
today that you do all the time.
Every single interaction
you have in your life
involves negotiation.
Whether talking to your
friends, walking down the street
and passing
somebody, negotiating
for a job in business, and
everything else that you do.
And most of the
instructions that you
have been given about
those interactions
since you were little are wrong.
Which is to say that they don't
meet your goals very well.
And that is true, not
just in daily life,
but in diplomacy, in business,
and in everything we do.
The climate that
results from following
a series of wrong
instructions supports
what happened in Tucson,
supports Congress
pushing through and then
repealing, trying to repeal,
the health care law.
And folks, all the controversies
that we have in the world
come from the
wrong instructions.
And so what "Getting
More" provides
is a new and different
method of human interaction.
One that will be
familiar to you,
and that I'm sure
you support, but one
within the page of "Getting
More" lays out in a structure
that you can replicate
in everything you do.
And this new form of human
interact-- its different way
of thinking says that
perceptions and emotions
are more important
than power and logic.
That the pictures in the
heads of the other party
is more important than any
collection of facts, evidence,
or resources that you
can possibly muster.
That making a connection
with another person
is the most persuasive
thing that you do.
And that force, power,
win-win, my way or the highway,
BATNA, good cop/bad
cop, walking out,
generally do more
harm than good.
In addition to that,
they get only about 25%
of the value of doing it
a different way, which
is something I'll talk
about in a few moments.
And of course, the focus
on people and relationships
does not mean you
have to be a patsy.
This is a very strong way of
negotiating and protecting
yourself, but it's a way
that protects yourself
in a humane and ethical way.
And so I wanted to talk just a
little bit about this process.
And then, I'll entertain
some questions.
In addition to being
something you do every day,
it's hard to find this
stuff because it's
buried in ordinary language.
In fact, the different
between success and failure
is very, very small.
I like to use a
baseball analogy.
If you are a .280
hitter in baseball
and you get 1 extra
hit every 9 games,
you become a .310
hitter in baseball.
And that's worth
two things to you.
One, a place in
the Hall of Fame.
And two, $10
million more a year.
And so you can't
find these tools.
They're mostly invisible,
unless you already know them.
And let me give you
a couple of examples.
One from another
company, one from Google,
to show you what I mean.
I had student, a former
student who works at Exxon.
Flew up to Philadelphia
a couple of weeks
ago on a Southwest
Airlines plane.
Plane was four hours late.
The rest of the
passengers were snarling
at the flight attendants and
all the other airline personnel.
And this former student of
mine thought about the pictures
in the heads of
the other parties.
He went up to the
flight attendants
and the other airline personnel.
He apologized for
everybody else's behavior
and he commiserated them
that their workday was
going to be four hours longer.
And when he got off the
plane, they gave him $600.
The only one on
the plane for that
to happen to because
he understood
that it was about them,
not him, that he needed
to make the connection with.
And he needed to step out of
the emotion of the moment.
And it's invisible unless you
already know how to do that.
I had a student at Google
here, Francoise [INAUDIBLE].
I don't know if
Francoise is here today.
Francoise is still one of the
heads of network administration
here and network sales.
And he was in Southeast Asia
doing a deal with a client.
And the client couldn't
afford Google's pricing,
couldn't do the deal.
And so Francoise probed
a lot more deeply
into what this other party
was about in the deal,
outside the deal, what are your
hopes and dreams, who are you
as a person, and found out
that the client was having
a lot of trouble financing
another venture that
had nothing to do with Google.
And the client also had a whole
bunch of fiber optic cable that
had been sitting
around for a while
that it really could
use the cash flow for
and really didn't
care if it got rid of.
And so Francois went to the
senior management of Google
and got a loan for this
company at favorable rates
to finance its other venture.
And in return,
got a 96% discount
on the fiber optic cable,
saving Google $500 million.
That is also invisible.
The notion of making a
connection with them,
no matter what the deal
is, and finding something
to get more with.
Now, you don't have to devote
your life to negotiation
actively.
But the more you know about
what's going on around you,
the more you can make
critical interventions.
And so my students learn the
exquisitely more conscious
of the world around them.
A simple analogy.
There's an old maxim about
the difference between expert
and non-expert knowledge.
A non-expert looks at a
field and sees flat land.
An expert looks
at the same field
and begins to see little
peaks and valleys,
little bits of relief.
It takes no more time
or energy for the expert
to collect the greater
amount of information
from that landscape
than the non-expert,
but the expert can make much
better use of that information
to pursue opportunities
or minimize risks.
So what we're talking about
is getting you to be much more
conscious about the topography
of your life and what's around
you, because let's face it,
you cannot avoid negotiations.
They hit you in the face,
whether you like it or not.
You can do them well or badly.
Saying, I avoid
negotiations means
you stand on the sidelines
and they get to score
touchdowns all day long.
And so you have to decide
how much to use it.
But once again, once you
have it in your arsenal,
you always see it.
But before, it's invisible.
And so what I want to
do-- before I show you
the specific tool,
I have a little menu
of people and companies that
have benefited from this.
I had three women, the last one
here in my class from India,
who could have their own
arranged marriages in India
using course tools with
their parents' blessing
after the invitations had
been sent out and daddy paid
for the wedding with somebody
from a different sect, which
is almost unheard of.
Of course, four-year-old--
brush his teeth, goes to bed.
No problema.
And we'll talk about
that a little bit, too.
And so these things
are meant to be used
in any kind of a situation.
I had somebody named [? Mahul ?]
[? Trivedi ?] who was a student
of mine at Wharton.
And he took my course
because he got dinged,
rejected by 18 companies.
So he came to see me
before the course began.
And I said, fine,
we're going to get you
offers from the same companies.
And he said, Professor Diamond,
with respect, you're crazy.
And I said, well, let's see.
And so I told him,
what I want you to do
is not send the same
resume to each firm.
I want you to write 18 different
resumes, each one catering
to the pictures and the heads
of the department that you're
interviewing with,
and the people who
are interviewing you.
What are their
hopes, dreams, fears?
Talk to alumni.
Talk to former employees.
Ask HR.
Ask the people themselves as
you do repeated interviews.
Well, he gave up after
12 final interviews,
a fistful of job offers.
And he just took one and
says, the rest is obvious.
I'll get the other six.
OK.
So again, pretty invisible.
But again, focused on the
model that I've talked about.
So this is a comment by
one of my former students
from Microsoft.
And this is a comment from
Patrick Grandinetti at Google
from taking the course.
About, I guess, 300 people or
so have taken the course here,
and they have benefited widely.
OK.
Well, let me talk about
the four different levels
of negotiation.
And to tell you what's wrong
and what we can do about it.
The first level, the
traditional level,
is getting people to do
what you will them to do.
Threats, leverage, power,
my way or the highway,
take it or leave it, BATNA
alternatives to agreement,
walking out, et cetera.
The problem is not
that it doesn't work.
It works with $20 trillion.
The United States
can do whatever
it wants in the Middle East.
The problem is it's
really expensive.
It takes a long time.
And it's not self-enforcing.
In addition to that,
it tends to cause
retaliation and resentment.
And that means the kids kicking
and screaming on the floor,
malicious obedience at work, or
terrorists in the Middle East.
It's not a real happy situation.
And if you think
that BATNA, Best
Alternative To A Negotiated
Agreement, works.
The next time
you're out to dinner
with your spouse or significant
other, in the middle of dinner
pull out your little
black book and say,
you know, if this
doesn't work out,
I got these whole bunch
of alternatives here.
See what happens.
So that also tends
to piss people off.
But this is the tool of choice
in work, at play, in the world.
The United States could have
sanctions on Korea and Iran
like it has with Cuba
until the end of time.
All it's doing is promoting
what I call the Alamo strategy.
They will fight to
the last man standing.
And so that's the problem.
And it's not a way to approach
negotiations effectively.
It gets about 25% of
the value of what you
can get by the model I propose.
And as evidence
of that, I'd like
to call your attention to the
work of John Nash, a Princeton
mathematician who won a Nobel
Prize for a bunch of theories,
including this work.
Was played by Russell Crowe in
the movie "A Beautiful Mind."
What Nash did is he
proves mathematically
the 1755 theorem of
Swiss philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
And what Rousseau hypothesized
is when parties collaborate,
the overall size of the pie
expands to such an extent
that each party gets much
more than it could get alone
with a smaller pie, no matter
how big that smaller pie is
and how much of that
smaller pie the person got.
And the really good
example that he
used is four
hunters individually
could only get a rabbit.
Together, they can
bring down a deer.
And that's a different way
of thinking [INAUDIBLE].
You think that the
Congress, the Democrats,
forced a health plan down
the Republicans' throat.
Then, the Republicans
got in office,
and they're trying to repeal
as much of it as they can.
Would you say that's consistent
or inconsistent with what
I've just said?
The result is we're not getting
a very good health plan.
And so that's the problem
with that attitude.
So let's go-- and these are
examples of how people act.
The people on the left
get four times as much
as the people on the right.
They get twice as many
deals, and each deal
gets twice as much.
Now, if you're a hard bargainer
and you do the one on the right
and you say, well,
I'm doing just fine.
And that's what, until
now, hard bargainers
have been able to say.
Of course, they didn't
have the comparison
to the column on the left.
They were in a vacuum.
But now, there is a comparison.
I've taught 30,000 people in
45 countries over the last 20
years.
I've read more than a thousand
studies, half a million
pages of journals and
research material.
And it wasn't until
1998 that I began
to see that people weren't
meeting their goals very well.
And over the last
dozen years, I began
to develop this based upon what
happened in the real world,
including my own ventures.
OK.
Power also is unstable
and unpredictable.
This in the Middle East.
People don't like when I mention
what the nationalities are.
Although, you can figure it out.
But this tank is not about
to run over this little boy.
Not with the whole
world watching.
So you might lose your
power in an instant.
You might appear extreme if
you use your power too much.
The way to use power is to use
just enough to meet your goals.
And the other person
shouldn't be able to feel it.
That's the way one
should look at this.
Let's go to the next level.
This is what people have
done, the cognoscenti,
for the last 30 years-- win-win,
interest-based negotiation,
rational actors, et cetera.
That's better.
People see a rational
benefit to them
and they're willing
to go along with it.
And that works with
really rational people
with no emotions, sitting
with their spreadsheets
in a conference room.
Everybody is really calm.
That doesn't work very often.
And so it's either irrelevant or
not reflective of what goes on.
We live in an irrational,
emotional world.
And the more important the
negotiation is to the parties,
the more irrational they are.
And that means world peace, a
billion-dollar deal, or my kid
wants an ice cream cone.
And so therefore,
you've got to take
people's emotional temperature
and deal with their emotions.
If the local school board or
municipality has raised taxes,
I don't want to
know from win-win.
I want to know how you're
going to make my life better.
I want an emotional
payment-- empathy,
I understand, some compassion.
Some way to make me feel better.
The right answer to the
statement "I hate you"
is "tell me more."
Because you're
obviously exercised,
and you're not listening
if you're exercised.
I need to get you
to listen to me.
These are really
powerful tools to use
when people are emotional.
Not telling them to calm
down, but listening to what
they have to say, whether
they're crazy or not.
It is obvious that the
president of North Korea
mostly wants love.
He wants to join the
trade committees.
He wants people to respect him.
Every time some
American shows up,
he rolls out the red carpet.
He releases prisoners.
He talks to the South.
He's like Danny DeVito in that
movie with the beautiful woman,
"Other People's Money."
He gets himself all
gussied up and ready.
Don't we get it?
So these are emotional payments.
I once told my class at Wharton
that I tell my wife sometimes
that she's right
even when she's not
to preserve marital harmony.
And then I thought, well, that's
not fair to keep it from her.
So I went home and
I said to my wife,
you know, honey, I
told my class today
that I tell you sometimes
that you're right
even if you're wrong.
And you know what she said?
That will work.
[LAUGHTER]
So people want
emotional payments.
And that's the first thing you
need to do in negotiations.
And so it brings us to the
third and fourth levels,
to perceive what you want
them to perceive and to feel
what you want them to feel.
Almost nobody goes there.
And I think the story
of the writers' strike
will prove instructive here.
I was called about
three years ago
by Ari Emanuel, who's the
leading agent in Hollywood,
the role model for "Entourage"
and the brother of Rahm,
who was the White
House Chief of Staff,
to help them with
the writers' strike.
The writers had been on
strike for three months.
They'd been without a
contract for a year.
No new TV material.
Nobody was talking to anybody.
They had finally
scheduled a breakfast
with the studio reps for
that Thursday morning.
It was a Tuesday afternoon.
So I got on the phone with
the Writers Guild people
and a bunch of other people.
And they wanted to know what
the priority of the [INAUDIBLE]
issues are, what the
royalty rate should be,
and other contractual issues.
And I said, forget
all that stuff.
Go to the breakfast and ask the
people from the studios three
questions.
Question number
one, are you happy?
We're not happy.
Question number two,
are you making money?
We're not making any money.
Question number three, if you
had to do this over again,
how would you guys do it?
It took 30 minutes to
restart the negotiations.
It took two days to
get an agreement.
Now, there's two things I
can say for sure about this.
One, it's not rocket science.
And two, unless you
already know how to do it,
it's completely invisible.
And so that's what
we're talking about,
is learning this stuff that's
invisible to the other party.
Things like, are my
actions meeting my goals?
Of course they have
problems in the Middle East,
because the wrong
people are negotiating.
People that are emotional.
You know, they already have
peace in the Middle East.
600,000 Palestinians and
Israelis live together.
They should be negotiating.
And so those are the kind
of things that come up.
This is the model based
upon a lot of research
that supports what I've
been talking about.
And this has particular
relevance to Googlers.
And when I mention
this, it would
take some getting used to.
Because it's very
different from,
probably, the model that
you've seen in your own
heads in terms of
Google's success.
Less than 10% of the reason
why people reach agreements
has anything to do with the
facts and the substance.
Has almost nothing to do with
how good your engineering is,
with the substantive
knowledge you have.
More than 50% has to do with
whether the people like you
or not.
And almost 40% has to do
with the process you use.
Do you deal with emotions?
Do you get commitments?
Et cetera.
And if you think this top blue
triangle is the negotiation,
sadly you're going to be right
more than you're persuasive.
This is very hard for people who
are [INAUDIBLE] based to grasp,
but it's absolutely true
based upon a ton of research.
Why was OJ Simpson
found not guilty
by the first jury in Los Angeles
despite a yard of DNA evidence,
including his blood at the site?
It's because the jury,
the inner-city jury,
didn't like or trust
the prosecutor.
And if they don't like you
and they don't trust you,
they won't hear you.
Now, Google has been
wildly successful because
of this blue triangle up here.
That you have so-- you're
so far ahead of the pack
that you have done great.
I read this treatise in business
school called "The Myth of US
Industrial Supremacy."
And there's a line in
there that stuck with me.
It said, "There is no human
enterprise, organization,
or civilization that cannot,
given enough time, be ruined."
And so what I'm thinking
about is it's fantastic,
but it doesn't last forever.
That additional
skills are needed.
I gave a presentation
at Microsoft
about four or five years ago
to the business development
and legal department.
And the first thing I did was
that I told the 300 people
there that I had
Googled Microsoft.
And that I had typed in three
words, Europe hates Microsoft.
And I said, why did
I get 5 million hits
in a tenth of a second?
I said, you think
that costs you money?
You think the fact
that people don't
like you means they
won't buy your products,
even if it's the best on the
market for their application?
And so this is
something that one needs
to pay a lot of attention to.
Which means that
the characteristics
and sensibilities of the person
sitting across from you so
dwarfs every other part
of the negotiation,
it's neither worth talking
about race, religion, gender,
culture, creed, unless you know
who's sitting across from you.
If you bring three people
to a negotiation on Monday
and so do they, and you bring
a fourth person on Tuesday,
it's a completely
different negotiation.
Even with the same six people,
somebody's kid might be sick.
Some may have had a bad commute.
So the first thing
I've got to do
is take the
emotional temperature
of the person sitting
across from me, even if,
and perhaps especially,
if I'm married to them.
There is no Google
way to negotiate.
There is no American
way to negotiate.
There are just individuals and
the pictures in their heads.
I've had the opportunity to
read the titles of all 2,200
negotiation books
written since 1950
as well as 400 or
500 books themselves.
And I found some doozies.
Here's one of my favorites.
"How to Negotiate
with the Japanese."
What's wrong with that?
What?
You're negotiating with
130 million Japanese?
How interesting.
You're negotiating with
a person or a couple
of people who may be
more or less the same
as the cultural norm.
So I want to figure
out, what are
the pictures in their heads?
A more dramatic example, if you
were a Jew in Poland in 1944
and you thought the
Nazis were monolithic
and you met Oskar Schindler,
you lost your life
because you didn't realize that
Schindler, although a Nazi,
was willing to save your life.
But you never asked him, because
you thought all Nazis hated
Jews.
What a source of
competitive advantage
it is to know who
is really the same
and who's really different.
And so that is a tremendous
competitive advantage for you.
You may have more in
common with somebody
who is your sworn archenemy
than you do with somebody
who sits next to you
at Google, if you just
took the time to find out.
Once you do that, you
then have to figure out
whether your perceptions match.
And if they don't, what
do you do about it?
And I put this up in my
classroom when I teach.
And I point to the
red dot and I say
to people, OK, what do you see?
Two words or less.
And I get these answers
and hundreds more.
I get vast disagreement about
what saw from a simple picture.
Only less than
half of the answers
contain the word red in it.
And in addition to
that, most people
process a small amount of
the available information.
Clearly, there is more
white space than red dot.
And so what you think
is the perception
doesn't mean that they
think it's the perception.
And for example, we did a
role reversal-- and this
is in the book-- at Google
with one of the attorneys.
I had him play a salesperson.
He played a salesperson
for five minutes.
And he said, you
know, I was amazed
after five minutes at how much
I hated lawyers at Google.
And so because there are
different perceptions
that you have to find out
based upon the different ways
that people have been brought
up, on influences on them,
and you need to find out.
So every time you have a
disagreement with somebody,
you need to check your
perceptions and theirs.
This is even a much more
serious problem than that.
I'm sure you've all
seen this picture.
I'm not going to go through
the details of it for time.
But if you want to
ask me, you can.
There are two woman in
this picture, a young woman
to the left of the
picture and an old woman,
which is sort of
the whole picture.
One's mouth is the
other's necklace.
One nose is the other's
chin, and so forth.
I've given half of this picture
to a class, the young woman,
and the old woman to the
other half of a class.
And I've asked them to stare
at their half for five minutes
while I took this
off the screen.
Then, I put the combined
picture back on the screen.
What do you think happened?
Well, almost nobody
could see the other one.
So the question is, if
people have trouble seeing
an image they know is there
after seeing a contrary
image for five minutes, how
much trouble does one culture
have seeing other culture's
point of view that
have seen the same picture
for a thousand years?
And when I say "culture,"
I mean production
versus marketing, legal versus
sales, Mets versus Phillies.
I don't just mean
Arabs and Jews.
So this issue is
much more serious.
They're not being stubborn.
They're not being recalcitrant.
They're not being stupid.
What you see so clearly is
not there for them at all.
It doesn't exist.
And so you've got to
start at the beginning.
What are the pictures
in their heads?
And what I think is black
they may think is white.
And you've got to find
out, friend or foe,
or you don't have a prayer to
persuade them willingly, only
by force.
And there are some things in
the book that talk about this.
The next point I want to make,
which is related to this,
should resonate
with you very much.
There's two studies I
want to commend to you.
They're both in the
book to think about.
The first study said that
work groups in which there
are varying perceptions,
where people disagree
with each other, produce three
times as many marketable ideas
than consensus groups.
The second study shows--
it's a study of US cities--
that for each 10% of
diversity added to an area,
net income of people
in it goes up 15%.
That is an enormous figure.
It is no magic
that Silicon Valley
is outside of San
Francisco, which
is the most diverse city
in the United States,
and has been the quickest
major city to come back
from the recession.
So you stand for diversity.
If somebody says to you
with some frustration
that you disagree with each
other, you've got to say,
that's great.
We're going to make money.
Homogeneity?
Not profitable.
Difference is profitable.
Let's disagree with
each other some
more so we can make some money.
So I want to turn the
paradigm on its head and value
differences.
And from that, get creativity.
So how do they value things?
Do they value things
different from you?
Somebody at Google that I taught
who couldn't get a client.
He found out about the client.
The client's life.
Found out the client
had a daughter
was having computer problems.
High school-age daughter.
The guy from Google took
his own time, went over
the guy's house for
a Saturday morning,
tutored the daughter,
fixed the computer,
got a multimillion-dollar
account.
And so that's trading
items of unequal value--
time for a
multimillion-dollar account.
The client thinks, here is
somebody who cares about me.
As long as you deal--
and this is also
different from
interest-based negotiation,
because it uses all of the
synapses in each party's head.
The CEO of a major
company in Philadelphia
once told me, the most
important thing he ever
did for his major client in a
20-year business relationship
was to pick up the client
CEO's mother-in-law
at the Philadelphia
Airport one Saturday night.
It has nothing to
do with any deal,
but it affects every deal.
Had another Googler
in one of my classes
here who a vendor raised prices
on him to a significant extent.
And so he thought about the
pictures in the vendor's head
and realized it's
very hard for vendors
to get into big
companies like Google.
And so he said to the
vendor, I'll tell you what.
You hold the price and I will
provide you introductions
to other departments at Google.
What you do after
that is your concern.
You get the job.
You don't get the job.
But I'm going to provide
you the opportunity.
For the provision of
the opportunity alone,
the vendor held the price.
And so that's what I mean
about a different way
of thinking about how people
interact with each other.
I do want to talk for
a minute about kids.
This is my eight-year-old
son, Alexander.
My favorite negotiating
partner, soon
to be my costar on YouTube.
But I want to mention
something about kids.
Kids are very negotiable if you
learn the language of children.
A couple of examples.
Kids have little power.
They want power.
And so give them
stuff proactively.
I tell Alexander he can
pick the restaurants.
His room can be a little messy.
He can go to bed a
little bit later.
And so as a result of that,
Alexander is constantly
in a debtor position with me.
He always owes me stuff.
And so when I ask him to do
things, he does them for me.
Also, I tend to
respect Alexander.
I come home from work.
He's watching TV again.
I don't shut off the TV.
I think to myself, well,
sometimes I come home,
I'm stressed out.
I have a drink.
Maybe the kid's stressed
out from elementary school.
I mean, kids get stressed out.
So I want to have a
conversation about it.
How is your stress level?
You watch TV to relieve stress.
Even if that's not the reason,
he respects the question.
And we'll have a
better relationship.
The third thing is kids
are very incremental.
So you want to be incremental.
You won't clean your room?
Will you clean a
quarter of your room?
Will you clean a
half of your room?
A couple of months ago, my kid
wouldn't do his math homework.
It was 7:30 at night.
My wife said, do
your homework now.
He said, how about 8:30?
My wife went ballistic.
I said to Alexander,
how about 7:33?
He said, OK.
My wife said, what?
And the thing was
kids are incremental.
Can I have a cookie?
Can I have a half a cookie?
Can I have a
quarter of a cookie?
And so what I was trying
to say to Alexander
is I speak your language.
And in return for that, he
gave me a 57-minute concession.
And so those are ways
to deal with kids.
There's a chapter in
the book about kids.
I want to mention not to walk
out of negotiations unless it's
a mutual agreement.
Because the signal to
the other party is,
I don't even care
enough about you
to give you the time of day.
It's a bad signal.
The last major point I
want to make to you--
and there's more
of it in the book.
And I'd like to
commend it to you,
is to deal with hard
bargainers in particular,
learn their standards.
Learn how they make decisions.
What are their policies?
Quote their stated policies.
If their website says they
care about their customers,
and they're late delivering
your cable TV box
or they overcharge
you on the phone,
you want to say to the
customer service rep, well,
I read on your
website that customers
are the most important
part of your business.
How does that dovetail
with this situation?
I was just curious.
And you will find that
they will be nicer to you.
Along with that, what are
the exceptions to policy?
Has the airline ever made
an exception to its $200
change fee?
Have you ever allowed after a 1
o'clock check-out in the hotel?
Fit within one of
the exceptions.
Asking for exceptions should
be hardwired to your brain.
I want to mention just three
very quick examples of this.
I had a student went to
McDonald's 5:00 to 11:00
on a weeknight.
French fries were soggy five
minutes before closing time.
Clerk wouldn't make
any more French fries.
Without going
ballistic, the student
picked up the
freshness guaranteed,
which guarantees fresh French
fries during all business
hours.
Showed it to the clerk,
got fresh French fries.
No muss, no fuss.
In a million different ways,
your life will be better.
Had another student
rented a car from Avis
in Albuquerque for spring break.
He got 100 miles from
the shop and realized
he paid too much for the car
one class higher than he got.
Didn't want to drive back.
At the end of a week, handed in
the car and said to the clerk,
I need a one-class credit.
And she said, you
can't have the credit
because it says in
the contract that you
pay for the car you sign
for when you leave the lot.
And she turned over the contract
and there was his signature
on the bottom of the contract.
So he immediately
looked at this contract
and said to the service rep,
it's not my responsibility
to read this contract.
And she said, why not?
And he said, look
at this contract.
You can't even
read this contract.
And if you know what rental
car contracts look like,
they're 8-point light gray
type on light pink paper.
Why, he said, if it
was my responsibility
to read this
contract, your slogan
would not be "we try harder."
It would be "you try harder."
[LAUGHTER]
He got the credit.
One more example.
I had a student from Wharton
who got a job at McKinsey.
And she thought she
deserved a $30,000 extra
signing bonus because she
had eight years of experience
in the media
entertainment department
of PricewaterhouseCoopers
in LA and she was going
to that department at McKinsey.
Her boss-to-be agreed with
her, but said, I'm sorry.
I can't do it.
My hands are tied.
McKinsey has got a
[? one-firm ?] policy.
She thought about her goals,
which were get more money soon.
So she said to her
boss-to-be, when
is the first time
McKinsey is allowed
to pay a bonus to a new hire?
And her boss-to-be
said three months.
And she said, why
don't you just give me
the $30,000 in three months?
And her boss said, sure.
That negotiation took less time
than it took to tell it to you.
The one thing you can't
do is make yourself
the issue using standards.
The more outrageous they
become, the more calm
you have to become.
Mahatma Gandhi,
Martin Luther King,
Barack Obama in the second
presidential debate.
It's very, very powerful.
I tend to say, be
extreme or come to me.
If you will come to me,
we'll be collaborative.
If you want to be
extreme without making
myself the issue, you can
drive yourself off the cliff.
So if they cheat me, I'm happy.
We just made money.
Well, tell me about
what you've done here.
And do you think this is
a good way to operate?
We've tried to reach you
20 times in the last week.
We apologize for
doing something wrong.
What have we done wrong?
Those are irresistible
questions.
What do you like most
about our competitors
and hate the most about us?
Those are questions that should
be part of your stock in trade.
Whatever these tools are,
none work all the time
and some don't
work half the time.
But they work more than
if you don't use them.
And so, let's say we're
working on an easy case.
You say, it doesn't
work over here.
And I say, forget about it.
Never works over there.
But if you can
increase your hit rate
a few percent in
your life, you'll
be fabulously more successful.
Did I mention to you
the baseball analogy?
There we go.
.280 hitter. .310 hitter.
That's basically it.
So here is, in a nutshell,
the three questions to ask.
What do I want at the end of
the process I don't have now?
Who are these people?
And given the first two, what
will it take to persuade them?
Different in every situation.
I wanted to end with a
little anecdote based
on this notion of
being incremental.
Asking for something smaller.
The world should follow the
technology industry's lead.
Start small, put in scalability.
Had they done that 30 years ago
with one health care facility
or one factory in
the Middle East,
we'd have a great
health care plan
and peace in the Middle East.
So many politicians don't
know from the concept
of scalability.
You can make the
difference in your own life
by shortening the question,
whatever you do, and scaling it
up from there.
The [INAUDIBLE]
I want to mention
to you is I had a woman
in my class some years
ago whose five-year-old
daughter fell in the kitchen one
Saturday morning and gashed her
forehead on the sharp corner
of the kitchen table.
The child was hysterical.
The child's grandfather,
the father of the student,
was hysterical.
And the student was about
to become hysterical
when she suddenly
stopped herself and said
to herself, wait a minute.
I'm taking a negotiation course.
I'm going to negotiate this.
And the issue was
the child clearly had
to go to the hospital
and get stitches.
She eventually got 12.
She wouldn't go.
She was clinging onto
the table for dear life
and nobody could pry her little
fingers off the kitchen table.
So her mother walked
over to her daughter
and said to her daughter,
does Mommy love you?
Her daughter said yes.
Her mother said, would Mommy
do anything to hurt you?
Her daughter said no.
Her mother said, when
we get to be big people,
do we have to do things
sometimes we don't like to do?
Her daughter said yes.
Her mother said,
Mommy has stitches.
Showed her a scar.
Granddaddy has stitches.
Showed his scar.
And within five
minutes, her daughter
picked herself up and walked
to the car by herself.
And so think about this in the
concept of being incremental.
The mother thinks the daughter
feels alone and in pain.
And so she asks,
does Mommy love you?
An emotional payment.
The first increment goes right
into the daughter's brain.
The daughter then realizes
that she is not alone,
but still in pain.
The mother then says, would
Mommy do anything to hurt you?
And so step by step, you can
bring somebody a vast distance.
And in a short period
of time, if you
start with the
pictures in their head,
give them emotional payments
and take them step by step.
And if they say, are you
being incremental with me,
you say, absolutely.
Is there anything wrong with
us pursuing a less-risky path?
If they say, you're using
standards on me you say,
what's wrong with
your standards?
And so this is a
transparent process, not
a manipulative one.
The best that you can do is
share these tools with others.
You'll all bring
down a deer together.
Now, some people say,
how do I replicate this?
It seems extraordinary.
And so for some
situations in the book,
I give more than one example of
some extraordinary situations.
And this is one of them.
About a year ago when I was
going to a Google workshop
in India, I was in
a car on the way
to the airport and
somebody called me,
Craig Silverman, a Long
Island investment counsel who
had taken the
course, and he said,
I just want to tell
you something I thought
you might be interested in.
This morning I went for
a routine blood test
at a blood lab.
And before I could
get the test, there
was this bloodcurdling
scream from the next room.
A young girl.
My nurse left me hanging there
and went to the next room.
This went on for
several minutes.
And finally, I decided
to investigate.
He said, I went to the
next room and there
was this poor little girl,
five or six years old.
Her mother was holding her
shoulders back and pinning her.
One of the nurses had
pinned her arm to the table.
And the other nurse
was trying to stick
this needle in her arm.
And so Craig walked over to
the girl's mother and said,
can I talk to your
daughter for a minute?
The mother said OK.
Craig went over to the
girl and said, look at me.
Do you think your
mommy loves you?
The girl said yes.
Craig said, do you think
your mommy would do anything
to hurt you?
Girl says, no.
And within two minutes,
she had calmed down
and was ready to get the needle.
He said, they looked at
me like I was a magician.
They said, where
did you learn that?
And to his credit, he
asked them to buy my book.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Questions, anybody?
I'm here to answer questions
on any subject involving
negotiations.
I'm sure somebody
has a question.
Who's tried something
that hasn't worked?
Who's tried something
that's frustrated you?
And so forth.
AUDIENCE: Got one.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
AUDIENCE: So we're in the
negotiating process for a house
right now.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Probably
a common situation.
And there are, of course,
several layers of people
in between us and the sellers.
How can we apply your
tactics if we don't even
have communication
directly to the sellers?
STUART DIAMOND: Sure.
The reason that there are
several layers between you
and the other party
is the brokers
feel fear that you
will steal the client.
That's why.
And so you've got to
address that explicitly.
And to say, I think
you probably don't
want me to talk
to the other party
because you're afraid
that something will
happen with the commissions.
So I like to sign
the most draconian,
non-circumvention agreement
you can come up with
to protect you.
But doesn't it seem to you that
making a personal connection
with the other party
would be better?
Tell me what they're
thinking and feeling.
We'll bake their favorite bread.
We'll wear their favorite
color, et cetera.
If you can't do that,
you've got to train
them to be your advocate.
They've got to find
out the pictures
in the head of the other party.
And they have to do it for you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thanks for coming.
Really enjoyed the talk.
So while I generally think the
approach that you're advocating
is really good, and I try
to employ very similar,
what about a negotiation
for a new car?
I mean, does the person on
the other side of that really
have any interest in my
caring about them as a person?
STUART DIAMOND: For a new car.
A couple of things.
And there's a section
about new cars in here.
First of all, you do want
to use standards, of course.
What these things cost.
But the other party cares
a lot more than price.
When you look up at the leader
board in a car dealership,
you'll see that the
sales reps are rated not
on price, but on units sold.
So the faster you
tell the other person
you're ready to buy
a car, the better
price you're going to get.
Here's my contract.
I will buy that car for $300
over your cost right now.
Here is a certified check.
Your commitment makes
you more powerful.
In addition to that,
there are all kinds
of other things mentioned in
the book that you can ask for.
Discounts on options,
better servicing.
I want a rental car
for free every time I
bring my car in for servicing.
I negotiated that
with my dealership.
And I'm one of the few
people who gets that.
And so there's various things.
That's another department.
That's OK.
You know them better than I do.
Go talk to them.
I'll wait.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
OK.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming.
I wasn't sure exactly how
to phrase this question,
whether I should say,
how do you negotiate
with incompetent people?
Or, maybe a better way
of asking the question
is, how do you negotiate
with bureaucracy?
When you're faced with dealing
with a wall of bureaucracy
and kind of [INAUDIBLE]
beyond that.
STUART DIAMOND: Sure.
Several responses.
First, use their standards.
Second, make a connection
with the person
across from you who wants
to feel their power.
When a cop stops
you, you apologize.
When you come to the window of a
bureaucrat at the motor vehicle
department, you ask
them how their day was.
Those are things that you
should do with bureaucracy.
You acknowledge their power
or you use their standards.
Those are the kind
of things that I
would do with bureaucracies.
Do you have a specific
example in mind I can address?
AUDIENCE: Well, I'm
currently in the process
of negotiating with
a board of education
for services for my daughter
for special needs services.
So it's a lot of bureaucracy
that you have to navigate.
And we're exploring getting
an advocate, a special needs
advocate.
Which is interesting
in-- well, it's
useful in that it gives
us additional information.
But I also realize
it's going to up
the stakes once we kind of go
into a meeting [INAUDIBLE].
STUART DIAMOND: Has
this bureaucracy
before ever done this more
quickly so the child doesn't
have to wait?
How you give a vision for
somebody-- my daughter
has these needs.
How long should she wait?
Bring her with you when you
ask people that question.
How long should Judith,
Allison, have to wait?
What do you think, Judith?
It's really hard for them.
The more you paint a
picture for somebody else,
the more persuaded
they're going to be.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Thanks
for coming today.
So I got from your
talk that when
you're making a negotiation,
you should first
take the emotional temperature
of the other party.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
AUDIENCE: And then make an
emotional payment, right?
Now, does it make a difference
whether the other party
can sense that you have an
ulterior motive for making
the emotional payment?
STUART DIAMOND: A good question.
I want to do things that are
going to seem fair tomorrow
as well as today.
So I'm not going to do
anything to hurt them.
I'm also, in fact, going
to get them to do things
they would otherwise not do.
I don't define manipulation
as getting people
to do things they
would otherwise not do.
I define manipulation
as hurting people.
So if they say, are you
making an emotional payment?
I'm going to say absolutely.
Don't you want one?
In other words, this is
a transparent process.
You have an ulterior motive.
My ulterior motive is to
make sure we both benefit
from this negotiation.
That's not win-win.
It's both benefit.
You benefit by trading
items of unequal value.
You benefit by giving each
other emotional payments.
It's much more
specific than win-win,
but I want to make sure that
we both get something here
that benefits us.
And so I think that
I owe you something,
some empathy, some apology.
Please tell me whether
I'm right or wrong.
So I'm going to be
very explicit about it.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
How do you negotiate
with a party
where there's a huge
dis-balance in trust?
STUART DIAMOND:
A huge imbalance?
You need to say, there's
a huge imbalance in trust.
What do we do?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Well, as a matter
of fact, there's
also a dis-balance
in understanding
of what we're negotiating.
If the subject is
difficult enough so
the other party
doesn't understand it
and couldn't make a coherent
proposal to counter yours.
STUART DIAMOND: If you
cannot understand what
you're negotiating,
you need not--
you should not start
the negotiation.
The first thing you have to
do is know where you're going.
If you don't, it's like getting
into the car and saying,
I'm driving to San Diego.
I don't know where it is.
I don't have a map.
OK.
You're not going to
get there very well.
So you really have to
spend time discussing what
the party's understandings are.
And yes, the less skilled
they are, the more differences
there are between
the parties, the more
time it's going to take.
But if you don't do it this
way, you'll never get there.
AUDIENCE: So you
think the education
of the other party, of their
goals is the most important
[INAUDIBLE]?
STUART DIAMOND: These
tools are morally neutral.
You can help people.
You can hurt people.
You've got to decide how much
help you want to give to them.
I tend to help people
as much as I can.
Otherwise, it's like an amateur
driver in the Indy 500 race.
You crash a lot.
AUDIENCE: OK.
Thank you.
STUART DIAMOND: OK.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Quick question from [INAUDIBLE].
Can they hear us?
STUART DIAMOND: Where are you?
AUDIENCE: They're [INAUDIBLE].
STUART DIAMOND: OK.
I'm sorry.
OK, go ahead.
AUDIENCE: There's a
[INAUDIBLE] usually set up.
AUDIENCE: Can you hear
us from [INAUDIBLE]?
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
Perfectly.
AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
A quick question.
I was wondering if
in your book you
cover how to handle
mother-in-law, father-in-law?
STUART DIAMOND: Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
You look up mother-in-law,
you'll have lots of citations.
We don't leave mother-in-laws
out of any book on negotiation.
AUDIENCE: OK.
Great.
STUART DIAMOND: And that
includes mother in-laws
and weddings.
AUDIENCE: And what?
AUDIENCE: At weddings.
AUDIENCE: Oh, at weddings?
OK.
STUART DIAMOND: And weddings.
And other things.
OK?
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks for coming.
My question is, what
if we try our best
to use your tools to
drive across the point
we want to make
with another party,
and yet it's just
not succeeding?
The other party is unresponsive.
What do you suggest
would be the best--
STUART DIAMOND: Again, I want to
try to drum this in your heads.
This is really key.
The best thing you have
is your credibility.
And you want to be real.
You want to say, you
know, I'm a failure.
I have tried to convince you.
I've been totally unsuccessful.
I've tried all these things.
Do you have any advice for me?
[LAUGHTER]
That's what you want to do.
AUDIENCE: OK.
STUART DIAMOND: Yes.
It's disarming when you do that.
RACHEL: Last question.
STUART DIAMOND: Last question.
OK.
Anybody?
OK.
One more.
Not one more?
OK.
Thank you all very much.
[APPLAUSE]
