Bargaining for advantage download

Editors John O. Greene and Brant R. Burleson have brought together preeminent researchers and writers to contribute to this volume, establishing a foundation on which future study and research will build. The handbook chapters are organized into five major units: general theoretical and methodological issues models of skill acquisition, methods of skill assessment ; fundamental interaction skills both transfunctional and transcontextual ; function-focused skills informing, persuading, supporting ; skills used in management of diverse personal relationships friendships, romances, marriages ; and skills used in varied venues of public and professional life managing leading, teaching.

Researchers in communication studies, psychology, family studies, business management, and related areas will find this volume a comprehensive, authoritative source on communications skills and their enhancement, and it will be essential reading for scholars and students across the spectrum of disciplines studying social interaction.

In a field dominated by books that focus exclusively on the perspective of business in large corporations or that assume that business has a moral deficiency in need of reform, Al Gini and Alexei Marcoux offers students and business people alike a concise guide to what everyone ought to do when doing business. Where other books are organized topically, Gini and Marcoux look at the moral features of business that recur across topical areas, stressing the considerations that bear on business people whether they be corporate functionaries, principals in family businesses, or solo entrepreneurs who do it all, end to end.

They present to students the essential concepts, ideas, and issues involved in ethics in business and emphasize the individual acting person and what it means to have character and integrity when doing business. With an emphasis on the practical, Mediation: The Roles of Advocate and Neutral, Third Edition, integrates theory with skills and strategies, ethics, and multiple practice applications to teach students about mediation and how to represent clients effectively in the process.

This next-generation casebook includes all of the mediation material in Resolving Disputes as well as selected materials from the negotiation and hybrid sections. It expands the mediation coverage in the survey casebook, focusing on psychological barriers, techniques of conducting legal mediation, and how to use mediation as a litigator. Lastly, the third edition of Mediation adds coverage not available in the survey book, including exploration of cognitive obstacles, subtle emotional issues, methods of facilitating positional bargaining and disagreements over legal issues, and policy issues affecting mediation.

Features: Expanded discussion of how cognitive barriers and emotions such as grief and loss can impact settlement. Examples showing how lawyers sometimes act as informal mediators. A chapter that place caucus, no-caucus, all-caucus and transformative models of mediation side by side, allowing teachers to compare and contrast processes. Get smart about personal finance with the art and science of negotiation Negotiating Your Investments is an in-depth guide to applying the principles of negotiation to your personal finances.

With expert insight into the before, during, and after of a successful negotiation, you'll learn how to prepare for and conduct important financial discussions with an eye toward getting the best possible outcome.

The book contains practical, actionable guidance toward pursuing what you really want, and tools that can greatly improve your chances of getting it.

Clear, concrete advice describes how to influence the other side, avoid being taken advantage of, and direct the conversation to your advantage. As a rule, investors fail to negotiate over financial matters, to their great detriment. Improving returns, or reducing fees, by a mere 1 percent per year can make a remarkable difference in your bottom line.

For example, a million dollar investment that returns 7. On the other hand, that much money could easily go straight into someone else's purse. With that much money at stake, good negotiating practices become extremely valuable. Negotiating Your Investments provides the skills and tools you need to hold your own at the negotiating table while offering advice you can put to work immediately.

Topics include: The elements of negotiation — identifying goals, interests, commitments, alternatives, and power Preparation, information exchange, bargaining, and closing and commitment — the four phases of negotiation Asymmetric information, conflicts of interest, professionalism, and whom to trust Investment vehicles and the economic science that lies behind wise investing Hard economic truths involving past results, rational market pricing, diversification, interest rates, and the effect of costs on investment returns While the focus is on personal finance, the book also includes techniques, analysis, and examples drawn from award winning negotiation courses.

It explores the basic theoretical models of bargaining in depth. With Negotiating Your Investments, you'll gain the skills and confidence you need to be smarter, and get better outcomes, in both your financial affairs and the many other negotiations you conduct every day. Go from the "IT guy" to trusted business partner If you're in IT, quite a lot is expected of you and your team: be technologically advanced, business-minded, customer-focused, and financially astute, all at once.

In the face of unforgiving competition, rampant globalization, and demanding customers, business leaders are discovering that it's absolutely essential to have a strong, active partner keeping a firm hand on the decisions and strategies surrounding information technology. Unleashing the Power of IT provides tangible, hard-hitting, real-world strategies, techniques, and approaches that will immediately transform your IT workforce and culture, presenting the new mindset, skill set, and tool set necessary for IT leaders to thrive in today's challenging environment.

Includes new discussion on social media Offers online access to the IT Skill Builder Competency Assessment Tool Features top ten lists of tips and techniques, proven frameworks, and practical guidance to help you launch and sustain your IT culture change and professional development initiatives Profiling several world-class organizations that have implemented the principles in this book, Unleashing the Power of IT reveals the best practices to get you on the path to implementation.

If you negotiate for a living or only occasionally, Latz gives you the tools and tactics to succeed before you sit down at the table. Whether it's negotiating Randy Johnson's contract or the purchase of your next car, Gain the Edge!

That one new strategy or tactic you gain from this book may make the difference between your walking away a winner and leaving empty-handed.

The margin of difference can be infinitesimal, yet the ramifications are often huge. Negotiating a new salary? Buying a car or a house? Closing a deal with a big client? Discussing where to vacation with your spouse? We negotiate every day. Yet most of us negotiate instinctively and don't give the process the strategic attention it deserves. We suffer as a result. Now negotiation expert Martin E. Latz reveals an easy-to-use strategic template you can use in every negotiation.

This is not ivory-tower advice, or advice just based on instincts and experience: The tactics and techniques here come from the most up-to-date research and the knowledge Latz has developed in negotiating on the White House Advance Teams, from consulting with top executives at Fortune companies and law firms nationwide, and from teaching thousands of business professionals and lawyers how to negotiate more effectively.

The result is a comprehensive guide that takes you all the way from general strategies and principles--Latz's Five Golden Rules of Negotiation--to specific tips, techniques, and even phrases you can use at the table. Gain the Edge! Synopsis : Bargaining for Advantage written by G. Richard Shell, published by Penguin which was released on 02 May Download Bargaining for Advantage Books now!

This newly updated classic just got even better. Richard Shell has taught thousands of business leaders, lawyers, administrators, and other professionals how to survive and thrive in the sometimes rough-and-tumble world of negotiation.

In the third edition of this internationally acclaimed book, he brings to life his systematic, step-by-step approach, built around negotiating effectively as who you are, not who you think you need to be. But by this time, Marci was already out the door.

For example, studies have shown that women bargain less effectively when they are reminded of a negative, women-are-wimps gender stereotype just prior to a transaction.

Even attempts to prove the stereotype wrong seem to backfire, leading to overly aggressive behavior and less-than-stellar results. This psychological process is reversed if women are given a positive, women-are- collaborative stereotype just prior to negotiating.

Now the self-fulfilling prophecy creates a good bargaining experience and better results. This ability to turn the tables on opponents seems to come with experience. These hard-nosed negotiations take place between creditors and companies that cannot pay their bills. Potential bankruptcy forms the backdrop to the bargaining. Few women make this their professional calling, and our speaker reported that her femininity was almost always an asset in this tough arena.

I wait for a man on the other team to come to my defense—one always does—and then I have gained an ally and divided their group. She was born in Poland but moved to Israel as a child. I create the impression that I am going to be tough as nails, and then I go in and melt their hearts. They are so relieved—and they work with me. Of course, I can always fall back on that first impression if I need to. They also need to be aware of their own assumptions. Gender differences are therefore well worth considering as part of a complete style analysis.

And in doing global deals, sensitivity to issues of language, customs, social expectations, and religion can mean the difference between a successful long-term business relationship and a short-lived, unprofitable transaction.

He started the negotiation well, but every time he made a concession, the other parties escalated rather than reduced their demands.

After several rounds of this over a couple of months, he quit, telling his counterparts that he was thoroughly disgusted with their tactics and that he wanted nothing to do with them.

He rejected the overture. A week later, they called again, making several concessions they had previously said were absolutely impossible. He reiterated that he had no interest in further dealings.

At this point in his story, he looked at me ruefully. If I had walked out two months sooner, they would have behaved better and I probably could have closed the deal. For example, different cultures have different sensitivities regarding the status of people at the bargaining table. Some formal cultures require participation by people of equal rank.

Other, less formal cultures use functional knowledge and decision authority as criteria for picking negotiators. Such differences can lead to serious breakdowns and misunderstandings.

A female attorney working for a prestigious New York law firm once accompanied the male CEO of a major client to Latin America to negotiate a complex deal. Soon after they arrived, the head of the prospective Latin American partner suggested that he and the CEO go off together to discuss business—while his wife and the lawyer go shopping. The lawyer was outraged, assuming this to be a blatant example of Latin American gender bias.

Before voicing her objections, however, she called a colleague back in New York, who told her that he, too, had been excluded from preliminary talks during his last negotiation in that country. The Latin American executive was just looking for a diplomatic way to get her out of the picture as a lawyer, not as a woman. Had the woman attorney insisted on participating, she would have soured the deal and destroyed her credibility.

These and countless examples like them confirm that culture presents a veritable minefield of stylistic differences in negotiation. The Arusha people gathering under their shade trees in Africa may engage in a process similar to the one business moguls use in New York, but the tone, pacing, signals, cues, and underlying assumptions about relationships can be radically different. Because our global economy depends on bridging these cultural divides, entire books some of which I list in the bibliography detail the pitfalls, opportunities, and customs that characterize negotiating in every commercially important region in the world.

I will be referring to a variety of different cultural practices throughout the book, especially in the chapters dealing with relationships, exchanging information, and bargaining. For now, I simply want to flag two important points.

First, cultural issues usually have more to do with form than substance. That is, they add complexity and potential misunderstanding to the way people communicate with one another, but money, control, and risk are still likely to be the most important issues on the table regardless of what country you are in. And the best way to avoid miscommunication is to do your homework on the culture in question, hire skilled interpreters, and use cultural liaisons to help you avoid cross-cultural meltdowns.

Second, the single most important difference in cross-cultural negotiations—other than the obvious problems of language and custom—is the way the parties perceive the relationship factor. As I will detail in the chapter on information exchange, North Americans and northern Europeans tend to focus more quickly on the transactional aspects of the deal, whereas most Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American cultures focus more intently on social, relational aspects.

Cultures may vary in the degree of formality they associate with prewedding festivities, but families in all cultures use these events to thoroughly size up and woo their new, would-be relations. If you want to be successful negotiating in a relationship culture, therefore, be patient and realize that the contract if one comes is just one part of a much bigger picture.

But effectiveness is as much a matter of attitude as it is of ability. The best negotiators exhibit four key habits of thought that everyone, regardless of their style, gender, or culture, can adopt to improve their negotiation results. Nearly every research study on negotiation has confirmed its importance.

Here is an illustration. Several years ago, a colleague and I were investigating the use of computer networks as a method for negotiation. We designed a network computer system to help parties reach better agreements and then set out to test it. We gave the same four-issue, buy-sell exercise to hundreds of MBA students.

We instructed half the pairs to read the problem and negotiate whenever they thought they were ready— some face-to-face, others using e-mail. They usually took about ten to fifteen minutes to prepare, then they negotiated. We required the other groups to go through a structured, individual preparation process on the computer that usually took about thirty to forty minutes.

Some students then negotiated the buy-sell exercise using our computer network system while others bargained face-to-face. We were surprised by the results. Our fancy, computerized method of negotiation did not matter much.

But the preparation process did. The students who used the formal preparation system reached better agreements in both the face-to-face and the computer network conditions—not just for themselves, but for both sides.

I will discuss the best way to set goals in Chapter 2. To acquire high expectations, you must combine specific goal setting with a personal commitment to performance. Expectations come from your overall attitude about what you are trying to achieve and derive from unstated, sometimes unidentified, beliefs about what is fair and reasonable. You can always tell, when a negotiation is over, where your expectations were really set.

If you feel genuine disappointment that you fell below a certain level, that is where your expectation was set. If you feel genuinely satisfied, you met or exceeded your expectation. The goal of an effective negotiator is to have expectations that are high enough to present a real challenge but realistic enough to promote good working relationships.

Information-Based Bargaining begins with the idea that information is power. Listening enables you to get information. If having high expectations is sometimes a problem for cooperative people, listening requires special effort for competitive types.

Aggressive bargainers spend most of their time at the bargaining table either talking about what they want or thinking of something clever to say next that will put the other side on the defensive. As we shall see, the best negotiators follow a different practice: They ask questions, test for understanding, summarize discussions, and listen, listen, listen. They keep their promises, avoid lying, and do not raise hopes they have no intention of fulfilling.

The research on this is reassuring. Skilled negotiators prize their reputations for straightforward dealing very highly. That makes sense. Given a choice, would you want to do business with someone you could trust or someone who might be trying to cheat you? This sounds good, but does it really pay to be honest in bargaining?

Does personal integrity require you to reveal your bargaining position? What if the other side fails to ask an important question? Do you have a duty to volunteer an answer? I will address these and similar issues in Chapter It is, like high expectations, an attitude. Relationships, social norms, culture, and bargaining etiquette all make a difference. Therefore, when I speak of a commitment to personal integrity in negotiation, I mean that effective negotiators can be counted on to negotiate consistently, using a thoughtful set of personal values that they could, if necessary, explain and defend to others.

This approach obviously leaves a lot of room for individual interpretation about what is right and wrong. But such differences are an inevitable part of human interaction. The main thing is to attend to your reputation and self-regard. Be reliable. Both worked out. We left each story as the parties began to share information with each other.

Smith gracefully accepted both the watch and the tacit admission that Smith had most of the bargaining leverage with reciprocal signals of cooperation. The initial meeting between the two men and their advisers went on through the evening and into the night. Within days, they created an outline of a merger agreement to create a new company: Harcourt General Inc. Back in the shadow of Mount Meru, the two farmers went back and forth all day. At length, one of the elders proposed dividing the disputed land along a prominent footpath that formed a natural boundary.

The farmers huddled with their bargaining teams. The social pressure for an agreement intensified. The farmer who had demanded the meeting in the first place the one whose son had been beaten then stepped into the center of the circle.

He, too, would honor the new arrangement. They had a deal. These public declarations and a ritual feast that followed served to commit the parties. Everyone in the community would remember the agreement and help enforce it if necessary. Summary All negotiations begin with you. The First Foundation of Effective Negotiation is therefore your preferred bargaining styles—the ways you communicate most confidently when you face a negotiation. Your success depends on candidly assessing your strengths and weaknesses as a communicator.

They can adapt easily to many different situations and opponents. Others are more limited in their range of effective action. They may be quite strong in situations requiring competitive instincts but weak when it comes to accommodation or compromise.

Or they may be strong in cooperative skills and weak if the situation calls for hardball tactics. Many negotiation experts try to teach people a single, all-purpose menu of bargaining moves. I do not believe this is either helpful or realistic. People and situations are too varied for such mechanical advice to work. Rather, your job as a negotiator is to understand your style preferences, see how they match up with the situation more on this in Chapter 7 , plan your path through the four steps that negotiations follow, and try your best to be effective by preparing, forming high expectations, listening to the other party, and acting with integrity in the process.

Information-Based Bargaining proceeds from the assumption that you will get better results for yourself and achieve more for others who depend on you by tirelessly searching for key information about the parties and the situation.

Your success then turns on using this information skillfully as bargaining goes forward. It is time to explore the Second Foundation, your goals and expectations. I believe in always having goals, and always setting them high. He quickly ran into a problem: The tiny radio was unlike anything Americans had ever seen. As Morita would later write, many U. Everybody in America wants big radios. Bulova offered to buy , of the radios for distribution through its strong U.

Morita was stunned by the size of the order. This was the deal of a lifetime. This condition conflicted directly with an important long-range goal Morita had set for his firm: to establish Sony as an independent, global brand name based on its innovative, quality products.

Morita cabled his executive board at Sony headquarters in Japan for instructions. The board enthusiastically cabled back its response: Forget about the problem with the brand name and take the order. Morita thought it over carefully for a week, then returned to Bulova to continue the negotiations. He told Bulova he would like to make a deal, but he could not accept the condition. Why not take advantage of ours? I am here with a new product, and I am now taking the first step for the next fifty years of my company.

Fifty years from now I promise you that our name will be just as famous as your company name is today. Indeed, his board was shocked when he reported his decision and told Morita that he was being foolish. Shortly thereafter, Morita received a more modest order from another American distributor, but this one let Morita keep the Sony name on the radio.

But his bargaining stance reflected the strength of his vision for Sony. Morita had a goal: to make the name Sony a household word for quality electronics throughout the world within fifty years. He achieved that goal with time to spare—and made himself a business legend in the process. The Second Foundation of Effective Negotiation focuses on your goals and expectations. And research on setting goals discloses a simple but powerful fact: The more specific your vision of what you want and the more committed you are to that vision, the more likely you are to obtain it.

But you do not need to be the next Akio Morita to draw a lesson from his story. Research on negotiation confirms that anyone who is willing to take the time to develop higher expectations will do significantly better and do so without putting his relationship or reputation with others at risk. To become an effective negotiator, you must find out where you want to go—and why. That means committing yourself to specific, justifiable goals. It also means taking the time to transform your goals from simple targets into genuine—and appropriately high—expectations.

What is the difference between a simple goal and something that has matured into a genuine expectation? Basically one thing: your attitude. Goals are things we strive toward that are usually beyond the range of our past achievements. Such things as investment goals, weight loss goals, and athletic goals are typical. We set goals to give ourselves direction but we are not greatly surprised or disappointed if we fall short. An expectation, by contrast, is a considered judgment about what we can and ought reasonably to accomplish.

If we fall short of our expectations, we will feel sincere loss and disappointment. It will hurt. We may set a goal of having our children attend an Ivy League college, but we have an expectation that they will attend college somewhere. Our expectation about college affects the way we communicate about the subject with others, including our children. They begin to share our assumption that college is in their future, and their behavior reflects that assumption.

And guess who in fact expects to go to college? Kids of parents who went to college. The same pattern holds all the way up to the children who expect to obtain doctoral degrees. So it is with negotiation. Our goals give us direction, but our expectations are what give weight and conviction to our statements at the bargaining table. We are most animated when we are striving to achieve what we feel we justly deserve.

As his goal matured into a solid expectation, he was able to communicate this vision more clearly to his own board of directors and to potential customers. What you aim for in negotiations often determines what you get. The first reason is obvious: Your goals set the upper limit of what you will ask for. You mentally concede everything beyond your goal, so you seldom do better than that benchmark. Sports psychologists, salespeople, and educators alike confirm that setting specific goals motivates people, focusing and concentrating their attention and psychological powers.

Third, we are more persuasive when we are committed to achieving some specific purpose, in contrast to the occasions when we ask for things half-heartedly or merely react to initiatives proposed by others.

Our commitment is infectious. People around us feel drawn toward our goals. Wayne Huizenga, an energetic American entrepreneur, maintains that one of the secrets of success in business negotiations is having a passionate commitment to ambitious goals.

This trait enables effective negotiators to communicate enthusiasm and direction at the bargaining table. Huizenga should know, having built three successful megacorporations from scratch at the same time he was buying or founding three professional sports teams—the Miami Dolphins football , the Florida Marlins baseball , and the Florida Panthers ice hockey.

Negotiators striving to achieve concrete goals are more animated, committed, prepared, and persistent. Nor is this effect limited to experienced deal makers. Everyone gains a significant psychological edge when he or she is working to achieve a specific target in bargaining. By definition, if you cannot achieve your bottom line, you would rather seek another solution to your problem or wait until another opportunity comes your way.

A well-framed goal is quite different from a bottom line. For example, in the case of the used CD player illustrated in Figure 2. Bottom lines are vitally important to negotiation theory, but setting and negotiating toward a legitimate goal is the key factor in most bargaining success stories. Let me explain why. The seller is selling a used CD player. Researchers have discovered that humans have a limited capacity for maintaining focus in complex, stressful situations such as negotiations.

Consequently, once a negotiation is under way, we gravitate toward the single focal point that has the most psychological significance for us. They measure success or failure with reference to their bottom line.

And we know that avoiding losses is a powerful motivating force. This power is not working as strongly for you when you focus solely on your bottom line. You can now end your search for a buyer and begin mentally possessing the other item you want. If the buyer is alert and most are when it comes to money , he will sense your relaxation and stop the bidding. What is the practical effect of having your bottom line become your dominant reference point in negotiations?

Over a lifetime of negotiating, your results will tend to hover at a point just above this minimum acceptable level. For most reasonable people, the bottom line is the most natural focal point.

Disappointment arises if we cannot get the other side to agree to meet our minimum requirements usually established by our available alternatives or our needs away from the table , and satisfaction arises just above that level. Meanwhile, someone else who is more skilled at orienting himself toward ambitious goals will do much better. Not surprisingly, research shows that parties with higher but still realistic goals outperform those with more modest ones, all else being equal.

To avoid falling into the trap of letting your bottom line become your reference point, be aware of your absolute limits, but do not dwell on them. Instead, prepare your bottom line, then set it aside while you work energetically on formulating your goals.

Then, if you must, gradually reorient toward your bottom line as that becomes necessary to close the deal.

With experience, you should be able to keep both your goal and your bottom line in view at the same time without losing your goal focus. Research suggests that the best negotiators have this ability. If setting goals is so vital to effective preparation, how should you do it? Use the following simple steps: 1.

Think carefully about what you really want—and remember that money is often a means, not an end. Set an optimistic—but justifiable—target. Be specific. Get committed. Write down your goal and, if possible, discuss the goal with someone else.

Carry your goal with you into the negotiation. What Do You Really Want? Begin your preparation for negotiation by considering your own underlying needs and interests. But it is easy to forget that price is often a means to an end, not an end in itself. The goal is to achieve more value or profit, not a victory on the price term.

This is not as paradoxical as it sounds. If you are on the buy side, you want to make sure that you get a specified level of quality for the money you spend, not just a low price. And sellers need to be careful that their sales create the conditions for future business. Canceled orders and one-time sales do not make for a profitable enterprise, even if the price achieved on any given sale looks good.

The founder of CBS, William Paley, was having a hard time making money in the radio broadcast marketplace in its early days. He was negotiating with local stations over prices for CBS shows the local stations would run, and the stations had all the power. They did not have to buy and often did not. Paley revolutionized radio and created the modern network by realizing that the price for his shows was a means, not an end in itself.

The strategy earned him millions. Later, in the s, Paley took the U. Experienced negotiators often report that price can be a relatively easy term to resolve compared with less obvious but more explosive issues such as control, turf, ego, and reputation.

So when you formulate your goals, consider carefully what really matters to you. Sure, money is important. But identify your underlying interests and needs clearly. Once negotiations start, it is all too easy to become preoccupied with competitive issues such as price and forget what you are really trying to accomplish. Set an Optimistic, Justifiable Target When you set goals, think boldly and optimistically about what you would like to see happen.

In one classic study, psychologists Sydney Siegel and Lawrence Fouraker set up a simple buy-sell negotiation experiment. In other words, Siegel and Fouraker gave their subjects both concrete incentives for hitting a certain specified level of performance and, perhaps unintentionally, a hint that the assigned target levels were realistically attainable why else would subjects be told about the bonus round?

Both sides had the same bottom line: They could not accept any deal that involved a loss. In our experiment, unlike the one Siegel and Fouraker conducted, negotiation subjects set their own bargaining goals. The result was the same, however. Negotiators who reported higher prenegotiation expectations achieved more than those who entered the negotiation with more modest goals. Why are we tempted to set modest bargaining goals when we can achieve more by raising our sights? There are several possible reasons.

First, many people set modest goals to protect their self-esteem. Modest goals thus help us avoid unpleasant feelings of failure and regret. This usually means we have failed to prepare well enough. Third, we may lack desire. If the other person wants money, control, or power more urgently than we do, we are unlikely to set a high goal for ourselves. Why look for conflict and trouble over things we care little about? Research suggests that the self-esteem factor plays a more important role in low goal setting than many of us would care to admit.

I see further evidence of this in negotiation classes. As students and executives in negotiation workshops start setting more ambitious goals for themselves and strive to improve, they often report feeling more dissatisfied and discouraged regarding their performance—even as their objective results get better and better.

That way you can maintain your enthusiasm for negotiation as you learn. Research shows that people who succeed in achieving new goals are more likely to raise their goals the next time. Those who fail, however, tend to become discouraged and lower their targets.

Once you have thought about what an optimistic, challenging goal would look like, spend a few minutes permitting realism to dampen your expectations. Optimistic goals are effective only if they are feasible; that is, only if you believe in them and they can be justified according to some standard or norm. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 3, negotiation positions must usually be supported by some standard, benchmark, or precedent, or they lose their credibility. No amount of mental goal setting will make your five-year-old car worth more than a brand-new version of the same model.

You should also adjust your goal to reflect appropriate relationship concerns, a subject I address in Chapter 4. With the preliminary work done, you are ready to enter the negotiation process and encounter the values and priorities the other side is bringing to the deal. Until you know for sure what the other side has for goals and what the other side thinks is realistic, you should keep your eyes firmly on your own defendable target. Be Specific The literature on negotiation goal setting counsels us to be as specific as possible.

Clarity drives out fuzziness in negotiations as in many other endeavors. With a definite target, you will begin working on a host of psychological levels to get the job done. Your specific goal will start you thinking about other, comparable jobs that pay your target salary, and you will begin to notice a variety of market standards that support a salary of that amount. But effective negotiators do not let these feelings get in the way of setting specific goals. There are several simple things you can do that will increase your level of psychological attachment to your goal.

First, as I suggested above, you should make sure it is justified and supported by solid arguments. You must believe in your goal to be committed to it. Second, it helps if you spend just a few moments vividly imagining the way it would look or feel to achieve your goal. Visualization helps engage our mind more fully in the achievement process and also raises our level of self-confidence and commitment.

He then kept that picture over his desk for several years as he directed all his professional energies toward gaining admission. After being turned down once, he was finally admitted.

When he arrived on campus, he had another picture taken of himself in the same building, and he now displays the two pictures together with great satisfaction. He credits the visual image of his goal with keeping him on track toward its achievement. The same visualization techniques work for negotiation goals. To commit yourself even further to your goal, tell another person about it and show him or her your written goal.

If other people know about the goal, you begin to feel subtly accountable to them, and research indicates that negotiators bargain harder when they must explain to someone why they failed to achieve a goal. Labor, sports, and political negotiators go to extreme lengths to mobilize this power: They sometimes announce their bargaining goals to the press, thereby putting everyone including their constituents and the other side on notice as to what they want to achieve.

This sort of public commitment is a powerful way of binding yourself to your goals. Of course, as in all other aspects of negotiation, one should use judgment in committing to goals. If both parties engage in dramatic forms of public commitment, with press conferences and do-or-die statements to their respective audiences, they can paint themselves into a corner from which it is impossible to escape.

Labor strikes, political showdowns, and wars are examples of failed negotiations, not successes. Finally, any type of material investment you can make in the goal that would be lost if you fail to achieve it will add greatly to your commitment.

A major airline recently announced that it had signed a deal to acquire as many as four hundred new planes to expand and upgrade its fleet. It went on to state that the airline would be forced to cancel that order if it failed to reach a favorable wage agreement with its pilots before the deadline for closing the purchase.

With that one move, the airline secured three negotiation advantages: a public commitment to its stated wage target, a credible deadline for concluding negotiations with its pilots, and, most important, a vision of what it and the pilots would lose if the airline failed to achieve its wage goals. The negotiations ultimately closed by the deadline and within the wage constraints the airline had set.

It therefore pays to carry your goals with you and, if you feel yourself getting swept away, take a break and review them before going forward. I find it sometimes helps to literally carry a short summary of my goals in my pocket or wallet.

Even if you just carry it in your head, however, the point is not to lose sight of your goals in the confusion of actual negotiation. Barry Diller, the successful television executive and entrepreneur, learned this lesson the hard way when he got caught up in bidding for the rights to the first television showing of the movie The Poseidon Adventure in the early s.

The reason Diller paid so much? He agreed to participate in the first and, for him, the last open-bid auction for TV rights to a movie. It usually does not take long for regret to set in after such a victory, teaching the winners that it is not enough to prepare goals—you must remember them during the negotiation. Clarity of purpose and optimism are key attitudes to bring to the goal-setting process. First, a concrete, challenging goal will motivate you.

You will become more focused, persistent, and achievement-oriented, and you will be more likely to come up with good arguments and new ideas about how to get what you want. You will also avoid the common trap of becoming focused on your bottom line too early.

Second, your clarity will communicate confidence and resolve to the other party. You will convey the message that you have high expectations for both yourself and the deal. And perhaps no other personal variable makes such a difference in negotiation as the quiet feeling of confidence, self-esteem, and commitment that emanates from people who know what they want and why they ought to get it. The Third Foundation of Effective Negotiation directs attention to this psychological drive.

Barton told a story about tribal people in the Philippines with whom he lived for many years. Barton reported that a man of the Ifugao people the name of the tribe once borrowed two pigs from his neighbor. Two years later, the man who loaned the pigs asked for the debt to be repaid. His son was getting married, and he needed pigs to give as presents at the wedding.

The two men then fell into a dispute over how many pigs were owed. There was general agreement that a two-year loan of two pigs called for a repayment of four—double the original number. That was the standard. The problem was implementing it.

The lender, an ambitious man who wanted to make a lavish wedding display, insisted that the borrower owed him a total of six pigs. He argued that slightly more than two years had passed and that one of the pigs had been of a special, larger breed that should draw a higher rate of interest. The borrower angrily replied that everyone knew the right number was four. The natural rate of increase on that chicken, he said, equaled roughly one pig. So he reduced his offer from four pigs to three—to account for the chicken debt.

The lender responded that he would accept five pigs, but not one less. After much haggling and many insults, the two families engaged the services of a respected elder to act as a go-between. That brought the whole negotiation process to an abrupt halt. Now the wives got involved. Both women told their men to stop arguing and settle the matter.

The elder finally put together a deal. First, the lender promised to restore the gong. Next, the borrower promised to cancel the chicken debt and pay the five pigs demanded by the lender. But there was a twist: The elder passed along to the lender only three of the five pigs paid by the borrower, keeping the other two for himself as his fee.

Few of us today are busy borrowing and lending pigs.