Negotiating for success

Regarded by many as the world’s leading negotiator, Prof Stuart Diamond has advised companies and governments on conflict resolution, and in 2008 was responsible for settling the seemingly intractable Hollywood writers’ strike. He spoke to Ann O’Dea.

According to Stuart Diamond we are always negotiating, whether making a business deal, talking to friends or even driving a car. It’s the basic form of all human interaction, he says, and most of us are terrible at it. Diamond is a recognised authority on the subject: he runs the most popular course at Wharton Business School and has advised major corporations and governments on conflict resolution. In February 2008 he was called in to resolve the infamous Hollywood writers’ strike, something that was achieved in a matter of days.

Diamond was in Dublin recently to speak at the John Hume Institute at University College Dublin, and we caught up with him to talk  about his latest book Getting More – How you can negotiate to succeed in work and life.

Diamond attributes his early interest in the art of negotiation to his days as a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. “The book is based on the formal research I’ve done in the last 20 years and the observations I’ve made over 40 years, since all of life involves negotiation.

“For the first 20 years I was a journalist and I found, by trial and error in the first few years, that if I focused less on facts and more on the perceptions in people’s heads I could get trust from people very quickly, and they would tell me all sorts of stuff that they didn’t tell anybody else,” says Diamond. “So I printed lots of stories that won prizes and I used that to develop a career with The New York Times where I won the Pulitzer.”

He subsequently went to Harvard Law School where he met the team behind the bestselling Getting to Yes. “I found a bunch of people who had taken this field, which I had been mining unbeknownst to me, and tried to make a structure out of it. They gave names to things so you could replicate them and I thought that was cool.”

Working with his colleagues for three years, his talent was quickly spotted and he was made associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, as well as head of its outside consulting.

“When I began to teach the subject I found something lacking in what they did. There was a group at Wharton that was working on this, so I went there to get my MBA and began to teach. This was when I began to develop what became this book.

“I’ve taught 30,000 people in 45 countries, from country leaders to administrative assistants, people from all walks of life, and I found that the same process could and should be used in any situation, whether it’s kids, diplomacy or business.

“Secondly, I found that most of the directions people are given to deal with each other are not effective in meeting the goals of the people who use them. That is not to say they can’t get agreements, but they’re often not very good ones.

“And if you look at the world around you that’s what you see. You see people get agreements, especially in thorny subjects, but they’re often not very good – from the banking crisis here to terrorism to strikes to what’s going on in the US to businesses that can’t seem to get together in a merger.”

Collaborative negotiating

Diamond is quick to debunk several negotiating myths, as he sees them. “The first thing I found was that the concept of power and leverage is greatly overused, and doesn’t do what people want it to do,” he says. “When you exert your power over somebody they get angry and they retaliate. They don’t bend to your will and that means malicious obedience at work, it means suicide bombs in the Middle East and it means the kid who’s kicking and screaming on the floor.

“Not only is leverage ineffective too much of the time, the second thing it does is it destroys relationships. If you tell somebody you have alternatives, they don’t like it. I like to use the analogy of going out to dinner with somebody that you’re fond of, and in the middle of dinner telling them that if this doesn’t work out you’ve got all these different alternatives, and you pull out your black book and rifle through it. Just see what happens!

“Sometimes this approach can work, if there’s a great power difference between the parties, but it’s not long term. People remember you used this on them.

“And the third issue is that you overuse your power and you become extreme and you become ostracised, and so power is a very unstable bond. In fact more recent studies have shown that people who collaborate get much more than people who don’t.”

He points to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Nash, the Princeton mathematician characterised by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.

“What he actually did was take the hypothesis of 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and proved mathematically what Rousseau said – which was that when parties collaborate the overall size of the pie expands to such an extent that each party gets more than he could possibly get alone, no matter the size of the pie. Now, that’s a very tantalising hypothesis that Nash proved, so that is no longer in dispute.

“And yet we have a whole world that uses tools like sanctions. I mean the thing about sanctions is it provokes what I call the Alamo strategy. It doesn’t matter how many sanctions we put on Iran or North Korea, they will fight till the last man standing. People get emotional and they will not let you put your thumb on them no matter what you do. That’s a problem.

“The second level is then the cognoscente in the field of negotiation in the last 30 years, beginning with the Harvard group of which I was part. It said: ‘Okay let’s look at interest-based negotiation, rational actors and find win/win’. That’s where the negotiation body of work has generally stopped, and I found significant problems with that too. The problem I found with that is the bigger the negotiation the more emotional the parties are.

“And when people get emotional they don’t care about rational actions, they don’t care about win/win. If you’ve got a local bank or government that takes your job, cuts your salary, you don’t want to hear about win/win, you want to know ‘What am I going to do to raise my family?’ You don’t want to see spreadsheets and nice economic studies.

“Win/win is a rational tactic for an irrational world,” says Diamond. “It can work sometimes but at the margins, especially in big negotiations.

He points to the Middle East peace process as a case in point.

“Settlements are not really the issue, or they shouldn’t be. They take less than 5pc of land in the West Bank, and land swaps have been discussed, yet the people are focused on them, because they’re a symbol. What the Palestinians should say every time, when any issue is raised, is: ‘Where’s my State?’ That would be a relentless focus on goals.”

This is the key, says Diamond, to remain focused on your goals, and to not get distracted by side issues. “The way I do that is to say: ‘What do I want at the end of the process that I don’t have now, whether I win or not?’ Sometimes I want to lose today to win tomorrow; sometimes I want you to feel that you’ve won.”

Perceptions and feelings

Diamond says he has discovered a much more effective route to ‘Yes’, and that is all about dealing with perceptions and feelings. “You need to look at how people view the world, through what lens, get into their subconscious, and understand their emotions,” he says.

He illustrates the point with his involvement in the Hollywood writer’s strike. In February 2008, he was approached by prominent Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel (model for television’s Entourage, and brother of the former White House chief of staff Rahm).

“It was a Tuesday afternoon and the chief negotiator for the Writers’ Guild, John Bowman, was going to meet that Thursday morning with five studio heads and their representatives. He needed a list of issues to prioritise.

“So I got on the phone with Bowman and a bunch of other people and I said to them: ‘Forget about the list, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go to the meeting and I want you to say to the studio heads: ‘Hi, how are you doing? Are you happy? We’re not happy. You making money? We’re not making any money. If you had to do this over again how would you do it?’ It took 30 minutes to restart the negotiations and it took two days to get an agreement in principle – after a year of conflict.

“There’s two things I can say about this, a) it’s not rocket science, and b) unless you already know how to do it, it’s completely invisible. In the Middle East they should just be going to lunch without talking about peace. Studies show that when you make a human connection with somebody, they’re six times more likely to give you what you want.”

Tell me more

“I tell people the right answer to the statement ‘I hate you’ is ‘Tell me more’ because I need to find out your perceptions and the contents of your head, even if you’re a terrorist,” says Diamond. “Otherwise I don’t know where to start to persuade you and I have to know where to start.

“So, that is the guiding principle of this book, that people are almost everything and you really have to focus in on who they are. If somebody says: ‘I’m not buying from you, I don’t like your products’, I say: ‘Fine, tell me what you hate about me and what you like about my competitors?’ It’s almost impossible for people to resist that question, and they will tell me how to persuade them.

“It’s completely opposite from the way most people negotiate. They look for weaknesses in the other party. I don’t care. I look for the other party’s hot buttons – something I first learned as a reporter – and I look for ways to access those hot buttons, to start there and to bring people step by step to where I want them to go.”

Speaking with Diamond, it’s not hard to see how he has achieved just that many times over.

Prof Stuart Diamond’s book Getting More – How you can negotiate to succeed in work and life is available now in paperback from Penguin Business Books.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Irish Director magazine.

Ann O’Dea