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Future of Conflict #3: Start With No

This week I read Start With No, by Jim Camp. It’s a business book by a veteran negotiator. I didn’t know much about Jim Camp beforehand, but this is what I gathered after reading the book.

  1. He was beloved by his colleagues and trainees.
  2. He really cares about the “little guy” suppliers negotiating against giant multi-national corporations.
  3. He really hates Getting to Yes and the term “win-win”.
  4. He likes (American) football.

Start With No wasn’t my favorite book. There was a lot of hot air. However, I still pulled some valuable themes for us, because that’s my job.

  1. Successful negotiation requires getting inside the mind of the Adversary
  2. Successful negotiation requires emotional control and steadiness.
  3. Deep Generosity leads to High Performance

The Mind of the Adversary

Adversary is what Jim Camp calls the person (people) on the other side of the negotiating table. Since Jim thinks everything in life is a negotiation, The Adversary is also your wife (Costa Rica or Hawaii?), your kids (what’s for dinner?), your boss (when can you update that website?), your soccer team (can we move practice to 4:40?), and everyone else.

My #1 takeaway from this book is that a good negotiator helps The Adversary understand how Good you are for Them.

Let me illustrate this by drawing a distinction with the interest-based negotiations I am more familiar with.

In interest-based negotiation (like mediation), my goal is for each party to understand:

  1. Their own needs
  2. The needs of the other party

As the neutral, I would ask both parties a question that helps them realize what They Really Want, below their positions. Once we got somewhere, I would summarize those needs to the other party, with the hope that each side could now see creative solutions where both of their needs can be met, rather than a zero-sum game.

This approach works well when:

  1. The parties have some kind of ongoing relationship
  2. Each party wants multiple things out of life.

This approach works poorly when:

  1. The parties don’t care about each other at all.
  2. The only thing each party wants is money.

(Luckily, very few negotiations only involve only money. Most of the time, when we intentionally spend money, it’s because we want something other than money more than the money!)

The Jim Camp approach goes above and beyond this approach by embedding the negotiator in the mind of The Adversary, with the goal of using questions so The Adversary realizes the degree to which you (and hopefully only you) can solve their problems.

[Living] in the adversary’s world is a fundamental way in which you see your adversary’s world clearly and without false assumptions, and get the adversary to see and act with the same clarity.

In order to do this, the most important element of Jim’s system is to ask questions that draw out the Pain of The Adversary. Not just what problem they are facing, but the gnarly impact that problem will have upon them — all through questions.

You want to inhabit the adversary’s world, because that is the world about which you need information, and that is the perspective from which the adversary makes decisions. He doesn’t make decisions from your perspective, does he? Of course not. He makes them from his own perspective. Obviously. How do you find out about this perspective? How do you inhabit his world? By asking questions.

Pain!

In a really efficient negotiation, both parties will work to clarify the vision of the pain of the adversary. In any event, you must never enter a negotiation in which you haven’t seen your adversary’s pain. Never.

Once you know their pain, your every action should help the adversary “see and decide” that you are the solution to their pain.

There are two primary strategies for accomplishing this:

  1. Help them stay rational
  2. No action without intent

Help Them Stay Rational

Camp believes any kind of emotion in negotiation (positive or negative) leads to emotional swings, broken expectations, and instability. Here is how he helps people stay calm and cool:

  1. No Ego Games. He is actively trying not to be the best-dressed or smartest person in the room. He wants the other side to feel comfortable, not intimidated or scared. He is not trying to “take control” or be the “alpha”.
  2. Focus on Freedom. He creates a low-pressure environment where there is no pressure to “Close” or say “Yes”. He wants to give as many opportunities as possible for The Adversary to say “No”, so when they don’t it’s because they genuinely see the value (to themselves) of whatever you’re offering.

“No” gets you past emotional issues and trivial issues to essential issues.
“No” does not tear down business relationships. It builds them. Saying and inviting and hearing “No” are the real win-win.

(These are pretty contrarian pieces of advice in a macho sales/negotiation culture, I gather.)

No Action Without Intent

There is a very business-specific side of this and a much more generally applicable side of this. He goes into building agendas for meetings and how every single interaction with The Adversary should have a clear goal behind it. What do we want out of this meeting? Out of this email exchange? Those goals should be phrased in terms The Adversary’s pain and how you are relevant to it. Fine.

But the larger point is that every interaction is part of the negotiation. There is no interaction without purpose. This is a high-level of craftsmanship. I am reminded of going to an omekase sushi bar in Seattle and seeing the economy of movement of the chef: every moment of every finger had a clear, specific, and effective purpose. That’s the level of detail Camp is interested in.

The main insight from this theme is that not only should you seek to understand The Adversary’s needs, but to ask questions that help them understand their needs (and their Pain) in a way they didn’t before.

The adversary’s answers to our questions build the vision that he needs to make decisions. No vision, no real decision: this is a rule of human nature.

Do you have a queasy feeling? I did. There’s an element of manipulation here — like much of marketing — where you are intentionally creating an experience for someone else with the sole purpose of your own benefit. It’s not a purely helpful tool.

It can be used to screw over other people.

However, I genuinely believe that is not Camp’s intent, and his insistence on keeping the discussion rational (as opposed to emotional) is his way of mitigating this (quite natural) inclination to manipulate.

If The Adversary doesn’t have a problem that either of you can visualize, then there is no need to be in the negotiation in the first place. And if their problem cannot be illustrated well enough that it is Totally Obvious how you can help, then you’re not in a position to help them.

Emotional Control

Perhaps 40% of the book is about reining in your own emotions. You might think of it as some combination of Non-Violence Communication, Beginner’s Mind, and Stoicism.

And there’s a deep truth to it that we all know, so I think it’s worth repeating: Being needy repels people.

He gives tons of examples of how the “energy” around neediness destroys a negotiation. It leads to someone talking too much about irrelevant topics, trying to impress The Adversary, or trying to push or control the negotiations.

If there’s no need, there’s no fear of rejection, and there’s no desire to please.

The serious negotiator understands that he or she cannot go out into the world spending emotional energy in the effort to be liked, to be smart, to be important. This negotiator wants to be recognized as being effective and businesslike, that’s all. She spends her energy on the task of business.

In a similar vein, he is categorically against all assumptions and expectations in a negotiation, and proposes replacing all assumptions with research. This is part of the “beginner’s mind” thing that is much easier said than done.

Perhaps the most actionable technique (also controversial!) in this section refers to outcome goals. He is categorically against any and all outcome goal, like sales targets and timelines. Why? Not only because they are out of our control (unlike the actions we might take to achieve them), but because they trigger neediness and desperation.

Focus on what you can control (the means), not what you can’t (the end)

He notes that people start to make bad decisions during a negotiation when they get close to missing their targets, instead of maintaining discipline on the small, steady actions (rooted in The Adversary’s mind) that will get them to their goals.

That’s the main thing I’ll take out of this theme — a desire to re-evaluate the role of outcome goals in my emotional life. Do the emotions they trigger help me achieving those goals?

Deep Generosity leads to High Performance

Start With No has fourteen chapters, lots of football metaphors, and dozens of cheap (inaccurate) attacks on “win-win” negotiation. But the last chapter is very different. Jim’s basic argument in Chapter 14 is:

  • People with high self-esteem accomplish great things
  • Giving gifts has a better effect on self-esteem than receiving them
  • Therefore, we should dedicate time to giving gifts and “paying it forward” if we want to accomplish great things.

It’s a passionate argument — seemingly out of nowhere — for giving things away.

I’ll close with an extended quote since I haven’t done much of that this week, and I like this story:

This story goes back to the mid-1950s, when the queen of England decided to put up for sale the land she owned in the Lake Muskoka region of Ontario, Canada. This land had never been owned by any white man before the queen. It had been taken from the original Canadians by treaty. My dad bid for a lot, sight unseen, on Go Home Lake, and to his family’s delight, his bid was accepted. In our first visit to our new holding, my father met an old trapper and hunter on the lake named Joe Bolier.

Joe was starting to build summer cabins for new people on the lake… Dad and Joe negotiated for our new cabin, and a deal was struck with a handshake. Nothing was put in writing. The cabin would be ready when we returned next summer.

Right on schedule, we showed up with enough old furniture and other stuff to make the new cottage our summer home. Joe stopped by to say hello and to be sure Dad was happy with his work. Dad was happy, and he said so. Then he looked Joe in the eye and asked if he was happy with the deal. Joe said, “Well, Larry, I didn’t do well here. I lost money. I underestimated the cost to carry all the lumber up over the cliffs.” Dad didn’t blink an eye and asked, “Joe, would another $800 cover your loss and give you a fair profit?”

The man was startled. He hadn’t met many landowners like my father, but this was the right thing to do on Dad’s part, and as a businessman he knew it was. Honestly, I think Dad, as an American, was a little uncomfortable in Canada. He wanted to feel good about his presence in the country. He was protecting his high self-image by doing the right thing. He was paying line for line, deed for deed. Dad was paying forward for a lifetime of service from Joe.

To summarize:

  • Keep it in your pants (emotionally)
  • Focus on the other’s side’s experience (to help both of understand if there’s a fit)
  • Pay it forward

Pretty good conclusions, really. And fully applicable to all of the domestic negotiations you’re having dozens of times a day, as well as your negotiations with multinationals.

Here’s the full list of quotes if you want to see what else was there than didn’t make the top 3.

As always, I treasure your feedback. I have a long list of books to go through (haven’t chosen next week’s yet!) but if you have a suggestion, I want to hear it.

Together,

~ Ankur