Negotiation 101 - important stuff

Start out by negotiating a win /win/win

Professor Bazerman recounts in Negotiation Genius an experience he had that demonstrates an important principle of investigative negotiation: "I worked with Chris, a Fortune 500 executive who is widely regarded within his firm as a negotiation genius. What’s the source of his stellar reputation? In one story, Chris broke a deadlock with a small European company that was selling his firm a new healthcare ingredient.

The parties came to terms on price, but the European supplier refused to grant Chris’s firm exclusive use of the product. Chris was called overseas to try to solve the problem, which he did by asking a simple question: Why wouldn’t the supplier grant exclusivity? The supplier explained that he had promised to sell his cousin a very small amount of the product annually. Armed with this information, Chris proposed a solution that allowed the two firms to quickly wrap up an agreement: the American firm would gain exclusivity except for a few hundred pounds of the product each year, which would go to the supplier’s cousin. Chris’s breakthrough may seem simple, but for the average negotiator, it would not be obvious.

He succeeded by recognizing that those who know how to gain valuable information perform better than those who solely focus on what they know. Chris intuitively employed a method that my HBS colleague Deepak Malhotra and I call investigative negotiation.

The first principle of investigative negotiation involves asking not just what the other side wants, but why he or she wants it. When you ask “why?” you are likely to uncover the deeper interests underlying your counterpart’s requests—and therefore, are better equipped to find novel ways of meeting both sides’ needs.