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Portfolio Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in Great Britain by Portfolio Penguin 2010
This edition published 2011
Copyright © Stuart Diamond, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-96224-5
Preface
1. Thinking Differently
2. People Are (Almost) Everything
3. Perception and Communication
4. Hard Bargainers and Standards
5. Trading Items of Unequal Value
6. Emotion
7. Putting It All Together: The Problem-Solving Model
8. Dealing with Cultural Differences
9. Getting More at Work
10. Getting More in the Marketplace
11. Relationships
12. Kids and Parents
13. Travel
14. Getting More Around Town
15. Public Issues
16. How to Do It
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
‘He’s the man with the Diamond touch … his negotiations jump from the professional (dealing with terrorists, running an airline, doing deals) to the personal’ Irish Times
‘According to Stuart Diamond, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, university lecturer and former adviser to the UN, it’s not just the movers and shakers of this world who should be focusing on how to negotiate, it’s all of us’ Guardian
‘If you watch American TV, you owe Stuart Diamond a thank-you. He’s the guy who broke the 2008 deadlock between Hollywood writers and the studio executives’ Sunday Tribune
‘Required reading for anybody in the business of persuasion’ Sales Success and More
‘Practical, immediately applicable and highly effective’ Evan Wittenberg, Google
‘I rely on Stuart Diamond’s negotiation tools every day’ Christain Hernandez, Facebook
‘The best training of my life’ Larry B. Loftus, Head of Procter & Gamble Far East
‘Stuart Diamond has taught me more than anyone’ Rob Mcintosh, Dell
‘This book will give the reader a massive advantage in any negotiation’ Stephanie Camp, senior digital strategist, Microsoft
‘The Getting More model is the negotiation model of choice for our CEO clients and staff of financial advisors’ Morgan Stanley Smith Barney
‘A flexible toolkit for getting your way, whether … a million-dollar deal, a botched restaurant dish, or a petulant four-year-old’ Psychology Today
‘The book is amazing … extremely powerful in the real world. A must-read!’ Adam Guren, chief investment officer, First New York Securities
‘For women, empowering and enabling’ Umber Ahmad, executive director, Platinum Gate Capital Management; former vice president, Goldman Sachs
‘Invaluable in helping me achieve my goals, whether on the field, in the office, or at home with my five children’ Anthony Noto, CFO, National Football League
‘The crown jewel; it fundamentally changed my way of thinking’ Ravi Radhakrishnan, senior manager, Accenture
‘The best training we have ever received on this or any subject. The benefits are immediate and tangible’ John Sobel, senior vice president/general counsel, Yahoo
‘The best class at Wharton; it changed my life’ Jim Vopelius, vice president and CFO, Trident Risk Management
‘The best class ever at Google; it should be required for all salespeople’ Patrick Grandinetti, senior manager, Google
‘The most important class I’ve ever taken’ Shanan Bentley, senior vice president of risk management, Citigroup
Stuart Diamond has taught and advised on negotiation to corporate and government leaders in more than 40 countries. He teaches at The Wharton School, which is often ranked as the world’s leading business school, and where his negotiation course has been the most popular for 13 years in the student course auction.
He has also taught at Columbia, NYU, USC, Berkeley, Oxford and Penn Law School, where he is currently an adjunct professor. He holds a law degree from Harvard, an MBA from Wharton, and is a former Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He has won numerous teaching awards.
Diamond advises companies and governments on more effective negotiation, and has owned or managed ventures in a variety of countries, ranging from an airline to a medical services company. He has provided negotiation advice and training to attorneys and to managers and executives for half the Global 100 companies. His clients have included JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Google, Yahoo!, Merck, SAP, Microsoft, BASF, Prudential, the World Bank, the Government of Colombia, a $16 billion petrochemical company in China, a $4 billion foreign car importer in Russia, scientists in Ukraine, entrepreneurs in South Africa and pharmaceutical companies in the Middle East.
He has consulted extensively for the United Nations. He once persuaded 3,000 farmers in the jungles of Bolivia to stop growing illicit coca and to start growing bananas. In 2008 he provided the process that enabled the Writer’s Guild to settle their strike with the studios in Hollywood. He has taught parents how to get their kids to bed on time and to brush their teeth with a minimum of hassle.
In a prior career Diamond was a journalist at The New York Times, where he won the Pulitzer Prize as a part of a team investigating the crash of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. He has written two previous books, two documentary films and more than 2,000 newspaper and magazine articles.
www.gettingmore.com
For Kimberly and Alexander
This is an optimistic book, intended to make your life better. It starts with the principle that you can get more. No matter who you are, no matter what your personality, you can learn to be a better negotiator. You can get more.
In the 20-plus years I have been teaching, I have had the palpable experience of watching people become better negotiators before my eyes. They became more aware of themselves and particularly others in their quest to get more in their lives through negotiation.
A lot of the tools that they learn in my class and use in their lives challenge the conventional wisdom. Many seem counterintuitive at first. But the success of my students’ day-to-day experiences, and their personal growth, are the markers of a new way of looking at human interactions. The Getting More process presented in this book redefines negotiation theory: simplifying it, eliminating the jargon and providing a more practical, realistic and effective way of dealing with others.
You will see how the conventional concepts of rationality, power, walking out and “win-win” actually don’t work very well much of the time. Instead, strategies like emotional sensitivity, relationships, clear goals, being incremental and viewing each situation as different are much more persuasive.
My students learn to get more by communicating even in the face of hostility, and by valuing the other side’s perceptions no matter what they are. They learn about the loss of profit from confrontation and “us versus them” tactics, and gain much more value by constantly pushing for collaboration. And they learn to handle hard bargainers by using their words against them in the least combative way. They offer trust but insist on commitments in return. They are not patsies. They meet their goals.
As mentioned throughout, the title of this book is Getting More, not Getting Everything. The book is intended to significantly improve the life of anyone who reads it and embraces its tools and strategies. Some elements will work sometimes; some will work better than others. It will teach you to determine what works best for you and train you to make those tools your own.
At the end of the day, Getting More is not about learning how to negotiate; it is about becoming a negotiator to your core, so these tools become as much a part of you as your personality. Once the tools are internalized, virtually every interaction you have will improve.
Not everything in this book will apply to you. Some of you don’t have children, and others are uninterested in public issues. But in writing this book I tried to communicate advice that touches a very broad audience. Something that you already know may be very fresh to someone else, and vice versa. The point is to identify what you can use, now and throughout your life, and key on it. Look for the things that can help you, that can add value to your life and the lives of others.
All of the material, whether applicable to you or not, is presented through the stories of my students and my own experiences, in the hope that their successes—and failures—will be interesting to you even as you are learning the tools.
Unless you practice with these tools, however, they will remain words on a page. You must see them work for you to own them.
You may think that some of the negotiation tools in this book cannot possibly work. But everything has been tested and tested again. They do work; often they tap into fundamental tenets of human psychology. If you’re skeptical, try them in non-risky environments, and incrementally, and see what happens. You’re likely to be pleasantly surprised. Don’t do everything at once. Try something, feel it out, improve it for yourself, and then add something else. You have a lifetime to do this.
Finally, let me know how you are doing. I’m a teacher at heart. I want to know how my students are doing, and anyone else who addresses the material. Write to me at www.gettingmore.com. This book is intended to begin a dialogue among those who have looked around at the world we live in, and decided it’s time to get more.
Haverford PA
August 2010