No: The Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home

214 Pages·2007·0.91 MB·English

by  Jim Camp

Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
The Best Word in the English Language

1
Stop the Roller Coaster, I Want to Get Off
Controlling the Commotion of Emotion
2
So You Want Results?
Focus on What You Can Control—Yourself
3
If You Want the Advantage, Take “No” for the Answer
Why “No” Is Great, “Yes” Is Bad, and “Maybe” Is the Worst
4
The Greatest Negotiation Secret Ever
Rooting Your Mission and Purpose in the World of the Other Side
5
How I Got My Boat
How Vision Drives Decisions
6
Socrates Has Nothing on You
The Art and Science of Asking Great Questions
7
Power Tools
“3+,” Stripping, and Not Presenting
8
The Truth Is, You Don’t Know
Blank-Slating to Success
9
Who’s Calling the Shots?
Finding the Real “Decider”
10
Getting What You Want
Building Your Success with Agendas
11
Managing the Real Price Being Paid
Budgeting Beyond Dollars and Cents
12
Perfect Preparation
The Ultimate Advantage in Any Negotiation

If You Want More
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jim Camp
Copyright
To my children,
Jim and Cynthia, Scott and Meredith,
Todd, Brian, and Kristi
Introduction
The Best Word in the English Language
T
he best word in the English language must be “yes.” You please the other
person. You satisfy the request. You get something done; you make a deal.
Everyone is happy, break out the bubbly. Likewise, the worst word must be “no.”
It rubs everyone the wrong way. It implies rejection and intransigence. It stops
this deal right in its tracks. It’s a killer.
Or so everyone in this compromise-and assumption-based world seems to
believe. In truth, this thinking should be flipped on its head. In negotiation, “yes”
is the worst word. It just betrays a fear of failure and a fear of losing this deal,
and it primes you to please the other side, to rush ahead, to compromise early
and often, to come to a deal, any deal. “No” is the best word. It’s what you want
to be prepared to say and to hear. “No” will liberate and protect you.
Consider Bill, a successful sales rep for Midwest Widgets (a ficticious name
clearly, as are all other names in this book), who handles the Dumont account.
Midwest has enjoyed Dumont’s business for seven years, and there’s been no
indication that the situation is about to change. Midwest makes an excellent
widget and gets a fair price for it. Suddenly, though, the largely ceremonial sales
call to Dumont takes a nasty turn. Steve, the new purchasing agent, tells Bill out
of the blue, “I’m sorry, but we’re changing our widget supplier. I’m fed up with
your company’s arrogant behavior and have decided to choose from three of
your competitors who’ve been beating down our door for years to get a piece of
the action.”
Bill, like many salespeople, immediately assumes that Steve and Dumont are
actually maneuvering for a price discount, and he believes (assumes) his only
recourse is to immediately give in and compromise. Drop the price and save the
business. Bill instantly runs the numbers. How small a discount can he put on the
table and keep the Dumont contract? How large a discount would cost him his
job? Almost instinctively, he asks Steve what price will be required to keep the
account. Steve has to work hard not to gloat in triumph. This was so easy. He
already has Bill exactly where he wants him, and he replies, “Well, Bill, I
appreciate your willingness to give us a better deal, but I’m not sure you can
keep the business at any price. But I’m willing to go to bat for you with my
committee if you knock fourteen cents off the unit price.”
Lose the Dumont account! Bill might as well get out his résumé and put his
house on the market. Emotional chaos is not too strong a description of his
plight at this moment. His emotions are raging and his heart is pounding, but he
is able to muster the wherewithal to ask for a time-out, which Steve grants. Bill
calls Susan, his sales director. It’s a new world with Dumont, he tells Susan. The
only way to keep the account is with a big discount—fourteen cents per widget.
Otherwise, Dumont is going elsewhere.
Now Susan is a partner in the chaos. Bill’s failure would be her failure. Just as
Bill has taken everything Steve with Dumont has said at face value, she takes
everything Bill has reported at face value. “Do you think he’ll take twelve cents,
Bill?” Both assume that the fourteen cents is Steve’s high number, but he’ll
knock it down a little. Neither Bill nor Susan has any idea what’s really going on
with Dumont. All they know is that it’s a win-win world: You ask, I give, it’s a
deal!

I call this compromise-and fear-based negotiation. Steve with Dumont is playing
on Bill and Susan’s fear of failure—their fear of losing the deal. He is rather
crudely trying to manipulate their instinct to say yes and their fear of saying no.
This is the oldest game in the book, but it works a million times a day.
Meanwhile, I teach and preach the system based on “no,” which in a negotiation
simply means maintaining the status quo. If Steve wants fourteen cents knocked
off the price of each widget, a “no” from Bill just holds things in a safe place.
From here Bill can then make a decision whether to give all, part, or none of the
increase based on the facts, not the emotion of the moment as he sees his job and
possibly his career unraveling.
The impulse to say yes (as advocated in Getting to Yes, as well as its many
other compromise-, assumption-, fear-, and emotion-based imitators) undermines
you, at the very least, while the “no” strategy will liberate and protect you by
releasing the emotional pressure in a negotiation. It provides a safe framework
within which to determine the best course.
To see how, in brief, let’s rewind Bill’s story. If Bill is using the “No” system,
Steve’s bombshell about the fourteen-cent discount doesn’t faze him in the least
because he responds systematically rather than emotionally. As Bill carefully
considers Midwest’s mission and purpose, he notes that it’s unlikely the
company’s management will support a significant compromise just because
someone asks for it. Judging Midwest by its own standards, Bill decides that
Steve and Dumont will have to do better than that.
Bill will ask Steve several questions, all aimed at building Steve’s vision of
what it would mean to Dumont to change its widget supplier. Where have we
fallen short, Steve? How many failures has Dumont encountered with the
Midwest widget on its production line? How much risk of failure can Dumont
absorb with a new, unproven widget? Bill would ask these questions in a certain
way, and he would listen to the answers and take notes in a certain way. Of
course, he would already know the real answers: the Midwest failure rate, how
much risk Dumont can take, and the quality and the price of the competitors’
widgets.
In short, Bill will say no to offering a big price discount while giving the
negotiation a solid foundation on which to build. So many people in business are
afraid that saying no in this way will make Steve walk away, but he won’t,
believe me. After all, Midwest hasn’t been Dumont’s widget supplier for seven
years for no good reason. In the end, Bill and Midwest may give some ground on
price—or they may not. Regardless, that decision would be based on solid
information, not assumptions or emotions. That decision would be based on
Steve’s new vision of what a change in suppliers will actually mean for Dumont.
It could well be that this vision will support a price increase, not a discount. I
have seen it happen many times.
Regardless, the “No” system guides Bill and protects him every step of the
way, and it will do the same for you. In your personal and working life, you
make all sorts of agreements every day. That is, you negotiate. These agreements
—big and small—have as great an impact on your life as anything else. They
drive your life, really. All of our lives. But how many of us approach these
negotiations truly aware of what we’re really doing? Very few. Often we get
away with this easygoing or oblivious attitude, or so it seems. Sometimes we
don’t even know we are in a negotiation, let alone prepare for it—until it’s too
late. How many times have you experienced the panic that sets in after some
rash decision or agreement you really didn’t think about, or whose consequences
you didn’t realize? Show me the person who hasn’t been blindsided when a
negotiation has gone off the rails entirely. What just happened! Now what should
I do?
Take my good friend Ralph, a developer who had invested his entire fortune in
a project in California. In this region, conservation and protection of natural
resources are very important to the community, and Ralph found himself up
against a local council that he considered more than difficult; to him, they were
impossible. As we enjoyed cocktails and the setting sun on my back deck, he
unloaded on me with his woes dealing with what he perceived as a group of
people driving him out of business.
“Ralph, what do they want?”
“To give me a hard time. To drive me out of the valley.”
“No, seriously, what are they after?”
“Well, what do you mean, Jim?”
“This is a negotiation. What do they want from it? Something is driving
them.”
My friend mulled my question in silence and realized he had no idea what
they wanted. As we sat on the deck he started making some wild guesses. I
listened for a few minutes before I stopped him, stepped inside the house, and
returned with a sheet of paper. On the spot, we started to build a plan. What was
the long-term aim, the continuing task and responsibility of Ralph’s
development? What were the problems to be faced and overcome? What did the
community hope to gain from this development? What did “their world”
demand?
While Ralph knew what he wanted from the negotiation, that was about it. He
had no idea what they wanted—the local council. He had no idea how to proceed
when the situation got the least bit complicated. He had no thought process to
guide his work—no solid plan to support and enhance his decisions. In fact, he
had never even thought of negotiation as a series of decisions. Instead, he had
been negotiating with his emotions—excitement, maybe some fear. He was
burdened with unwarranted assumptions. His crystal ball was very cloudy, which
is worse than no crystal ball at all. No wonder he got into trouble and hated to
negotiate with that council.
Once Ralph discovered he could negotiate based on decisions and use “no” to
his great advantage, he faced the council with greater skill and confidence. In the
end, his real estate development was completed to the satisfaction of almost
everyone. My purpose in this book is to provide you with the same new mindset
that I provided for Ralph twenty years ago and still provide for my clients today.
Negotiation is negotiation, whether it’s

• handling a complex multimillion-dollar deal that could make or break a
business
• submitting a career-building proposal to your boss
• gaining admission to the university of your choice
• settling a dispute with the pool contractor (or with the homeowner)
• getting your child to agree to go to bed
• getting that summer internship or landing that first job
• making progress during a dicey parent-teacher conference
Using my system, you can negotiate anything. No more hopes and prayers. No
more fear and panic. You will know where you stand at all times and what to do
next. No more guessing and unnecessary giving in. No wasted answers and
offers, immediately regretted. You will understand any conflict or issue
involving another human being as a negotiation you can reasonably control with
planning and solid decision-making.
Chaos does not have to rule, in either your business or your everyday life.
There is a much better way, and it’s not rocket science. My “No” system is a set
of clear principles and practices that you follow step by step by step. My system
is for Mom, Dad, the kids, the entrepreneur, the professional corporate
negotiator, the CEO, the teacher, the realtor, the banker, the politician, the
carpenter, and the diplomat.
I want you to think about negotiation a little differently—a lot differently—
and to see negotiation neither as a chore nor as a nightmare, but as a challenge
you learn to enjoy. With “no,” you have much control over the outcome. No
more wondering, What just happened! Now what should I do? Those days are
gone forever. You’re safe now. Your back is covered.

In order to understand the power of “no,” you must first understand that “no”
rejects the compromise-and assumption-driven reigning paradigm in negotiation
today. If this makes you wince—after all, who doesn’t want to “get to yes”—
hang in for a few pages. The “No” system is not just contrarian. It creates an
entirely new paradigm for negotiation—one that makes common sense, then
intellectual sense, and finally practical sense in your life and work.
If you’re a devotee of required compromise and endless assumptions, there are
many businesspeople—I’m one of them—who have you for lunch every day.
They have developed high-level strategies whose only purpose is to take
advantage of your weak mindset of compromise and assumption. These tactics
and strategies, I want you to know, accomplish their goal without too much
trouble, grinding negotiators and their businesses into the dirt day in and day out.
Think Steve and Dumont. My purpose with this book is to enable you to turn the
tables on these folks. “No” will give you the upper hand over strategies like
Steve’s and all other negotiating strategies. Throughout these chapters I will
include real-life stories of my clients achieving great success using my system.
You’ll see firsthand the powerful results produced by “no” every day.
For the fun of it, I sometimes introduce my system and the “no” principle with
the story about the day I watched my granddaughter Lily negotiate with her
mom over going to bed. I watched as three-year-old Lily said no to her mom five
times and in the end got exactly what she wanted. Lily sure wasn’t afraid to say
no or hear no—she just kept negotiating. Persistence is important to the success
of “no.”
If you’re a parent, you know that every child hears “no” as the start of the
negotiation, not the end of it. As adults, however, we’ve been conditioned and
trained to fear the word, so with audiences and clients I slowly and carefully go
about proving that the practice of politely saying no, calmly hearing no, and just
inviting no has a beneficial impact on any negotiation. In fact, the invitation for
the other side to say no has an amazing power to bring down barriers and allow
for solid beneficial communication. Giving someone permission to say no takes
pressure off by lowering the intensity of emotions. Since the subject right now is
children, let’s say you’re the parent walking into a parent-teacher conference to
discuss your child’s lack of self-control and respect for authority. This could be a
very tough meeting, with trouble possibly brewing. You’ve already had a talk
with Johnny and you have a plan to help solve this and get Johnny on the right
track. You are here hoping to gain the teacher’s help. This is a negotiation, plain
and simple, and you should begin this exchange with a clear statement to the
teacher that you have a plan and you want her to feel comfortable rejecting your
ideas. You want her to be comfortable in saying no. You would be well advised
to say at the first opportunity, “Mrs. Jones, I have noticed some restlessness in
Johnny and I have a plan to solve this problem he is creating. I want you to feel
comfortable rejecting the plan and feel free to give me your ideas. That said, my
impression right now is that…”
This straightforward invitation for the teacher to say no allows him or her to
feel comfortable and, if necessary, tell you what’s really going on. And you must
really mean this, because you probably don’t know what’s really going on at the
school.
If you’re the teacher, you might begin the conference by saying, “Mr. Smith, I
don’t know you well at all. I only know Johnny. He’s a good boy, but I’ve been
teaching twenty-three years, and his behavior at times does prompt some
questions. May I ask them? Please, set me straight.” This is a slightly more
subtle invitation to “no”—and one the teacher should also mean. For both parent