The Exchanges

Q Do you think that relates to the old saying, like, you never get fired for hiring IBM?

A Yeah, you know, um, because, well then the other, the other crazy thing is, In navigating people's fears, people aren't afraid to fail. They're afraid to fail in a new way. So you never get fired for hiring IBM is like, if we hire IBM and we fail, it's already been demonstrated to be a socially acceptable outcome. But let's say, let's, if we go out, you know, when, when was, uh, when was Apple started? When, when did they first make the first Mac? If we go out and hire these guys, you know, named Jobs and Wozniak that built some stupid computer in their garage, you know, that could go bad. Whoever heard of those guys? So let's hire IBM first because that's, that's the safe failure.

AI assessment note: “So you never get fired for hiring IBM is like, if we hire IBM and we fail”

Q Wasn't getting to yes based on that whole principle?

A You know, it is, and, and, you know, one of the biggest differences between getting to yes and, and, uh, and my book Never Split the Difference is, Getting to yes is intellectually sound. There's nothing intellectually to be challenged on getting to yes. And unfortunately, that does you no good as soon as you involve human beings because none of us are intellectually sound. You know, we're all driven by emotion and passion and emotional intelligence. If we'd have known as much about specifically articulating emotional intelligence like we do now as we did when getting to yes was written, I think that would have been a different book. And I met Roger Fisher, uh, back in 2004 when I went through, uh, when I first started collaborating with Harvard Law School, and Roger Fisher was both brilliant intellectually and actually emotionally intelligent, incredibly emotional intelligent, but they wrote an intellectual book, and that's where it falls down.

AI assessment note: “You know, it is, and, and, you know, one of the biggest differences”

Q Is that how you think about that? Or do you have different terms in mind that?

A Um, you know, our terms are a little more layman's terms because And this goes right to why hostage negotiation has direct application to business. Because when I learned hostage negotiation back in the, in the, uh, in the early nineties, they used to tell us, all right, look, some guy, some poor guys got himself in a jam. He's barricaded someplace. He's taken hostages. Look for the loss. You know, there's going to be a loss. All our, all our techniques are designed to get the guy talk and find out what his loss is and address that. So look for the loss. So something would have happened. And we just figured that it was only the loss was a driver of bad behavior, bad criminal behavior. And then Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky come along. And then unfortunately, you know, when the Nobel prize is handed out, Amos Tversky has already died of cancer. Otherwise he would have got it also. Kahneman and Kversky come up with prospect theory and win the Nobel Prize for it after hostage negotiations been invented, which is the fear of loss is the single biggest driver of human behavior. Uh, prospect theory says, you know, loss stinks twice as much as an equivalent gain. Not that it's the only driver, but it's the biggest driver. And when I found that out, I said, you know, we've been operating like that for years looking for the loss. We just figured it was hostage takers. We didn't know i…

AI assessment note: “our terms are a little more layman's terms because And this goes right to”

Q As a practitioner of this for so many years, what would surprise people the most or perhaps, I mean, what surprised you the most about how real life negotiation works versus the way that we think it works or the way you thought it worked before you got into this line of work?

A Well, if you let the other side go first, it'll take less time. You know, we used to, uh, I had a judge in a federal trial that had a great saying. He says, we're going to delay things in order to save time. And we think in the, the most direct route, you know, let me just tell you what I want so you can give it to me. Like that's the most direct route. And it's a mess. I mean, that, that, that going and direct Is a really bad idea. It just creates so much, it creates chaos. You know, Covey's, we think that Stephen Covey seek first to understand, then be understood, the seven habits of highly effective people. I mean, I always just, maybe my perspective is wrong. I always thought of Covey as this warm and fuzzy nice guy. You know, seek first to understand, then be understood is a mercenary's tool. I mean, if you want to get to an out, if you want to get to your outcome faster, Let the other side go first. It'll take a lot less time. Uh, you don't waste time spinning your wheels, or you don't waste time arguing, or you don't waste time to point counterpoint. And I think most people don't realize that. They don't understand a tremendous amount of power of letting the other side go first, not the least of which is it takes less time overall.

AI assessment note: “if you let the other side go first, it'll take less time.”

Q The idea that you consider the worst case opportunity in any negotiation. Is this an idea you found useful, or do you agree or disagree with that in practice?

A Ah, you know, again, an intellectually brilliant idea in practice, a horrible idea. And it, it, it came, it was much easier for me to come to accept that because as a hostage negotiator, what's my bad? Are we walking away? You know, do I say, do I say to the bank robber, well, I'm not giving you a plane, so we're leaving. There ain't no Batman hostage negotiation. So as soon as I got, I was never handicapped by Batman. It's a great handicap. Here's, here's the problem with Batman. That becomes your goal, and so therefore, if you say to yourself, and the vast majority of people who calculate their BATNA, you know, as long as I do better than my worst alternative, as soon as I get past that, I'm good, and I can quit.

AI assessment note: “an intellectually brilliant idea in practice, a horrible idea.”

Q I like that a lot. Um, what fields of knowledge outside of negotiation itself, and I guess your own experience, have you found most valuable in kind of adding to your, your repertoire of tools and finding new insights?

A You know, some, some of the stuff that I'm finding really interesting now is, has to do around the mental state of flow. Because historically, um, we're supposed to be dispassionate in the negotiations. You know, you drive to be dispassionate, a drive to get into a neutral frame of mind. Well, flow is where you're padding recognition and your decision making is at its peak. Your mental endurance increases and your overall performance is much better. Like, X Games athletes are doing things that the world thought was previously physically impossible. Are they physically, can an X Games athlete, is their vertical jump five feet instead of two feet? No. But their performance and what they're doing is the equivalent of taking a vertical jump and doubling it or tripling it. But they're physically the same specimens. The state of flow, which borders on, is a highly positive frame of mind, bordering on, it's fun. They're having fun, bordering on euphoria. Their pattern recognition and their decision making is near perfect in that state of mind. That's what we need in business. We need more mental endurance. We need better pattern recognition. We need fearless decision making. As soon as fear drops away, we can think better. It's a positive frame of mind. So the whole psychology of flow in terms of people's performance in business is stuff that I'm finding fascinating, and it happens to…

AI assessment note: “some of the stuff that I'm finding really interesting now is, has to do around the mental state of flow.”

Q What are the other, um, bad recommendations you hear in your profession that are practiced even by practitioners?

A Well, you know, there's a couple, there's a couple subtle ones, and, um, you know, one of the first one is, is this, you know, you gotta go first, you gotta, you gotta anchor high, um, and, you know, in, in practice, that interferes with collaboration if you anchor high. It's, it's basically a, it's starting out by not telling a truth, um, it's defining it as a win-lose scenario, um, And it's also taken, it's taken a risk of leaving a tremendous amount of money on the table. And one of my, one of my favorite stories was, because we never taught high anchoring, but one of my students in Georgetown, he decides he's going to go for a job interview. He's going to high anchor. He's making about 85 K at the time, and he wants a nice big jump, and he wants to anchor at one 10. That's what he's after. And, um, On a, on a way to the interview, you know, his father's telling him, it's like, you know, that's, that's a huge jump. You're talking about, think of the percentage jump. That's just, that's, you know, that's 25,000 dollars in terms of percentage. You're going for too much. And he's like, I'm determined. I'm, I'm going to go after it. I'm going to, I'm going to throw out the number one-tenth. So they go into the interview and they say, you know, where are your salary expectations? And he puffs himself up and proudly says, one-tenth, one-tenth. And he negotiates the deal and, and t…

AI assessment note: “one of the first one is, is this, you know, you gotta go first, you gotta anchor high”

Q What do you think prevents people from that though? Like the, the notion of being wrong, like what's going on inside that person? Because I'm sure they also at some level feel if they don't see it tangibly that, you know, something has to change and yet they're still unwilling to See reality.

A Yeah, well, it's, you know, I know from, I'm satisfied from, from, from Danny Kahneman, that there's a fear of loss in there someplace. And, um, you know, their, their perception of themselves. And there's, there's some, there's something inside them that just scares the heck out of them. Um, you know, I was, one of the things that, I was talking to my girlfriend recently, I was saying like, you know, I think everybody's got two lines of code, somewhere deep down inside. Somebody said something to everybody when we were little kids, that was like our two line of, two lines of magic code in there, and figuring out what that code is, those two lines, is what really drives the direction that people go, and some, you know, some, it has to do with self-esteem, it has to do with, You know, I, I met a guy one time who, um, was, was, he was a surprise to his family. You know, they thought they were done having kids, and 10 years after they were done having kids, you know, another one is on his way, and he used to love to tell this guy he was an accident, and he grew up, his two lines of code, you know, I mean, that makes, that almost made him feel like he was unwanted.

AI assessment note: “I'm satisfied from, from, from Danny Kahneman, that there's a fear of loss”

Q Yeah. When you're in your negotiations with somebody, how do you separate out somebody on the other end of the phone or the negotiation like you, um, versus somebody who's read a book? Like the people who know what they're talking about from the people who pretend they know what they're talking about.

A You know, one of the biggest things is where's the other side coming from? Because I, you know, I'll get, I'll get people that'll try my techniques on me because they're trying to communicate with me better, and I'm good with that. Or I, I get somebody who's, who's trying some of this stuff on me because they're just trying, they're trying to prove that they're smarter than me, and they're still going to exploit me and take advantage of me. I, you know, you can sniff that out pretty fast. So a lot of it really has to do with, you know, not as the other person trying to collaborate with me, but really are they trying to hurt me? And, uh, and I, and I'm good. I'm absolutely good with somebody negotiating with me as long as they're trying to make a better deal.

AI assessment note: “one of the biggest things is where's the other side coming from?”

Q Do you ever actively coach your kids on how to negotiate better? Like, not necessarily negotiating with you, but in seeking what they are getting what they want to achieve?

A See, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's the bad thing about growing up the son of an FBI hostage negotiator, which is what happened to my son, my son. I found out in, when he was in his twenties, how much trouble he got himself out of when he was in his teens using hostage negotiation skills. He was around it all the time. He learned early on about, you know, going after problems and diffusing problems. Like he, like he was, he played, he played football, um, uh, junior high, high school, college. So, and this isn't in the book. He, he'd go to school and he went, I had him in a Catholic school where they had a uniform and every now and then, because he was a kid, you know, he, he'd go, go to school and there'd be something wrong with the uniform. And one, a student say, Hey, you know, you may, you did, you screwed this up today. You're not wearing this properly. Watch out for the vice principal. Most kids are going to spend their entire rest of the day running from the vice principal cause they don't want to get in trouble. As soon as he realized he'd made a mistake, The very next place he would go would be the vice principal's office. He'd knock on the door and he'd go straight in. And he was telling me one time he walked in and he's, he's telling the vice principal, you know, he's a disrespectful student. You know, he doesn't have any, uh, you know, he's, he's not paying …

AI assessment note: “I found out in, when he was in his twenties, how much trouble he got himself out of”

Q And I think one of the keys you mentioned in the book to figuring that out is active listening. I imagine, I mean, that was a huge part of your job and is one of the keys to empathy and understanding. How can I learn to be a better listener?

A Yeah, and it's, you know what, and then it's even beyond active, it's proactive listening. Because, all right, so what am I proactively going after? I know that the negatives are a bigger deal. I'm proactively listening for where the negatives are. I'm proactively listening for their fear of loss. Having heard it, now I have a very specific toolkit designed to deal with that exactly, and the, the, the practice of hostage negotiators since 1972, when it was invented, pretty much, have taught us exactly what works and what's the fastest way into somebody's emotional system so they can hit the triggers and move on. And with those tools, then I get this done, done much more quickly. Uh, one of my students did a, an actual study on it, and her conclusion was empathy saves time. You don't use empathy because you're a missionary, because you're soft touch. Use empathy because you want to get stuff done faster, and you've got other stuff to do to get after.

AI assessment note: “I'm proactively listening for where the negatives are. I'm proactively listening for their fear”

Q So if you're a new company and you, you have no real established track record, is there a way to use that to your advantage or shape the perceptions of somebody taking a risk on you? Yeah.

A Um, because again, then, then you call it out. You know, the elephant in the room, so to speak. Um, you can call it out, and it's not that it's guaranteed that you're going to make the deal if you call it out. It just increases your batting average. You know, it increases your, your win percentage. There's, there's no, there's no guarantee of success. There's just a guarantee of the best chance of success. So any negative that's there, ignoring it is leaving a landmine, but calling it out gives you your best chance at eliminating it as an issue. Whether you're an unknown startup or whether or not you got a strong competitor. I used to, you know, before the book came out and, and, you know, been, been very happy with the success of the book. It's been called one of the seven best negotiation books ever written. It leads its category. Um, the audible version of the book has been leading the business category on Amazon basically since the book came out.

AI assessment note: “you call it out. You know, the elephant in the room, so to speak.”

Q Which one do you think is more prevalent?

A Ah, wow. I think, well, people, I think, um, they're probably underpaid more. And, but then, You can actually fix that too, depending upon how you take care of them as an employee. Like if you can underpay somebody, and if you're really focused on their growth and development as people and professionals, they'll be really happy in the job, and they'll do great. Because, you know, the old phrase, money's not a motivator. What is a motivator? The meaningful work within that profession to be involved in stuff that's going to matter to everybody else, you know, being involved in critical strategic projects, or I had a, an executive from the general services administration who got ahead really fast. He once said, run to trouble. Like if you like working on the company's biggest problems, There's a couple good things about that. I mean, if the company's really having some serious problems in a certain area, number one, you're not going to make it any worse. You're not going to be the guy that screwed that up because it's already screwed up. So it's like a fail safe area to be in.

AI assessment note: “I think, um, they're probably underpaid more.”

Q Can you give us an example of the other two and how the tone and pitch is different?

A Well, you know, uh, the assertive's voice is the direct and honest guy. You know, just, here's what I want, give it to me. Um, if you think of, and the world breaks up in a, pretty much evenly into thirds. It's from our caveman days. It's fight, flight, make friends, response to threat. We either fight it, we run from it, or we make friends with it. And the world really does pretty evenly split up into thirds. And so about a third of the planet's a direct and honest. That's my natural type. You know, I'll say, look, um, I could be mean to you because I'm a jerk, or I could be mean to you because I just don't know any better, or I could be mean to you, uh, because I hate everybody, or I could be mean to you because I hate you specifically. If I explain it to you like that, then, then your reaction is like, well, you sound like a jerk, and I don't care why you don't like me.

AI assessment note: “the assertive's voice is the direct and honest guy”