How to Negotiate

Like a Child
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Special discounts on bulk quantities of AMACOM books are available to

corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For
details, contact Special Sales Department, AMACOM, a division of
American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adler, Bill

How to negotiate like a child : unleash the little monster within to get
everything you want / Bill Adler, Jr.

p.

cm.

ISBN 0-8144-7294-X

1. Negotiation in business.

2. Negotiation.

I. Title.
HD58.6.A35 2005

658.4Ј 052—dc22

2005018460

᭧ 2006 Bill Adler, Jr.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management
Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

Printing number

10

2
1

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Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
A Note About Gender

xi
Introduction
1
Throw a Tantrum

10

Try a Wild and Scary Threat

19

Just Cry

21

Pretend You Don’t Hear or Understand What the Other Side Is Saying

26

Pretend You Don’t Understand to Get the Other Side to Offer Something
They Didn’t Plan on Conceding 34

Share Something Important with the Other Side 37

Call in Backup (Or ‘‘My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad’’) 41

Don’t Think About Negotiating—Just Do It 46

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ⅷvi

CONTENTS

Be Nice

51

Be Disarmingly Honest

54

Be Yourself

56

Know Your Own Team

58

Play Your Best Game

62

Be Direct About Your Needs

65

Take Your Ball and Go Home

67

Stick with Your Gang

69

Give Yourself a Time-Out

72

Let the Other Guy Think He’s Won

75

Break the Rules

79

Change the Rules

82

Follow the Rules to the Letter

84

Be Naive

86

Go Out of Your Way to Please the Other Side 89

Be Needy

91

Ask the Person Who’s Most Likely to Say ‘‘Yes’’

94

Play One Side Against the Other

98

Delay Matters (Or ‘‘I Have to Ask My Mommy’’) 100

Move Slowly and Procrastinate

102

Do a Bad Job

105

Make a Deal That You Can Exchange for a Better Deal Later 107

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CONTENTS

vii

Win Through Sympathy

109

Act Forlorn

110

Change the Subject

112

Give Your Business ‘‘Lemonade Stand’’ Appeal 114

Solicit a Bribe
116

Keep Coming Back to the Same Question

118

Play the Repeat Game

121

Be Irrational

124

Worry the Other Side That You Might Be Sick 126

Make Weak Promises

128

Win Through Cuteness

130

Don’t Fear Failure

133

Be Prepared—But Not Overprepared

135

You’ve Won—Now You Have to Win Your Friends Back 137

You’ve Lost—Now Don’t Be a Sorehead

139

Optimism Rules
143

Back to the Beginning

152

Index

157

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Acknowledgments
It goes without saying that without my daughters, Karen and Claire, this
book never would have been possible—or even conceived. I won’t go into
details, but suffice it to say that they taught me a thing or two about
negotiating, and that they were sometimes more successful than I was.

I also want to thank my wife, Peggy Robin, not only for taking over the
negotiations with our children when it was apparent that I was losing, but
also for her help—as always—in making sure that this manuscript was
written in passable English. Ellen Kadin had the foresight to sign up my
manuscript and has been a wonderful editor. Jim Bessent helped whip How
to Negotiate Like a Child into shape. Finally, Jeanne Welsh kept all our
ducks in a row while I was writing this book. Thanks everyone: I could not
have done it without you.

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A Note About Gender

Despite all our advances in technology, language still fails us at times.

There was a ‘‘progressive’’ restaurant (the kind where everything on the
menu was made from either soy or flaxseed) in Washington, D.C. called
Food For Thought, which decided that its servers would be called
‘‘waitrons.’’ Fortunately, the restaurant didn’t exercise a strong influence on
language: The term ‘‘waitron’’

lived and died with Food For Thought, which went out of business years
ago. (That the restaurant closed its doors had nothing do to with the word
waitron, but it did have a lot to do with the fact that you can only do so
much with soy and flaxseed.) I bring up this story because, despite Food
For Thought’s clunky choice of words, the restaurant’s owners recognized
that a gender-neutral term for ‘‘waiter’’ was needed so language could keep
up with society. Now it’s the case that a waiter can be a man or woman. But
not so with ‘‘businessman,’’ which still has strong masculine connotations.

What’s a writer to do? What I’ve done is used ‘‘businessman,’’

‘‘businesswoman,’’ and ‘‘businessperson’’ interchangeably, with

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xii

A NOTE ABOUT GENDER

businessman and businesswoman being used more often because they’re

less glaring to the mind’s eye than businessperson. So my apologies in
advance to any readers—and especially grammarians—whom I may have
offended, insulted, upset, or affronted by my choice of words. I’m not going
to try and invent ‘‘businesstron.’’

You’re welcome.
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How to Negotiate

Like a Child

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Introduction
Angelic. Sweet. Affectionate. These are the words that come to mind when
we think of children. But there’s another set of words that applies equally
well to children: Stubborn. Determined. Ma-nipulative. And winners.

The truth of the matter is that when it comes to arguing with children,
children often win and the parents lose. Many parents have said to
themselves, ‘‘We might as well walk all the way down-stairs and get
Betsy’s stuffed elephant now because we’re going to agree to do it
eventually.’’

Children are the best negotiators in the world.

How did this state of affairs—children getting what they want and parents
conceding—ever come about? How can a forty-some-thing high-powered
lawyer lose to an inexperienced four-year-old?

More important, how can adults harness the astonishing negotiating

prowess and skills that children have?

There’s no single explanation for why children are such good negotiators.
Rather, they draw on a broad range of techniques, depending on the
particular situation, and including some outrageous

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

ones that most of us have been socialized to abandon. Each of these

techniques—and how you can exploit them in business and other walks of
life—will be explained in detail in individual chapters.

Negotiating like a child may be the most useful and satisfying skill you can
have in any aspect of life. If you learn how to negotiate like a child, you will
be able to get practically everything you want.

Core Child-Negotiating Techniques

Here are the core techniques discussed in this book. If the list is too long to
memorize, just spend time in a playground to refresh your memory.

• Throw a tantrum.

• Ask the person who’s most inclined to say ‘‘yes.’’

• Play one side against the other.

• Get sympathy.

• Give yourself a time-out.

• Change the rules.

• Solicit a bribe.

• Move slowly and procrastinate; wear the other side down.

• Turn the negotiations into a game.

• Act irrationally.

• Worry the other side that you might be sick.

• Make weak promises.

• Win through cuteness.

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• Take your toys and go home.

• Follow the rules to the letter.

• Be nice.

• Be disarmingly honest.

• Go out of your way to please the other side.

• Let the other guy think he’s won.

• Stick with your gang of friends.

• Remind people that ‘‘my daddy can beat up your daddy.’’

You’ll notice that some of these techniques involve behaving like an angel.
There’s nothing tough about being nice because that’s the way you are. One
of the things that child-negotiators prove is that being mean and nasty just
because you don’t care about anyone else is not going to give you an
advantage. A mean personality is more likely to throw a monkey wrench
into the negotiations than it is to give you an edge. (We’ll go into the
reasons why later on.) The savvy reader will notice that this list can’t be
described with a single word or phrase such as ‘‘holistic,’’ or ‘‘do unto
others as others would do unto you,’’ or ‘‘rules were made to be broken.’’

The complex workings of the business world (and the world of playground
politics) can’t be neatly packaged as a single philosophy, technique, or
school of thought. When it comes down to negotiating strategies, you need
to realize what children innately know: Everybody’s different. Children
understand that negotiating is as much about people as it is about the
objective. You tailor your techniques to the people around you, just as a kid
might use one technique on Mom and another on Dad and yet another on a
teacher or a group of friends.

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Child-Negotiating Strengths and Limitations Now to the inescapable

question: What ages are we talking about here when we say ‘‘children’’?
For the most part, I have young kids in mind, ages two to eight. But I
haven’t excluded slightly younger and slightly older kids, say, from one-
year-old until twelve or so.

Older kids can easily revert to the negotiating strategies they were fond of
just a year or so ago.

Some of the negotiating strategies I explore relate to children negotiating

with other children; some involve children negotiating with adults. Which
examples are which? You’ll figure it out. (If you can’t, then you probably
shouldn’t be reading this book.) Win or lose, children move on. They get
over it. Children may gloat or mope for a while, but they quickly forget—
their grudges never last long. (Adults forget things, too, of course. But we
tend to forget things like where the car keys are. Anything that causes angst
we remember. It’s the curse of being grown up.) The techniques that
children use to negotiate are often brilliant, but they sometimes lack
something that’s important in business: the long-range goal. Children are
notorious for focusing on the here and now, and this tendency is one of the
reasons they are such good negotiators. Adults think long term—which
explains why they do things like develop cellular telephone networks, make
advances in stem cell research, and create gourmet restaurants—though
they sometimes lose sight of what they need to gain in the short term
because they’re too focused on a goal at the end of a long, hard road. The
child’s strength is the grip on the present. When a child says, ‘‘I want it
now!’’ it’s no use discussing the long-term benefits of waiting patiently. The
truly successful child-negotiator comes away with both the immediate
desire fulfilled and the long-term goal met, because the more mature party
in the negotiations is forced into the position of looking at the big picture.

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INTRODUCTION
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That’s a key point to keep in mind when employing these child-negotiating

techniques. You will be working from a narrow focus on the here and now.
Because of that limitation, you probably won’t be able to use these
techniques in support of the creation of anything substantial—a cure for
AIDS, a skyscraper, or a musical masterpiece. You must depend on the
other party to supply the vision, or else you must supplement these child-
negotiating techniques with some adult-inspired forethought and long-range
thinking. Because you are not really a child, you can adapt, improvise, and
vary your responses as required by changing circumstances.

How to Negotiate Like a Child will provide you with some potent tools that
you, as a thinking adult, will be able to use more artfully than the children
who use them unthinkingly to get what they want.

There’s another important point that I need to make about using these
techniques: You can’t use them in a halfhearted way.

If you’re going to throw a tantrum or appeal with cuteness, your negotiating

position will be significantly diminished, to say the least, if you lose it and
then say, ‘‘Only kidding.’’ For these techniques to work, you must appear
sincere in your behavior. Your performance has to be credible; otherwise,
those sitting opposite you at the negotiating table may perceive you to be
simply acting like a child.

Tapping into the Riches of Your Childhood Experience—

in Business and in Life

The How to Negotiate Like a Child techniques can, and should, be used not
only in formal business-to-business negotiations, but in every aspect of your
business life. When it comes to winning, half of the battle is matching the
right technique to the right players in the right situation. In this book you’ll
find information both on

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how to choose and how to carry off the techniques that could be winners for
you. Timing is another key issue. Business negotiations happen every day
throughout the day, and while not everything is subject to negotiations,
many things are. If somebody else sees it as a negotiation, then it is one.

Who says that you should act like an adult? Who says that behaving like a
child (but also knowing when that won’t work) isn’t the adult thing to do?
We do know that in the company of other adults, especially during business
negotiations, we tend to behave like everyone else around us: serious,
somber, even severe. We get locked into a conformist mode and become
afraid to stand out.

We’re afraid of embarrassing ourselves and seeming immature or

unbecoming. Yet this artificial division between childhood and adulthood is
just that: artificial. We’re foolish to think that once we turn thirty we
become adults and then, suddenly, we can no longer draw on our childhood
experiences anymore. Our adult personalities and behaviors have been
shaped by our childhood experiences, whether we acknowledge it or not.
What I’m suggesting is that we delve deeper into our childhood and make
conscious use of what we learned and did during our childhood—not shut
ourselves off from our younger selves. Unlike caterpillars and other insects
that truly metamorphose from one physical form into another totally
different one, human children and adults are not all that different.

The journey from childhood to adulthood is a continuum, and it’s a great

waste that so many of us discard rather than make good use of the
willfulness, playfulness, and inventiveness we used every day in childhood.

Our society pushes us to hold on to youth, especially when it concerns our

looks. We’re obsessed with looking young, which is why cosmetic surgery
is such big business. It’s why we spend hours and thousands of dollars at
the gym. But plastic surgery and exercise can only go so far—these are very
limited tools when it comes to

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INTRODUCTION
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preserving our youth. They do little to rejuvenate our minds. What good is
it to have a youthful-looking body if that body contains a cranky old mind
whose idea of fun is a round of golf ? Want to be youthful? Act like a child.
Want to succeed in business? Use your childhood skills to break out of the
constraints the adult world has built up around you. With the techniques in
How to Negotiate Like a Child, you will regain your ability to color outside
the lines.

Let me give you another perspective on the use of childhood experiences.

I’m a pilot. In many ways, flying airplanes mirrors life.*

Flying an airplane is a complex task, where the consequences of error are

rather unforgiving. When training for a pilot’s license, and throughout your
aviation career, you’re taught to make use of all available resources and
information. In fact, that mantra—to make use of all available information
—is mandated into the Federal Air Regulations. And indeed, pilots who do
live long lives.

So why don’t we apply this same standard in other areas of our lives,
especially business? Perhaps it’s because we think we’re gleaning all
available information and using all available resources when we read
business intelligence reports, conduct interviews, and analyze markets. But
we’re not. We’re not developing our most valuable resource: ourselves. It’s
foolish to spend so much effort and money and review on outside sources
and not develop our own resources by tapping into the riches of our own
childhood.

Let me mention something very important about using these techniques.

No, it’s not that your hands will become lethal weapons and you’ll have to
register them. It’s not that not all of these tech-
* If you’re interested in becoming a pilot, start with the Aircraft Owners
and Pilots Association (www.aopa.org). I’m not suggesting that if you
become a pilot, you’re going to have a definitive edge in business, but
you’ll certainly develop skills that will help you in business. Among other
things, pilots are able to focus during a crisis.

And having a pilot’s license often means that you don’t have to check into
the airport two hours ahead of time: You fly when you’re ready to go.

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niques are good for all kinds of negotiations. The techniques in this book
apply—or don’t—to a wide range of ways in which you might negotiate.
Negotiations aren’t just business-to-business dialogues; throughout the day
we participate in a wide variety of negotiations, everything from getting the
last doughnut in the box near the water cooler to angling for a promotion.
There are many different situations where you may want to negotiate like a
child, such as when you’re:

• Asking for a raise

• Angling for a corner office

• Asking for some other benefit, such as a telecommuting arrangement or

more comp time

• Assuming more responsibility

• Relinquishing some of your responsibilities, such as supervision of a
junior staffer

• Aiming to hire an extra assistant

• Seeking management approval of your ideas for less paper-work

• Requesting a better hotel room (or at least one that’s not near the ice
maker)

• Trying to get a reservation at a hot, new restaurant

• Asking your company to pay for a business-class, rather than coach, ticket

• Asking for better customer service (e.g., so you don’t have to wait an hour
at the pharmacy for a prescription)

• Trying to get tech support to stick with you on the phone until your
problem is solved

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• Deciding on the details for the office holiday party

• Asking for the time off you need, either for child care or to deal with a
crisis

• Determining what kind of software the company’s computers should use

• Requesting a transfer to another city, of your choice

• Trying to get your moving expenses paid

• Pawning the more boring assignment off on somebody else I mention

these examples to point out that your business day is filled with myriad
negotiations. If you don’t think of something as a negotiation—and
especially if the other side does— you will lose.

I’m certainly not suggesting that you need to negotiate over every little
thing or even most things on a daily basis. What I want you to recognize is
that there are many points in the day when you’re involved in a negotiation
and you don’t realize it. If somebody else realizes that a particular activity
is actually competitive and you don’t, that person may be able to take
advantage of you and win.

Any given competition or negotiation may be worthwhile or not worth

fighting over, but it’s important to recognize them as competitive activities
so that you have a choice of negotiating or not.

The first step in winning a negotiation is to recognize that somebody is

negotiating with you.

Now let’s get to some of the ways you can use the child within you to give
yourself an edge.
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Throw a Tantrum

The tantrum is the child’s most basic negotiating skill. Nobody likes to be
around somebody who’s in a fit of rage, beyond reason.

Our natural inclination is to flee from that person as quickly as possible. Of

course, we can’t always do that if the person who’s having a tantrum is our
daughter—or a businessperson that we have no choice but to deal with.
Instead, we often give in to the demands of the tantrum thrower, especially
if it’s a ‘‘little thing.’’ You can tell when that capitulation is on its way
because it is often preceded by an inaudible (or even sometimes loud) sigh.
We rationalize our surrender, thinking that ‘‘we’re not going to lower
ourselves to that level and start screaming, too.’’ And we’re right—we look
superior, at least to ourselves. We’re not the ones performing embarrassing
antics. But look at the outcome. The calm person feels as if he is the better
businessperson, but the tantrum thrower has walked away with the prize.
The tantrum thrower knows that, too, which is what makes this such a
powerful bargaining technique: Most of us don’t want to be seen throwing
tantrums, and so we concede rather than scream, shout, and stomp our feet.

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The truth is that the loudest screamers and stompers often get what they
want. Just think of Michael Eisner at The Walt Disney Company, or Bill
Gates of Microsoft—both legendary for their tantrums. And for getting
what they want.

Also, look at Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp., another CEO who is reputed to
be extremely childish in the way he conducts his business: petulant, bent on
revenge against anyone who’s crossed him, spending company funds
flagrantly on himself. Of course, you don’t want to be known for throwing
tantrums to benefit only yourself. You learn to use the technique to push for
positive things for your company. You dig in your heels and don’t budge
when it’s a matter of such importance that you really can’t give in without
abandoning your own principles. You never scream just to scream.

You need to use the techniques of a child without forgetting that you’re a
responsible adult. You always know what the stakes are before you take this
course of action. Because once you’ve made something into a tantrum-
throwing issue, you can’t back down.

Also, keep in mind that throwing a tantrum doesn’t have to involve

screaming. In fact, sometimes it’s better to throw a quiet tantrum because
nobody will know about it other than the person you’re ‘‘screaming’’ at.
Quiet tantrums usually manifest themselves in ways that are hard to
describe, but you know it when you see it: All of a sudden, your mail is
misdelivered. IT doesn’t respond to your urgent pleas for help. On your
next business trip, you find yourself in the middle seat in coach between
two former winners of the Twinkie-eating competition. The person who
hears the quiet tantrum runs the risk of not being believed if he tells others
about it—and that gives the tantrum an extra edge, especially if you’re
known as a quiet, ‘‘normal’’ kind of person and you use the tantrum very
sparingly; nobody will be the wiser.

Throwing a tantrum is a classic way in which business executives negotiate

(behave, actually) like children. It can be incredibly
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powerful. But throwing a tantrum is effective in the same way that nuclear
weapons are effective: You can’t use them all that often or you will have
nobody left to negotiate with.

When we read about business executives who act like children we almost
always read about them in the context of throwing tantrums. Throwing a
tantrum is the way that men and women revert to their childhood
negotiating days. But there’s no subtlety in throwing a tantrum. There’s
often no strategy, no creativity in it, either; no plan of attack. In that case,
throwing a tantrum isn’t a brilliant move; it’s a tool of desperation.

I realize that these comments sound like I’m knocking the very thesis of this
book, which is that you can advance your position by negotiating like a
child. You certainly can. But what you can’t do is use a single technique—
especially throwing a tantrum—all the time. If you overuse this ploy,
several bad things are bound to happen to you:

• Nobody will want to have lunch with you.

• You’ll run a business (or have relationships) based on fear rather than
respect.

• You’ll mostly be known for your bad temper. (In the adult world, throwing
a tantrum and having a bad temper are syn-onymous.)
• Somebody’s going to slap you down one day.

But if you’re known for being levelheaded, then that one time you throw a
tantrum, you will get what you want. Throwing a tantrum is like using a
very, very powerful secret weapon or a dangerous but potentially life-saving
drug. Observe this rule: Use it only when nothing else will do. There’s
always a chance that you may never throw a tantrum in your business
career, and that’s okay.

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THROW A TANTRUM

ⅷ13

Children who constantly throw tantrums are more often ignored than
anything else. At home they may get spanked, sent to their rooms, or put on
Ritalin. At school they get sent to the corner, or their parents are called in
and told they have a problem child.

They may even be asked to leave the school. Most people—parents,

business colleagues, teachers—will only be moved by a tantrum from a
child who’s never thrown one before. Then they’re stunned and are not sure
how to react. Once the child has a reputation as a

‘‘tantrumer,’’ the strategy loses its effectiveness. People shrug and say, ‘‘Oh,
he does that all the time.’’ You can be pretty sure—no, make that absolutely
certain—that if you’re the kind of businessman who’s known for throwing
tantrums, others will be plotting against you or will try to avoid you. It’s
hard to send a colleague or somebody from another company to their room
as parents do with tantrumers, but the business equivalent is to fire
someone. Even if you’re having your first and only tantrum, you have to
consider the risks. A tantrum works best not only when you have absolute
confidence that your way is the only way, but also when you’re sure that
you are an indispensable part of the solution. Then you can be as stubborn
and intractable as you like. That’s the main reason it works for CEOs.
They’re already at the top. If they throw a tantrum and don’t get what they
want, the people who lose their jobs are the ones who failed to please them.
If you have any doubts about your position, then please, please, use one of
the other strategies in this book. When used under the wrong circumstances
the tantrum can blow up in your face.

I’ve made throwing a tantrum the first and longest chapter of How to
Negotiate Like a Child because it’s the trickiest and riskiest technique, but
it’s also the first thing that comes to mind when we think of children’s
demands. Despite the notion that children are inquisitive, playful, angelic,
and loving—and they are—they’re also

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little monsters now and then. Throwing tantrums is universal among

children.

Tantrums sometimes work best in group settings. In a one-on-one

environment they’re, well, scary. There’s a fine line between people
thinking you’re a tantrum thrower and people thinking you’re in serious
need of therapy. In a room full of people you’re not scaring any one
individual, so the fear factor is diluted. In an enclosed office you can be
pretty sure that your tantrum, directed at one individual, is going to elicit a
range of conscious, subconscious, and probably primeval thoughts mostly
centering around one impulse: ‘‘Get me out of here!’’

There may appear to be a contradiction between this idea that tantrums

work best in groups and that ‘‘quiet tantrums’’ also are effective. Both
techniques are effective for one single, simple reason that’s important to
keep in mind: People are conflicted. None of us behaves in exactly the same
way in the same situation, because there is no such thing as ‘‘the same
situation.’’ Seemingly contradictory approaches to dealing with business are
inevitable. Likewise, kids are a fountain of contradictions and paradoxes.
That’s one of the reasons they are such successful negotiators: You don’t
know what’s coming next.

You might think that from the perspective of your reputation it’s better to
reserve your tantrum for a one-on-one setting, lest you develop a reputation
for being a loose cannon. And that’s true if, as I just mentioned, you’ve
demonstrated that you will blow up over any number of trivial incidents.
But that doesn’t mean that being known as a tantrum thrower over matters
of genuine consequence is without its advantages. If your personality lends
itself to having a temper, then there’s probably nothing you can do to
change your personality and you might as well take advantage of it. In that
case, don’t just be known as a tantrum thrower; rather, use your tantrums to
generate a little fear where it really matters. Let it become

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known that if anyone screws up in a way that affects the integrity or

structure of your company, they need to fear your wrath. Let it be known
that after the tantrum comes the measured consequences.

You may seem out of control during the tantrum because you don’t suppress
your anger. But when the tantrum is over, you assess the situation calmly
and do whatever needs to be done.

Defending Against Another’s Tantrums Understanding how and why

tantrums can be effective—or ineffective—can also help to defend you
against somebody else who’s throwing a tantrum your way. In the adult
world, tantrums may indicate a personality trait (or flaw?) rather than a
calculated negotiating technique. Some adults never shed this childhood
behavior.

But in any case, you should not let your opponent defeat you by trying to
make you think that his tantrums can’t be overcome; that he’s going to
throw tantrums always and forever unless you capitulate.

It’s never a good idea to throw a tantrum yourself in response, because that
would only result in what can best be described as a Saturday Night Live
parody. Can’t you visualize business executives turning into children as
they hurl insults and bad words at each other? Clearly, raising the tantrum
level is not the solution for dealing with somebody who uses tantrums as a
business tool. Unless, of course, you have an ample supply of throat
lozenges.

There are several ways to cope with and win against somebody who uses
this technique:

• Enlist the support of others. And not those on your side of the negotiating
fence, but people who may be loosely allied with the tantrum thrower. Find
somebody else to negotiate with. It’s rare that there’s only one person who
can negotiate for a particular side,

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or that only one person in a large, complex organization has the ability to
decide things of importance. (In some situations that may be true: If your
boss is the tantrum thrower and you’re negotiating for a raise, you’re stuck.
But that’s the exception.) Sometimes it’s a fairly straightforward process to
find somebody else to negotiate with because they’re already in the room
with you. Other times you have to track that person down. Because you’re
not going to be the only person who’s aware of and suffering from these
tantrums, you should be able to engage somebody else with little difficulty.
There’s an episode of the television series Friends where one of the
characters, Ross, notices that one of his friends, Rachel, is dating a
‘‘screamer.’’ Rachel never catches her boyfriend in the act of throwing a
tantrum, but Ross does all the time. He tries to tell Rachel (whom he still
loves, but that’s another plotline), but because she never witnesses the
tantrums, she doesn’t believe him. Fortunately, few tantrum throwers are
able to keep their problem secret. You’ll know and everyone around that
tantrumer will know, too.

• Just let the tantrumer have his rants. Kids know this trick. The sister
doesn’t try to stop her little brother’s tantrum because she knows that he’ll
eventually wear himself out. So she doesn’t try to muzzle the tantrum
thrower or mock him. She simply goes about her business as if his little
outburst is beneath her notice. This usually infuriates him even more,
making him redouble his screams and attempts to get attention. Then it
becomes clearer to all concerned who’s an effective player and who’s just
hot air. So, if you’re sitting in a conference, find something else to do while
the tantrumer is spewing fits. Read through the conference materials.
Check your e-mail on your BlackBerry if you think you can get away with
it, or just smile and bide your time. Eventually he’ll shut up. Often at the
end of a rant, the tantrumer will be tired. You may have little difficulty
negotiating with somebody else at that point.

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But what about the situation in which you’re one-on-one with somebody
who relies on throwing tantrums? That’s a more difficult pickle, but one
you should be prepared for, because you’re bound to encounter a tantrum
thrower at least once or twice in your career.

The first thing to consider is just to let the tantrumer wear himself out,
which can work just as well in a one-on-one situation as in a group setting.
It can even work to your advantage, since many of the people who throw
tantrums view those who are able to weather the storm as having passed
some sort of test of toughness of spirit.

• Pretend the tantrum didn’t happen. Of course, you can ‘‘resist’’

a tantrum thrower in several ways. You can just yell. You can say no and
just keep saying no, or you can nod and just go on doing what you want to
do. Nor does resistance have to be obvious, or even visible. Just work on
getting the results you want. If, later, the tantrum thrower challenges you,
you may have to reveal that you didn’t accede to her wishes. There may be
consequences—or not.
Sometimes a tantrum thrower doesn’t even remember what her goal was, so
if her goal is missed, then there’s nothing lost.

At the risk of getting all Zen-like, let me suggest that you simply let the
tantrum blow past you. The world is filled with strange, angry people, and
you’re just unlucky to be working with one. But the truth is that everyone
works with people like this. Years ago, when I wrote Outwitting Neighbors,
a book about coping with difficult or oddball neighbors, I did so with a few
purposes in mind.

Perhaps the most important point I wanted readers to come away with was
that everybody at one time or another has a neighbor that they don’t get
along with or is annoyingly strange. It’s a fact of life: None but a hermit is
insulated from bizarre and perplexing people.

So we have to learn ways to cope with them.

This may be the simplest way to deal with a tantrum. If you can let the
tantrum pass by you like a hot desert wind, then it will

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be over quickly. Often people who use tantrums to gain a negotiation

advantage don’t want to dwell on them or discuss them, so ignoring the
tantrum, if you can, should work. I say that because, in the heat of the
moment, tantrums are hard to ignore. Tantrums are designed to get you to
capitulate right then and there. They are designed to get the other side to
quickly acquiesce, because they generally can’t be sustained for an
extended period of time.

• Use whatever delaying tactics you can. Do you have to study the
question? Do you need more information? Do you have to run it by the
legal department? Do you need to consult an astrologer?

(That last one will throw people for a loop, but suggesting that you have to
confer with your astrologer might survive scrutiny by somebody who’s
already acting irrationally.) Because most tantrums have only short-term
impact, almost any delaying technique should work to diffuse their energy.

But what about the tantrum thrower who continues to erupt?

How can you possibly cope with that? Then my earlier advice holds: You
need to seek allies. You have to talk frankly with your coworkers and
negotiate as a team. Tantrums may intimidate your coworkers; it’s up to you
to develop a coalition that can, if you’ll pardon the expression, drown out
the tantrum thrower. People who throw tantrums assume that they’re going
to silence the opposition.

They can only get away with it if the other side lets them.

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Try a Wild and Scary Threat

A variation on the tantrum theme is to employ a wild but scary threat. Both
use extremes—tantrums involve an extreme of sound and emotion; wild
threats involve a large range of consequences.
You know how kids threaten to hold their breath till they drop dead.
Sometimes people will give in rather than wait to see how far the kid can
go. That’s the tactic Donald Trump used when he wanted to build Trump
Tower higher than permitted under New York City’s zoning laws. He said if
he didn’t get the height exception that he wanted, he’d build the ugliest
building that he could possibly design, and site it in a way that would
overshadow the historic, low-rise Tiffany’s building below. He showed the
city planners a hideous design. While they may not have been sure he’d
really do it, they decided not to risk it and gave in. It’s the technique that
Mayor Anthony Williams used to help get financing for a new baseball
stadium in Washington, D.C.: He basically said that if public financing for a
stadium didn’t go through the city council, then there’s be no baseball in the
nation’s capital.

This technique only works if you can scare the other side into

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thinking that you really would carry out your threat, as wild as it is. Like a
child holding her breath, you might be called upon to hold it in till your face
turns blue and you feel like your lungs are about to explode. Yes, everyone
around you knows that you can’t really carry the threat to its ultimate point;
but on the other hand, you might actually be able to hurt yourself, and you
can worry them enough to give in. The potential for harm has to be there.
You need to make the other side believe that the risks of potential
consequences are more awful than just giving you what you want.

Highway signs that say ‘‘Speed Monitored by Aircraft’’ aren’t that effective
if drivers don’t see any airplanes in the sky; signs that say

‘‘Speed Limit Enforced’’ and that are accompanied by police cars on the
side of the road are a lot more effective in gaining compliance.

For some reason when kids say ‘‘I hate you!’’ to their parents, the parents
often (but not always!) respond by doing something to demonstrate their
kindness or love. (At least the first time they’re surprised by their child’s
scary pronouncement.) Parents do not want to be hated by their children,
and even though they know in their hearts that ‘‘I hate you’’ is just the
child’s way of acting out her feelings and she doesn’t really mean it, they
still are willing to bend when it comes to whatever’s being negotiated.
Children quickly pick up on what kind of behaviors bother their parents and
learn to use those behaviors as leverage.

Wild and scary threats work best when they are unanticipated.

‘‘We’re going to walk out of the negotiations’’ isn’t a terribly surprising or

effective thing to say if it comes at the end of a slow build-up. And it’s
possibly not believable, since it’s a well-known negotiating bluff. The sign
on the highway that alerts drivers to airplanes that detect speeders is
generally regarded as a bluff, while the radar sign combined with the police
car hidden behind the billboard at the side of the road is both effective and
hard to anticipate.

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Just Cry

Parents can’t stand to see their kids be sad. Even more—they can’t stand to
see their children cry. While not all parents respond the same way (many
learn to stiffen their spines early on as a way to cope with lengthy bedtime
wailing), some parents can’t get over feelings of guilt, remorse, and sadness
when they hear their children cry without thinking of themselves as failures
and bad parents.

Crying is also loud. In any public place, crying causes strangers’

eyes to immediately focus on the parent-in-charge, and parents don’t

particularly care for that kind of attention. The louder the crying and the
quieter or more enclosed the space, the more likely the parent will do
whatever it takes to resolve the situation—in other words, give the crier
what he wants.

You see this scene played out in movies all the time, and not only with kids,
but with adults, too. In the movies, the plucky heroine is about to be taken
somewhere against her will. She might be in a train station. The person who
wants the woman to go with him has a gun against her back. She figures if
she tries to run off, he really will shoot her. But, if she calls attention to
them by pre-

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tending to be his girlfriend, acting like they’re in the middle of a lovers’
quarrel, and she cries and screams at him, ‘‘I know all about you and my
sister! I never want to see you again,’’ it will seem natural for her to run
away crying. Having made a public spectacle out of the situation, she
knows it will now be impossible for him to use the gun on her and hope to
fade away into the crowd. So she wails, she shakes, she sobs, she accuses.
She gets all the surrounding strangers not only to notice but to sympathize
and reach out to her.

Her would-be kidnapper is left with no choice but to slink away before the
crowd turns on him.

Kids know they can get away with crying. But even if they didn’t, it
wouldn’t matter because crying comes naturally to children. This technique,
like throwing a tantrum, is part of their nature. It’s almost as if there’s an
inner crier waiting to be released and all that’s required is the right trigger.
When children get ready to cry, it’s like watching a slow-motion movie:
Their muscles relax, then tighten, their face swells, the eyes get puffy, and
then, like a sudden cloudburst in summer, a lot of water and sound is
released.

You saw it coming; you could have gotten out of the way before it started to
pour and there was loud thunder and dangerous lightning. But you didn’t.
And now that the storm has started, you need to do what you can to keep
dry and safe.

While analogies often fall flat, this one—the similarities between a child
bawling her eyes out in public and a severe thunder-storm—is quite apt.
You need to get out of the rain; you really need to keep from being hit by
lightning. While crying children aren’t dangerous like lightning (so we
think!), it’s still highly desirable to get them to stop crying loudly in public
places . . . before we’re ejected from that place.

The human tendency to side with the crying person is something that criers
learn to count on. There’s a nurturing parent in most of us who wants to do
whatever it takes to stop the crying. A

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child does not even have to be savvy about this technique: Cry a bit,
especially in a public place, and the parent-in-charge is going to start
promising or giving things to get the child to stop. After doing this two or
three times, kids quickly pick up on how effective crying is.

For grown-ups, the hard part about using this technique is that no adult
wants to cry in a public place. Fortunately, most adults can’t bear to see
another adult cry, even in a private setting. An adult always thinks that he is
at least partly the cause of the other person’s crying, and nobody wants to
think of themselves as having failed in human-to-human interactions. When
you cry, the person with whom you are negotiating will have to break stride
and deal with your crying. There’s simply no way they can continue the
conversation or what they were doing. The tone and substance of the
negotiations will no longer be under the control of that individual; you will
be in charge. I know that it’s odd to think of this technique this way. After
all, you are the one who’s emotionally distraught; you’re the one who
appears weak. And in fact, if your crying is genuine, you are going to have
a difficult time making use of this technique because you will be distraught,
not to mention sobbing. Not only are you possibly upset, but your crying
may start without any advance preparation or warning. That’s why I’m
advising you to think about it now!

This technique—crying—is something that you may have no choice about

using. But if you anticipate that you might become emotional when you go
into a negotiating session, you should also be able to work through in
advance what the likely responses to your crying might be, and then choose
the most effective ways to respond in turn. I’m not saying that you should
plan to stop crying at a certain point. If you tend to get emotional, you’re
unlikely to be able to turn the tears on and off just like that. I’m simply
saying that if you think you might need to cry, you might want to make

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sure that the tears are seen by the people most likely to be moved by them.
And if you think that someone will react harshly, it’s also a plus if you can
arrange for more sympathetic types to see that your tears were met cruelly
by your adversary. You can’t help but paint yourself as the victim of an
overbearing and insensitive lout, making the other person come off as a
bully in the process.

Of course, this technique draws heavily on all the players fitting certain
stereotypes. You can’t pull off the ‘‘I’m a put upon little flower’’ routine if
you’re six foot three and an ex-marine. Also keep in mind that once you
play the easily wounded part, you may end up stuck with that label for a
long time to come—and it could come back to hurt you when you believe
you are ready to take on a leadership position. Real leaders seldom cry.

They do, however, grow into their positions. So if you’ve had a crying
episode when you were young and starting out and you were up against
someone so cruel that he reduced you to tears, don’t feel you’ve blown any
chance of ever being taken seriously again. Look for opportunities to show
that you’ve learned from the experience. You can remind people about how
you once took things too much to heart because you cared so deeply about
whatever you were fighting for. People don’t fault the young for that.
Crying past, say, age twenty-seven or twenty-eight becomes harder to
defend.

Now, let’s say you’re young enough and new enough at a job to be allowed
to indulge your emotions with a flood of tears, if properly provoked. This,
of course, raises the question: Should you pretend to cry to gain an
advantage over the person you’re negotiating with? In part that’s an ethical
question, and to the extent that you are pretending, the answer should be no.
Making your sincere, spontaneous sorrow work for you is one thing;
deliberately manipu-lating somebody is another. But what if you’re on the
verge of crying? Should you tap into your mental storehouse of sad images
to help you start crying? My answer has to be no. Tears, like tan-

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trums, lose their power with overuse. You’re much better off learning to
hold the tears back so that they come out only when you really, really can’t
hold them back. Because you are an adult and not a child, people don’t
expect you to cry easily. They’re only shaken and sympathetic if you do so
on rare occasions. Do so frequently, and you become the dreaded term that
even very young children hate to be called: a crybaby.

It’s fine to let your feelings out, but it’s not good to fling them at people
every time you feel slightly aggrieved. Just as you should restrain unbridled
anger when it’s not appropriate, you should restrain your tears when they’re
not truly unstoppable. Cry once too often and you will get a reputation for
shedding crocodile tears.

And that may lead to a party of crocodile hunters out to get you.

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Pretend You Don’t Hear or

Understand What the Other

Side Is Saying

This is one of the most ancient, yet least known, child-negotiating

techniques. Children apply this technique in one of two ways: They pretend
either not to understand or not to hear. In escalating tones, the child says:

‘‘What? What? WHAT!?’’

Eventually, the other kids give up trying to argue for what they want. In
frustration, they accept the fact that the child just doesn’t get it.

So the child who seemingly is oblivious to the other side’s point of view
ends up able to continue to arrange the dollhouse her way, or use all the
Tinkertoys, or finish thumbing through Pat the Bunny. If you don’t know
what the other kid wants you to do, then you don’t have to stop doing what
you’re doing. Parents are often the victims of this ploy: We say something
to our children and get back a response that’s a complete non sequitur, then
we wonder,
‘‘Did Sally not hear a word I said?’’ Maybe. It’s more likely that Sally
heard everything you said—after all, she’s only three feet away.

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But Sally appeared not to know what to do with your statement.

That’s not the same as deliberately ignoring you, which she knows would
make you mad. Children can get away with pretending not to hear you
because they’re not yet socialized to respond to every verbal query. Adults
feel compelled to answer or at least acknowledge when somebody
addresses them (that’s how Colin Farrell got in trouble in the movie Phone
Booth); few grown-ups have the ability to just ignore or walk away from
somebody they don’t want to talk to. Perhaps it’s because children are often
naturally shy, or because they’re not yet secure in their verbal skills, or
maybe it’s a lot simpler than that: Kids just don’t feel that they need to talk
to anyone if they don’t want to.

What a great skill to have. Just think how powerful you’d feel if you could
just blank out on somebody entirely because you don’t want to deal with
them. Take telemarketers and door-to-door solici-tors: We usually engage in
some kind of perfunctory conversation, and that’s what the telemarketer
counts on. Once the conversation—the negotiation—has started, it has to
come to some kind of resolution: You might buy what the telemarketer is
selling or you might not. The minute you recognize that you’re talking to
someone who wants to disrupt your day by selling you something you don’t
want or need, you should immediately disengage by responding with a non
sequitur or simply not responding at all. Then you’ll have shut out any
possibility that this particular negotiation will conclude in the
telemarketer’s favor.

My favorite response when a telemarketer calls is, ‘‘I don’t believe you.’’
That’s one no telemarketer has ever had a response to.

What can they say? ‘‘Yes, yes, I’m trying to sell you something! I’m for
real!’’ This is a response of the ‘‘I can’t hear you’’ type.

It always amazes me that in movies, the hero is put in a position where he

has to negotiate with the bad guy. The situation always runs something like
this: The bad guy has wired some priceless

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thing (the Declaration of Independence, the Washington Monument, Mount

Rushmore—it seldom matters what it is) to blow up unless he gets the
President on the line to agree to his demands.

Wielding a walkie-talkie, the bad guy starts dictating the various things that
the President must do to prevent the explosion. Of course, in the movie, the
President seemingly plays along while hatching some clever plot of his own
to trick the bad guy into blowing himself up at the very moment he thinks
that the last of his demands has been met. But it seems to me that the whole
mess could easily have been avoided if the bad guy couldn’t get through to
the President in the first place. If the President hadn’t agreed to pick up the
walkie-talkie, he would never have had to invent all the stalling techniques
and plot turnarounds that take up the next ninety minutes of the movie.
What’s the lesson? Don’t watch predictable potboiler movies. In addition,
from the moment you think that you’re going to be at a significant
disadvantage in a negotiation, end the negotiation. Stop listening. It’s not
your talking that’s the problem; it’s that you are listening to the other side’s
demands.

That is the source of your negotiating weakness. People have a hard time
hanging up the phone, cutting off the negotiation, or closing their office
door. We think we’ll be perceived as rude, disrespectful, or offensive. But in
fact sometimes not hearing what the other side wants you to know can give
you a great advantage in negotiations.

Anyone familiar with radio icon Don Imus has probably heard him use
some variation of this technique on his show.

Obviously, you can’t use this strategy in all circumstances: Avoidance can
get you fired or result in your never making a deal that you might really
need to make. But this technique is ideally suited to those situations when
you have a general sense of how badly things can go for you. Some people
shouldn’t even get that first foot in the door, and if you slam the door even
before that foot has a chance to cross your doorway, you’ll be much better
off.

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If you are going to ‘‘pretend not to hear’’ someone, it’s extremely important
to employ this technique from the get-go. The other side can understand if
you are hard to reach—e-mail sometimes fails, people go on vacation, and
so on. But once they’ve made contact with you, and they know that you
know that they want something you’d rather not give, then your
‘‘pretending not to hear’’ becomes transparent and it may only make them
redouble their efforts to get through to you.

Let technology come to the rescue. If you have a smart cell phone, consider
getting a program that tells your phone not to answer calls from certain
numbers. Download a program that lets you bounce e-mail so it appears that
your e-mail address isn’t working (such programs actually exist). Filter e-
mail from people you don’t want to hear from; if you actually never see that
e-mail, there’s no temptation to answer it. Get caller ID and train everyone
in your house to use it (your home is not a sanctuary when somebody is
trying to contact you). Do whatever it takes.

Let’s get back to the way kids act. Children know that if you tell them to
clean up their rooms, chances are they’ll have to stop playing and start
straightening up, maybe not immediately, but sooner or later. But if you’re
not heard—or if your son thinks that you think he didn’t hear—then the
cleaning clock hasn’t begun ticking. From children to military officers, the
response is the same: If you don’t hear an order you don’t have to follow
that order.

That’s why people use return receipt requested on mail, sometimes even e-
mail, too: Everyone involved in any negotiation or communication knows
that it’s a prerequisite that there be communication between the negotiating
parties before one side can gain anything.

Children hope that through this technique they can avoid the inevitable.
And sometimes they can. Children know that in a war of nerves, the adults
may be the first to tire. Whatever it is parents wanted their kid to do, they
may discover it’s easier to do it them-

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selves. It’s uncanny how some children can figure out just how long they
can try a parent’s patience with the ‘‘I never heard you’’

routine.

Even when this negotiating technique doesn’t result in the unpleasant task
going away (incidentally, it never works for things like

‘‘Get dressed; we’re going to the doctor’’), it will work to delay some tasks
for children until they’re ready. So, by using this technique, children are
often allowed to straighten up their rooms on their own terms, to their own
level of cleanliness, not yours. Why interrupt having fun with your
imaginary friend if you don’t have to?

Timing is often a critical element in negotiations, and the side that’s in

charge of them has the strongest hand. How important can timing be? Let’s
say that you’re involved in an important (aren’t they all?) negotiation on the
other side’s home turf. You’ve booked your hotel reservation for a set
number of days, and you’ve also booked your return flight. If the other side
knows that (and they most certainly do) and they can delay the meat of the
negotiations until it’s just about time for you to leave, then you’re left with
two bad choices: Leave without concluding the deal or negotiate something
that’s not necessarily your best deal. That’s how critical timing can be.

Most negotiations are not conducted in the vacuum of a conference room.

There is almost always more than a simple trade or partnership. Often one
side has to obtain financing to make the negotiations work, or has to get the
approval of a reluctant board, or has to win the okay of the government
before making the negotiations succeed. In other words, they have to jump
through several hoops. This, too, comes down to timing. You can’t agree to
the deal until you’ve secured that $10 million from the bank or you’re
certain that key board members will give their consent. Control the timeline
for the ‘‘hoops jumping’’ and you control the outcome.

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PRETEND YOU DON’T HEAR OR UNDERSTAND

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The main problem with delaying tactics that hinge on your not hearing or
understanding is that it might be hard to pull it off with sufficient subtlety
during a business negotiation. You just can’t be blatant about it. That is to
say, in business, you can’t get away with screaming ‘‘What, what, what!?’’
or pretending that you don’t understand your negotiating partner’s Southern
accent. (You might be able to get away with feigning an incomprehension
of California-speak, but I leave that up to you.) Also not-so-subtle are the
other business variations on this theme: not returning calls or e-mails
(which tends to annoy the other side and brings out A-type personalities in
even the most serene individuals). But there are clever techniques you can
adopt that build on this very creative negotiating tactic.

The businessperson’s version of ‘‘What, what what!?’’ or not hearing is to

ask for more clarification from the other side. You need to see some
examples, or you want to tour the other company’s factory and meet some
frontline workers . . . you get the idea.
So while your basic strategy is a childish wish to avoid or put off difficult
negotiations, or at least slow them down so that you can use the time
pressure to your own advantage, you must overlay this behavior with an
adult’s control over technology (when it comes to making yourself hard to
reach by e-mail or by telephone), an adult’s sense of what’s reasonable (so
that your delaying tactics never come across as too blatant), and enough
subtlety to avoid giving offense where none is intended. Keep your
negotiating goal in mind so that you’re not simply being obstructive and
unreach-able as an end in itself.

A few pointers and reminders about how to apply this negotiating

technique:

• Use it selectively. Pretending not to hear is ideally suited to dealing with

people you’re never going to have to work with again.

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

Inside your own company, it could leave you with a reputation for not
listening or being too obtuse to understand a problem. Never being
available to an outside party is fine, provided you’re sure that the outside
party really has nothing to offer you and would just be wasting your time.

• Make gaining control of timing your goal. Pretending you don’t

understand what the other side wants or is saying also works well as a
means to postpone negotiations until you’re ready. In that case the purpose
is to control the timing to your benefit. This isn’t a negotiating technique
that you can always use, but it’s something that if used well, with necessary
subtlety, can reap tremendous benefits.

• Use it to turn the tables on your negotiating opponent (including your

boss). Pretending not to hear or understand is one way to prevent your boss
from overloading you with work that you can’t do alone or might not be
able to do to the standard required. Here’s how that works: Your boss hands
you an assignment that you know you don’t have the time or resources to
carry out. Instead of objecting immediately and saying that the assignment
is unfair, you ask for clarification of each part of the assignment. The boss
tries to explain. You ask her to go over every aspect of the task and how it
should be performed. The boss elaborates, and in the process she’s forced to
spell out the time demands of the job, which go well beyond the normal
scope of your job description. You still make it sound as if the mission
hasn’t been explained enough for you to know exactly what you are to do.
Your boss is left with the nagging doubt the she’s made a muddle of the
assignment by not explaining it well enough. She is now primed to accept
the fact that you might not be able to carry out the assignment as proposed,
and that it wouldn’t be your fault. How can you complete the work if the
boss can’t make clear what she wants? The boss may be forced to reevalu-

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ate the assignment, or else provide you with the resources you need,
including extra time. Your boss may also have to help you meet the
deadlines, or perhaps assign an assistant to you who will share the burdens.
If she doesn’t, and the assignment turns out badly, then it’s not your fault.
You’ve laid the groundwork for the boss to have to accept responsibility for
the debacle.

After all, it was her job to communicate the mission to the person carrying
out her orders. By asking questions and demanding clarification, you made
clear that the assignment was problematic from the outset. It’s the job of the
person who sets the task to make sure that the task is clear. Pilots are
required to read back clearances to air traffic control before taking off.
Unless you hear the controller say ‘‘Read back correct,’’ you may not move
the airplane, you may not pass Go and collect $200. (If you do, it’s going to
cost you a lot more than $200, since the FAA will likely yank your pilot’s
license for a while.)

When you are in the boss’s position, you can turn things around to your
advantage if you take a few extra steps to make sure that everyone knows
you explained the instructions clearly. You can even go as far as having a
written memo signed by the person who’s pretending not to understand. Just
make sure that any neutral ob-servers will agree that you took great effort to
make things perfectly clear.

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Pretend You Don’t Understand

to Get the Other Side to Offer

Something They Didn’t Plan on

Conceding
Let’s take the technique described in the preceding chapter to the next level.
Using selective understanding to delay negotiations has its uses, but getting
the other side to offer something that they didn’t plan on mentioning is even
better. And once somebody has offered something extra, it’s hard to take
that back.

Journalists do this all the time: They ask their victim . . . er, subject . . . a
question or two and then stop asking questions. With the camera rolling or
the microphone recording, the person being interviewed is virtually
compelled to talk—actually babble. And often when confronted by silence,
the babbler will say something that she didn’t plan on saying. The reporter
doesn’t care about the silence being recorded because the reporter knows
that those blank moments can be edited out (and the subject should know
this, too, but usually doesn’t). Nobody wants to be seen on national
television looking stupid, so they talk.

Kids aren’t as sophisticated; they don’t realize that adults want to fill the
vacuum. Kids don’t self-consciously apply this technique because they
aren’t fazed by awkward silences as are adults. In fact,

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if you observe children, as I did while researching this book, you’ll notice
that kids are content to sit with their friends and not say anything at all for
periods of time that would drive an adult to reveal all manner of personal
information. It’s not a problem for them or for kid-to-kid negotiations. In
other words, children are immune to this negotiating tactic. However, it
works well against adults. Children may not be insightful enough to realize
what they’re doing, but they certainly do use this tactic—and it works.

The silence that they sometimes leave in answer to an adult’s question

prompts the adult to fill in the blank space with some new or extra promise.
Adults don’t know what children are thinking or plotting when they are
silent (though usually kids aren’t thinking about anything significant).
Because of this uncertainty, which is entirely in the minds of the adults, we
offer things we hadn’t planned on giving.

Here’s a for instance: You want your four-year-old to clean her room. It’s a
reasonable thing to request. But you know that your daughter doesn’t want
to clean her room—what kid does? (What you don’t know is that your
daughter also doesn’t see her room as being messy and thus doesn’t really
understand your request at all!) At first your daughter argues with you,
insisting that she needs to complete the game she is playing with her teddy
bears: She can’t leave them without plotting out their entire lives. For every
argument you have in support of your view that she should straighten up her
room, your daughter has a counterargument, until finally she runs out of
things to say in response. She becomes silent and plays with her bears,
despite the fact that you’re not done explaining, arguing, demanding. What
do you do when you’re confronted with silence? You offer to buy her
another bear for her family if she cleans her room! Your daughter agrees
and you go away satisfied.

Your daughter may or may not actually straighten up her room at that
moment, even after agreeing to it, but she’s going to get a new

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

teddy bear because once you’ve made the offer you can’t withdraw it. Or
rather you can change your mind, but as every parent knows from
experience, withdrawing the bear offer will cause the negotiations to
collapse with little hope of recovery.

(How to get your child to clean her room is, unfortunately, beyond the
scope of this book. I’m sorry.) What should you do when you’re confronted
by silence?

Countering this negotiating technique is very easy. All you need to do is to

be aware of it—be aware of the adult tendency to avoid silence. Nature may
abhor a vacuum, but people like vacuums even less. Just wait. Or meet
silence with silence. Or meet silence with action. (Start taking away the
bears!) Do anything but fill the silence with a promise you are sure to
regret.

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Share Something Important

with the Other Side

Sharing a virtue, hobby, interest, spiritual perspective, background, or alma

matter can be the decisive factor when it comes to negotiations, especially
three-way negotiations in which you are courting, or being courted by, two
other organizations or individuals.
There’s almost nothing that compares to sharing something special with
somebody else. We’ve all experienced this: You meet somebody and then,
after some conversation, you discover that the two of you went to the same
elementary school, share the same, rarified taste in music, stayed at the
same hotel in Madrid, or enjoy a passion for mountain biking. The more
exotic the connection or the more significant the shared experience, the
stronger and more lasting the bond. I know that when I meet another pilot,
there’s an instant relationship. We share something that was very difficult to
achieve and brings us a lot of happiness. I know that in a room of fifty
people, if there’s one other pilot, that’s the person I’m going to connect to.

From their first moments as social creatures, kids immediately start to

figure out what, if anything, they have in common with

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

other kids. Then they learn that they both play with Matchbox cars or
American Girl dolls; or maybe they share a fascination with The Phantom
Tollbooth, like playing Frisbee, or delight in chocolate cake. Or maybe they
both have pet rabbits. Or even just the same first name. Their passions are
as strong as those of adults, and when children make a connection that
involves something that they like, this connection drives their relationship,
sometimes to the exclusion of other children. The circle of friends is
narrowed to those kids who share whatever it is that fascinates them. This
glue is easy to underestimate, especially since children often forget why it is
that they developed such a solid relationship.
As with many things that kids do, the adult way is a little more complex and
has some pitfalls. But first, another few words about how to make use of
this strategy. It pays to research the hobbies of your negotiating partners.
Find out what they like. Even if you don’t share all the same interests, there
probably will be some over-lap of experiences in any group you might
assemble at random, so you’ll have something to talk about other than
business. If your boss or new office mates like competitive chess, well, then
the more you know about chess the more you’ll be able to talk about it and
consequently improve your relationship.

It’s especially helpful to get to know something about your negotiating

counterpart’s special interests when he’s into something obscure or esoteric.
If he plays golf, he’ll easily have potential business partners inviting him to
the links on a nice day. You can be one of those extending an invitation, and
you won’t stand out. But what if you learn that in addition to golf, he’s also
an expert on butterfly migration. Do a little research of your own on the
subject and then ask some intelligent questions; perhaps even suggest a visit
to a traveling butterfly exhibit when it comes to town. I would bet he’ll be
delighted to find someone with an interest in his hobby, and that common
ground could well become the basis for a friend-

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ⅷ39

ship that solidifies the relationship that began as purely business.

And you might find yourself with a new and fascinating hobby as a side
benefit.

The more links you have between you and the person with whom you’re
negotiating, the greater the chance that something positive will result. And
these connections will give you a stronger relationship than others who are
involved in the negotiations may have.

Sharing something in common with the other side is more of a broad

strategic measure than a negotiating tactic. This is something you should
always do when you encounter new people who you need to deal with on
several levels: Develop some kind of personal bond or relationship that
goes beyond the give-and-take of negotiations. That way, they won’t view
you simply as someone who wants to get something from them, someone
they deal with only because they must. They will view you as a whole
person, and you will see them more completely, too.

But—and here’s that warning—whenever a business relationship develops

into a personal relationship there’s the risk of a falling out, as can happen
when people jump to the conclusion that they’ve got a lot of things in
common and then, over time, discover a conflict over this or that particular
issue. Unlike children, who sometimes rush to declare someone their new
best friend, only to feud, declare the person an enemy for a short time, and
then make up, adult friendships are far less flexible. Because you will need
to continue to work alongside certain people for business, you will always
need to keep a certain businesslike detachment. You can share interests—
even passions—but keep yourself from going overboard.

Remember, Martha Stewart thought she had a close friendship with her
stockbroker, and she thought that friendship meant that she was entitled to
insider information about the stock she owned.

She even remarked to another friend, ‘‘Isn’t it nice to have stock-

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ⅷ40

HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

brokers who will tell you these things!’’ But it turned out that it wasn’t that
nice for either of them; they both ended up with identi-cal sentences of five
months in prison and five months of house arrest. So share your interests,
share your passions, develop your relationship . . . as far as ethics, good
business sense, and the law will allow.

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Call in Backup (Or ‘‘My Dad

Can Beat Up Your Dad’’)

In business, the variations on this technique may be ‘‘My lawyer can beat
up your lawyer,’’ or ‘‘My bank will give me enough capital to buy you out
if you don’t agree to my terms.’’ That sort of thing.

The problem with this approach is that you’d better be willing to follow up
or your reputation is toast. Kids quickly realize this:

‘‘I’m going to sic my dog, Killer, on you if you don’t trade baseball bats
with me.’’ Some kids will make the trade to avoid having to look over their
shoulder every time they think they hear the pad-ding of a dog behind them.
Maybe even most kids will assume that it’s not a bluff. But every now and
then you find a kid who won’t accede to the bluff. Then the game’s over.
Not only does the bluff no longer work, but the bluffer’s stature is forever
diminished—until he gets transferred to another school, that is. Children
don’t often think about the consequences of their bluff being called—
remember, they’re focused on the present, not on what might happen in the
future—but you need to be keenly aware of all the permutations of your
bluff failing.

You can use the ‘‘My dad can beat up your dad’’ technique

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

perhaps with a little more subtlety, but if you’re unwilling to follow though,
your reputation will be tarnished and your negotiating position weakened.
While this is true for all of the methods in this book, it’s especially
important that you have a realistic appraisal of your side’s strength when
you use this technique. You can’t threaten to sic your killer dog on someone
if all you’ve got is a lapdog. You can’t threaten to wear the other side down
with relentless litigation if the other side has its own gang of lawyers who
have done the same to others. Children sometimes assume that their dad or
their dog is the biggest, toughest, most protective being on the planet.

Their fierce loyalty and belief in the idea that wishing can make something
come true leads them to use this tactic in the face of countervailing reality.
But for an adult to succeed by claiming a strong or fierce protector, there
actually has to be one.

Of course, the big, tough protector doesn’t have to be at your beck and call.
It may be enough that the protector you call upon has an intimidating
reputation. Just like the kid whose dad is a cop or a professional athlete, you
may not need to do anything more than let your adversary know who your
protector is. For example, if you receive a letter threatening you for
nonpayment of an amount you know has been falsely billed to you, you
may not have to call on your state’s consumer affairs department to protect
you from the collection agent; it’s sufficient to write a letter to the company
letting them know that you’re aware that you have the protection of your
state’s consumer law and will file a complaint if the false billing does not
cease.

But what if you live in a state with weak consumer protection laws? What if
you don’t actually have any strong force to back you up? Who can you say
you’ll get to defend you if no one comes to mind? This is the situation for
the kid whose dad is the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling. Kids are
stuck with the families they happen to end up with. But in the business
world, you can choose

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CALL IN BACKUP (OR ‘‘MY DAD CAN BEAT UP YOUR DAD’’)

ⅷ43

your protectors, to a certain extent. You can, in effect, get a stronger

‘‘dad’’ before the negotiations even begin. So if your company keeps a law
firm on retainer, you make sure it’s a firm known for being tough and
winning at all cost. If you need to project financial strength, you make sure
that your company has a solid relationship with a bank or brokerage firm.
Whether having a tough, resourceful partner can enhance your negotiating
position depends on what you’re negotiating, of course. Sometimes it’s
worth the effort, time, and expense to have a business ‘‘dad’’ who can beat
up the other side’s business ‘‘dad.’’ For that, you need to know your
opponent’s intentions and level of aggressiveness. That is, you’ll have to
see if and how they flex their muscles.

Older kids flex their own muscles. That’s a lot different from saying ‘‘My
dad can beat up your dad.’’ The behavior of older children—teenage boys
in particular—isn’t especially relevant to negotiations between
businesspeople. It’s the poorly disciplined, unsuccessful boys who try to get
what they want by direct aggression. They may end up in detention or in
juvenile court for their hostile actions, not on the boards of corporations.

Here it’s the younger kid who’s actually the shrewder player.

He doesn’t threaten to pound the other side into submission with his own
might. He just tries to make the other side afraid to take his side on. So if
you’re planning on being tough, borrow from what younger kids do; don’t
emulate the older children, who may be too tough for their own good.

You should also keep in mind that you don’t want to flaunt your tough
protector too much. Kids may do that, but children aren’t negotiating a
critical business deal and the stakes aren’t necessarily as high for them as
they are for you. You want to create a subtle sense that you could, might,
and possibly will call on an outside force. You want to use this tactic to give
you an edge, perhaps the decisive edge, not to defeat the other side and
cause the

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

negotiations to fall through. Many techniques that children use are

reasonably foolproof, but some have the potential to bite you back.

Or, as kids would say, bite you in the backside. Use this one judi-ciously.

Because this strategy only works when you have really big guns (and then
not all the time), the best way to counter it is to focus on the other side’s
weakness. Everybody, every organization has a weakness. Perhaps even
more than one. My kids taught me this strategy through the board game,
Sorry. In Sorry, the player who gets all her pieces at the destination first
wins. But along the way you can bump other players’ pieces—sending them
back. (This same twist was a popular component in many board games from
days gone by, including Careers, where you not only try to advance your
career, but thwart your opponent’s success, too.) It’s important to advance
your pieces along the board as quickly as possible.

But when confronted with a choice of whether you should advance your
own piece or create a setback for your opponent, how do you choose? How
do you know what the best strategy is? The answer, my kids showed me, is
quite simple: Do whatever your opponent would like least. Put yourself in
your opponent’s position for a moment and consider what would be the
worst outcome. Once you’ve figured that out, then make that play.

The same strategy can work well when countering the ‘‘My daddy can beat
up your daddy’’ situation. Do whatever the other side wants least. Take the
time to figure out where the other side’s weakness lies. Once you know that,
you can figure out how to approach them from their weakest point. It may
take some time to puzzle out the weak spot, since any organization will do
its best to project an image of uniform strength. But sometimes a little
poking around will reveal that on one side or the other, the walls are not as
strong or as high as they appear to be.

Your best bet in that case might be to extract the concessions

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CALL IN BACKUP (OR ‘‘MY DAD CAN BEAT UP YOUR DAD’’)

ⅷ45

you want in exchange for your promise to continue to act as if your

opponent is strong and did not give in. In legal terms, this means you settle
your claim for an undisclosed amount and the other side never has to admit
they did anything wrong. Your negotiating opponents appear not to have
cracked—at least to the rest of the world—but you and only you know
they’ve caved.

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Don’t Think About

Negotiating—Just Do It
There are critical differences between the way you may have learned to
negotiate and how children negotiate. Kids do something that’s not taught
in Harvard Business School (which is why this book will give you a leg up
in negotiations, even if those you are up against went to Harvard). Adults
plan, theorize, strategize, and agonize.

They think and, quite often, they think too much. Kids just do.

There are, of course, certain advantages to thinking about the negotiations

in advance. You need to understand your objectives, the other side’s
objectives, your limitations (financial and otherwise), how the negotiations
integrate into your overall business plans, your staffing requirements, and
so on. In the real world, sometimes you can’t just wing it.

But kids don’t have staffing requirements, long-range goals, or anything

like that. Yes, that will put them at a disadvantage when it comes to
integrating their needs into a five-year business plan.

But that doesn’t matter because children don’t have any need for a five-year
plan. When they negotiate, it’s for something in the here and now. Kids
barely have a five-minute plan. And that’s why when

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DON’T THINK ABOUT NEGOTIATING—JUST DO IT

ⅷ47

it comes to negotiations over short-term issues, they’re the champs.

Children focus on the present; they know what they want and go for it,
undistracted by ancillary missions or long-range problems.

It’s this amazing focus, this single-mindedness of purpose, that en-ables

children to negotiate with a doggedness and effectiveness that few adults
can match. Kids are not conflicted about doing things: They don’t worry
that if they do the thing that their boss wants, they might alienate their
coworkers. When you have a one-year, five-year, or ten-year goal, there are
going to be all sorts of complications and prioritizing. You may lose sight of
what your immediate needs really are.

Adults involved in negotiations are not only distracted by business issues,

but by personal ones, too. Sometime during your negotiation meeting,
someone may be thinking:

‘‘Gee, he’s cute. Maybe just a little fling . . .’’

‘‘I’m tired of Oklahoma City; I just want to get back to LA.’’

‘‘I should have brought a charger for my iPod.’’

‘‘I can’t stand another PowerPoint presentation!’’

‘‘Will Quinn try to claim my office if I’m gone any longer?’’

‘‘Wish I’d had time for a smoke before this meeting started. It’s time for a
cigarette break.’’

‘‘What a view—maybe it’s time to switch companies.’’

‘‘I don’t want to miss my kid’s soccer game! Let’s wrap this up.’’

These personal concerns, which percolate in the mind of everyone who’s

involved in negotiations, can have an impact on the way negotiations are
conducted. When kids act out during long, dull meetings, no one’s
surprised: We all know kids will be kids. But

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

adults are expected to be in control at all times. They’re held to a higher

standard, especially in the business world, where everyone tries to make a
point of appearing ultra-professional at all times.

Still, I’d bet the ranch that a negotiation has never transpired without these
kind of thoughts taking over each person’s mind for at least a part of the
time.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people
worry than work.

Robert Frost

You root around for a solution and may come up with an answer: Zen. Zen’s
the antidote. Empty your mind of everything other than the task at hand. Be
one with the calm sound of central air-conditioning.

Nice try. Zen doesn’t make the meeting any shorter or stop the person next
to you from clicking his pen-top compulsively and fidgeting with his feet
under the table. Zen doesn’t postpone your son’s soccer game. Zen doesn’t
eliminate the nagging worry that if these negotiations don’t wrap up in the
next ten minutes, you’re going to miss your flight home and end up on the
red-eye in a middle seat between two incredibly huge passengers. Zen is
good for selling books on Zen, and it’s good for expensive spas in Ari-zona,
but it won’t help you in the here and now. What will help you here is the
sense of immediacy that children bring to their negotiations: Just do it.
Speak out. Ask for what you want bluntly.

Focus on what you need to accomplish and look for the most direct way to
get it. Do what you can to cut through all the distractions, delaying tactics,
and negotiating nuances that others are throwing your way.

Kids just speak up and say what’s on their minds. That can be a breath of
fresh air. It can also be indiscreet or incredibly embar-

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DON’T THINK ABOUT NEGOTIATING—JUST DO IT

ⅷ49

rassing, depending on what’s on the kid’s mind. But as an adult, you have
the sense to avoid saying anything stupid or hurtful, and you can figure out
how to cut through the bull and get to the point of the meeting without
making anyone feel offended.

But what if there’s no chance for you to push things along?

What if you have no say in how the negotiation meeting is run?

Then it’s a matter of keeping yourself awake and focused, despite all the
distractions and worries that may trouble you. How? One thing that may
help is to remember that your negotiating opponent has an equal—though
different—number of worries. She who worries less negotiates best.
Advice that tells you not to worry or fret is one thing; actually developing
the skills to practice that advice is another. I’ll say this at the outset: Some
people can learn not worry more easily than others. It’s the sort of thing that
comes naturally to certain types of personalities, while others seem born to
worry over everything that can go wrong. Don’t fight your nature—just find
some coping techniques you can use while sitting silently in a meeting.
Maybe that guy who’s fidgeting with his feet under the table is onto
something; it could be his method of working out his anxieties. Try out
different things that help your stamina and concentration. Talk silently to
yourself, perhaps. Get an internal dialogue going about whether you
compartmentalize or squash some thoughts. During this process, you will
think about those issues and problems you need to address and take your
mind off the ones that don’t matter right now.

Of course, you can never discipline your wandering thoughts perfectly.

Accept the fact that no matter how ‘‘Zen’’ you are, a few stray bad thoughts
are going to find a way back inside your brain.

In that case, your job is to let them slide by. If you’re the kind of person
who isn’t bothered by somebody yakking on a cell phone at the dinner table
next to you, or by the flash of passing truck lights

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

in your motel room, or the passenger who’s humming in the seat behind
you, then chances are pretty good that you will be able to put these
distracting thoughts away for the duration of the negotiations.

But what if you’re the kind of person who glares at the parents who are
settling themselves and their one-year-old down in the row behind you on
the airplane, and then spends the rest of the flight waiting for the sleeping
baby to wake up and start to wail? If you find yourself constantly worrying
about things that haven’t happened but could happen, chances are that
you’re not going to be able to compartmentalize your mind or hold
distracting thoughts at bay for the duration of the negotiations. If that’s the
case and you’re a bona fide worrier, then you’re not the best candidate to
put the ‘‘don’t think about it’’ strategy to use. You’re going to need to look
into a more adult way to prevent yourself from torturing yourself with your
worst thoughts and fears. A good therapist, perhaps?

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Be Nice

Does being nice run counter to the negotiating tactic that says ‘‘My dad can
beat up your dad’’? Sure it does. But so what? Kids don’t strive for
consistency; they just do whatever they think will work.

Grown-ups think they need to be logical and consistent, but as Emerson

observed, ‘‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’’
Children, by their spontaneity, often have a more suitable handle on a given
situation than adults, who may be too concerned with preserving an image
or fulfilling a given role. But in situation-driven negotiations, it’s an
advantage to be flexible, to be able to act one way with one set of people
and take the opposite tack with another.
So flex your ‘‘My dad can beat up your dad’’ muscle on alter-nate
Tuesdays, and be nice the rest of the time. Use your adult judgment to size
up the situation and the people involved—and if it seems to you that a
childlike sweetness and a go-along attitude would work better than a tough-
guy stance, then be as sweet and angelic as you’ve ever been in your life.

I’m not going to write about how being nice helps reduce your

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blood pressure, carries over positively into your family life, alleviates
stress, helps you think more clearly and focus on your goals, and bolsters
your ability to deal with people who aren’t nice. What I am going to do is
show you how children make use of this negotiating tactic and how you can
translate that information into better business negotiations.

There are two kinds of people. (It’s a standard cliche´ for every business
book to divide people into two different groups, so I ask your forgiveness in
advance.) The first group is made up of nasty, unkind, egotistical,
malicious, and unpleasant jerks. The second group is made up of pleasant,
kind, polite, amusing, considerate individuals. With whom would you rather
spend hours or days?

The answer is the same for children as it is for businesspeople.

What do children do when they’re thrown into a situation with nasty, toy-
grabbing, sand-throwing meanies? The nice children may get taken
advantage of on the first encounter, it’s true. But they also tend to look for
ways to avoid future encounters. When play dates are being proposed, the
mean kids don’t get asked back.

How does that translate to adult business? Repeat business and satisfied
customers are the backbone of many, if not most, business transactions. If
people think you’ve behaved like a jerk, they’ll go out of their way to avoid
you next time they need whatever it is you’re selling. They may even prefer
to pay more for a product or a service if it means avoiding doing business
with someone they find inconsiderate or hard to get along with.

So play nice, and the other kids will continue to play with you.

Be polite, be friendly, be sweet, and they’ll tell their friends that you were a
good person to deal with. It’s that simple.

Despite the simplicity, this may be one of the most difficult concepts for
hard-nosed businessmen and businesswomen to assim-ilate. After all,
getting ahead in business is all about being tough, they think. Nice guys
finish last, the saying goes. Well, at least that’s

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what the people who aren’t nice keep saying. Nice guys can finish last, but
that’s only if they’re nice and only nice. If you combine nice with
competence, imagination, and hard work, I say you’ve got a winning
combination. Add to the mix some creativity and drive, and it’s clear you’ll
go far, whether on the playground or in the boardroom.

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Be Disarmingly Honest

It’s not that kids don’t ever lie. All kids at some point want to find out if
they can get away with bending the truth. They experiment with lying from
the time they learn to talk. ‘‘Did you eat all your broccoli?’’ the parent asks.
‘‘All of it,’’ the kid says proudly, thinking that nobody was looking as he
quickly transferred the serving from his plate to the floor, where the dog
quickly gulped it down. But parents aren’t fooled. They know he couldn’t
have eaten it all so quickly. They can see the telltale sauce-tracks running
off the edge of the plate. They check the floor and find the bits that the dog
didn’t lick up. And then they let the kid know that they aren’t fooled, and
they make sure he learns that lying is a serious thing—something with
consequences.

But there are always kids who don’t learn the lesson. Either they succeed in
fooling their parents, or they succeed in evading the consequences. They
learn to justify their actions to themselves.

They come to think of themselves as too clever to be caught. I’d like to be

able to assure you that these people do badly in the business world. People
learn they can’t be trusted. People don’t like

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them and avoid dealing with them if they have a choice. In a more just
world, that would be the case. But I’m sorry to say, in the real world, quite
often cheaters—and liars—do prosper. Still you wouldn’t want your kid to
be one, and you don’t want to be one yourself.

I’m trusting that you don’t need a lesson on the underlying immorality of
lying. You know it’s wrong. This book isn’t about morality, it’s about what
kids can teach us that’s of use in business negotiations. So let me come back
to the broccoli story. The reason the kid is caught is because kids, when
they lie, do it clumsily. They leave trails of evidence. They can’t remember
the previous lies they told, so they have a hard time keeping their stories
straight. That’s good, because it means that they get caught easily and learn
that being caught brings consequences.

Adults who lie not only lack a sense of morality, they usually are also
overconfident of their ability to deceive. They really think they can lie well
enough to get away with it, to benefit from their deception. But most people
just aren’t that good at it. Sooner or later they trip up. Yes, as I’ve said, we
have to concede that some people get away with lying their way to business
success. But any habitual liar has got to worry constantly about being found
out.

And what do adults do when they find out a business deal was based on a
lie? They cancel the contract; they call the police and complain of fraud.
And they file multimillion-dollar lawsuits. The consequences can be a
whole hell of a lot worse than being deprived of dessert for a week.

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Be Yourself

Kids don’t adopt different personas to fit the occasion. Kids are who they
are; what you see is what you get. And kids know that about each other.
They know which children are shy, loud, exagger-ate a lot, like to play
Frisbee instead of soccer, have lots of interesting things in their pockets all
the time, tell good jokes, tell bad jokes—in other words, kids have their
strengths and weaknesses.

You get to know a kid and you know what you’re getting. Few kids can pull
off passing themselves off as something they’re not. And kids are usually
quite good at spotting adult phonies when they see them.

In my opinion, this ability helps streamline and speed up the negotiation

process because you don’t have to first penetrate the other kid’s persona.
You don’t have to try and peel away their inner motivations or desires: No
onions here. You might think that this, in fact, is a bad idea; that it’s a
weakness to be open about who you are and what you want. But that’s only
if it’s part of your game plan to actually hide what your negotiating goals
are—a strategy that can all too easily backfire. By keeping true to yourself,
you’ll

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find that the people you are negotiating with will relax a little, too—and
perhaps even let down their shields.

To the extent that you are yourself, and to the extent that people can count
on you to be the person you show yourself to be, others will perceive that
you are the reason that things went so smoothly. You’ll enhance your
personal reputation. In an environment where people are used to playing
their cards close to the chest—indeed, an environment in which people
expect diversions and subterfuge—the person who can get rid of all of that
will become somebody other people want to negotiate with. If doing deals
is what you do for a living, it’s to your advantage to have people know you
and be able to tell others who you are and what they can expect when they
deal with you. You’ll be like the kid who collects baseball cards, the one all
the other kids want to trade with.

How do you become yourself ? I can’t give you step-by-step instructions,

and indeed it may be a difficult thing for you to do.

After all, if you’re like many people in business you are used to a certain
amount of aloofness and pretext. Office politics requires that you act like a
politician, and all politicians distance their behavior from the way they are
when they’re not at the office. Perhaps the cure is to spend a little more of
your free time among kids, watching them, playing with them, enjoying
them for their own unique selves, and a little less time in the cubicles where
adults jockey for position and the upper hand.

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Know Your Own Team

The next thing you need to know are the people you depend on and who
depend on you: your own team. Children learn quickly that they can often
accomplish more faster if they work together.

Even brothers and sisters will form alliances (albeit temporary ones) when
it suits their interests. Alliances not only let individuals coop-erate, they
also mean that you’re not working at odds with people—you don’t have to
divert your intellectual resources from your primary objective. But you can
only form an alliance when you know what your partners want. So get to
know them.

If you’re a kid, that means knowing who’s on your side. It may be the kids
you play soccer or baseball with, or whatever sport you prefer. It could be
your classmates. Or it could be just the group of kids you hang out with. For
an adult, it’s your colleagues, the people at your company. It may not be the
whole enchilada; lots of times there’s some group of people within your
own company that you’ll view as the competition you’re up against: You’re
competing for office space, budget, choice assignment, or promotions. I
leave it up to you to define who you will regard as ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’

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Once you’ve decided who your teammates are and who’s on the opposing
side, you have to know your people and their strengths and their
weaknesses. (I’ll be talking a lot more later about various ways to scope out
your opposition.) You get to know them just as you did your pals on the
playground, by actually playing with them. That is, you want to do more
than just work with them.

You want to relax with them. Get your families to know their families. Find
out what you have in common, and find out also the things that you don’t
have in common. Then you’ll be able to appreciate the diversity and find
the qualities and resources that others may have that you lack.

This isn’t exactly unpleasant work, either. It means that you’ll go out
together for drinks after work, have parties either at work or on weekends
(why not both?), and observe each other’s birthdays and milestones. No, I
don’t mean with funny hats, cupcakes, and birthday presents, like you did
for each birthday child when you were in kindergarten. It is important to
keep these things low-key and to avoid the sense that it’s compulsory to
celebrate each passing year with a lot of whoop-de-do (regardless of how
the birthday boy or girl feels about it). I’m merely arguing here against the
opposite: the rigid separation of home-life and work-life that all too often
becomes institutionalized in large corporations where lots of strangers are
thrown together from nine to five. It’s so much easier to achieve a stated
end when you have developed a sense of comrade-ship with the people
you’re working with.

That’s not to say that you must become close friends with the people on
your team. There may be personality clashes; there may be many
differences of opinion. But you do need to develop respect and tolerance for
each other, and find ways to appreciate the differences you have. Young
children aren’t equipped to do this. Teamwork skills generally don’t
develop until the middle of childhood, seldom earlier than age nine or ten.
They tend to develop earlier

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among boys than among girls. (Perhaps that’s a relic of the past, when girls
were less likely to play on teams than boys were. But these days, with the
enormous popularity of girls’ soccer teams, that may no longer be the case,
as it surely was when I was growing up.) Though your friendship with your
work teammates will seldom be as deep and as lasting as your friendships
from school or from shared interests, that’s not to say it’s impossible for
them to be.

Business friendships that arise under very stressful conditions, such as

during tense and extremely high-risk negotiations, have something of the
Stockholm Syndrome about them. (That’s the name given to the strange
sympathy and closeness that’s been known to develop between hostage
takers and their hostages. It is a relationship created out of a forced
proximity and shared interest in an outcome. Both the prisoners and the
captors may be afraid of being killed in a police raid, for instance; both the
prisoners and the captors have to share the same food, cramped conditions,
lack of facilities, and so on.) In the workplace, it doesn’t really matter too
much if you don’t develop friendships that go to a deeper level. So what if
there’s not much going on beyond the surface. If someone on your team left
the team tomorrow, would you still go out of your way to see that person?
Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get all the support you need
from each other while you’re on the same team.

That’s usually good enough for kids. They play with one team in the
summer when the sport is baseball, and they get to know each other well
enough to work happily enough together. And then, when it’s basketball
season, they go on to become part of another team of kids and get to know
those kids well, and maybe that group operates with quite a different group
dynamic. But kids adapt to the different team styles and learn to fit right in.
When it’s time for soccer, it’s another group yet again, and new adjustments
need to be made.

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Not everyone can slide so easily in and out of different groups.

Some kids never feel comfortable with the idea of team play; they’re better
at solo or one-on-one sports. That doesn’t mean they won’t be good team
players in the business world. It’s easy to draw analogies between the type
of team play we learn as kids and the way colleagues at work learn to
function as a team—just as I’ve done here—but let’s not get too literal-
minded. Here I speak as one of those boys who was always picked last for
team sports. Let me add that I never let my klutzy sports past handicap me
when it came to my adult business dealings (and neither should you).

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Play Your Best Game

If you don’t like the game that’s being played, get everyone to play
something else—a game in which you have greater say over the rules and
the players.

Children can learn chess at a young age, but they often prefer checkers.
Other kids like board games like Sorry, Parcheesi, Candy Land, or
Monopoly. Why? Some kids do better with checkers because the strategy is
simpler; for others, Candy Land has the excitement, the color, and the
tempting subject matter. Sorry is largely a matter of luck—some kids like it
best for just that reason. Monopoly involves lots of personal trades and
judgment, as well as a lot of luck.

So what happens when a chess player gets together with a Sorry fan?
There’s a deep and protracted negotiation over which game to play. The
main reason is that the chess player is clearly the intellectual type, while the
Sorry player is obviously not as bright. (Only kidding.) No, the real reason
is that kids like to play what they like to play—it’s that simple. Given a
choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream, somebody who likes
chocolate is going to choose

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chocolate over vanilla 999 out of 1,000 times. That’s in a kid’s nature, and
it’s something that doesn’t change all that much as they grow up.
But there are consequences to a negotiation over what kind of game to play.
If you’re successful in getting the other side to play your game, the one
you’re best at, the one you enjoy, you give yourself the advantage in the
game itself. Business negotiations are like that, too. If you get to choose the
time and place and the types of things that are up for grabs, you’re playing
your best game, and you have the advantage.

That’s why pre-negotiations—talks about setting up the negotiations, and

the scope of the negotiations—are oftentimes as important as what goes on
once you’re in the thick of things. They may even be more important. Let’s
go back to the analogy of children choosing a board game: If the child
who’s a good chess player can convince the child who prefers Sorry that it
will be fun to try chess, there’s no question about who’s going to win the
chess game. On the other hand, if the child who likes playing Sorry can get
the chess whiz to play a game that’s virtually all luck, then they’re on an
even playing field, and the Sorry-preferring child at least has an even
chance.

That’s why children often spend as much time arguing about which board
game to play as they do actually playing the game itself. They understand
that the experience of playing one type of game will be vastly different
from playing another. If chess ends up being the game, then the Sorry
player’s best bet is to enlist another chess whiz to be on his side. Or if that’s
not possible, he’ll put off playing until he’s had time to learn much more
about the game. Or at the very least, he’ll insist upon a relaxation of the
rules: The less experienced player should be allowed more time for moves,
or be allowed to take back a move that he quickly sees was a poor choice.

Adults use variations on these themes all the time: They bring

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in an outside expert to coach them through the unfamiliar part of a

specialized business deal. They negotiate for extra time to investigate an
unfamiliar situation. They write an escape clause into a contract that gives
them an out if a decision turns out to have terrible consequences for their
business. Along the way they learn how the other game is played. That is to
say, the Sorry player, after getting plenty of expert advice and experience
with chess, can actually end up being the chess whiz himself—and in that
case, he may actually suggest a game of chess the next time he’s the one
who gets to choose which game is being played.

Learning to play new games gives people new skills and can bring other
changes, too. Parents of schoolchildren see this happen all the time. At
parent-teacher conferences, parents hear that their little Julie is smart, well
behaved, and never lashes out at other children. ‘‘Are you talking about my
child?’’ is the sometimes quiz-zical reply. Parents regularly get reports
about children who are supposed to be their offspring, but from the
description appear to be somebody else’s children. How is that possible?
How can a kid behave one way at home—often sarcastic, for instance—and
another way at school? The answer is sometimes found in the behavior
needed to succeed in team games at school. The kid who may be

‘‘mouthy’’ at home with his parents may be the same kid who, having found
a sport that he’s good at, is a disciplined, dedicated, and well-integrated part
of the team. The coach tells the parents their kid is a model of cooperation
and sportsmanship. Being good at something and being looked up to by
others for being a leader at a game gives children confidence and often
brings out the best in them.

The reason some people succeed in their chosen field, when they’re not
generally perceived as role models in other aspects of their lives, is that
those people have become comfortable and experienced at playing a game
(or rather, doing business) their way, and they’ve succeeded in getting
others to play on their terms as well.

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Be Direct About Your Needs

Ice cream. That stuffed bear. That Barbie. To be picked up. To be put down.
Not to take a nap. A fairy tale before bedtime. When a child knows what
she wants, she’s relentless about getting it. If you’re a parent and you don’t
pay attention to what your child really wants, you’re going to lose the
negotiation every time.

Most of the time children are completely transparent about what they want.
When a child clings to a stuffed bear in a store like a mountain climber
holding on to a cliff overhang, you know what she wants. She’s not secretly
telegraphing you a message that she really wants the stuffed alligator in the
other aisle.

From the child’s perspective, the negotiation is straightforward and simple.

No trickery, deception, fraud, or ruses: I want this stuffed bear.

Look at the way adults behave, in contrast. Let’s say your wife suggests
going out to Beppo’s Italian Garden for dinner. You object, saying, ‘‘I don’t
like the service there.’’ But the real reason you don’t want to go to Beppo’s
is that you have zero willpower and will be compelled to order the cannoli
for dessert, with the certainty of

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adding an extra inch to your waist. And with that high school re-union
coming up in two weeks . . . well, let’s just say that you’ve always wanted
to impress a certain someone you knew in high school fifteen years ago.

It’s so complicated: All you want to do is avoid several hundred extra

calories. But you don’t say that. What happens next? You play a few rounds
of a game, a cross between Twenty Questions and The Weakest Link, as
your wife probes the depth of your deception, quizzing you on exactly
what’s wrong with the service at Beppo’s Italian Garden. How much
simpler—and more effective for you—it would have been to make your
mission (reasonably) transparent: ‘‘I can’t resist their cannoli and I want to
keep the weight off ’’ would probably have won the negotiation for you.

Let’s get back to the way children negotiate. A child who wants to be
carried because it’s a sweltering August day and there’s a steep hill ahead
will almost certainly achieve that goal for a number of reasons (kids can,
and do, combine negotiating strategies). Because you know that’s all you
have to concede, in your mind, it’s an easy

‘‘mission accomplished’’—just carry Jennifer until you’re drenched with

sweat and wheezing like you’re in the middle of a pollen cloud and the
deal’s done. Uncomplicated and clear-cut. Sure, it’s a lot of work and
Jennifer really is old enough to walk, but she made the negotiating process
easy for you by making your part understand-able and easy to implement.

Clarity is an important aspect of negotiations. When the other side needs to

see your cards to understand the strength of your position, you lay the cards
out on the table. Hugging them close to your chest gets you nowhere.
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Take Your Ball and Go Home

It’s simple: You don’t like the way the negotiations are going and you just
take your toy and walk away. Kids don’t hesitate about using this ploy.
Even more strategically, while children will sometimes announce in
advance, ‘‘If you don’t let my little sister play, too, I’m going to take my
train home,’’ they’re just as likely to pick up their possessions and walk
away. That is the beauty of this negotiating technique: It can be used as a
potential threat—like a tree limb that’s about to fall off—or as a warning
that you’d better heed or at least take into account.

Let’s look at the way children employ the more subtle technique. A child
who announces that he might take his basketball and go home may or may
not get his way. Why? A basketball’s not exactly a rare commodity. If
another kid can run home and bring back a ball, then the play will continue
without the kid. But if he’s the only basketball owner among that group of
kids, then they’re going to have to let him play the game. This is really a
basic principle of capitalism; Karl Marx called it ‘‘ownership of the means
of

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production.’’ And yet it’s so simple that every child can grasp the concept at
once.

What children sometimes fail to grasp, however, is that ownership brings

responsibilities, too. If the owner of the ball becomes too dictatorial,
ordering other players to overlook his fouls or demanding that other rules
be bent unfairly in his favor, there’s always the danger that the other players
will revolt, grab the ball away from him, and send him home with nothing.
That’s an extreme case, perhaps. Another, more common risk is that the
other kids will decide they don’t want to play with him anymore. They’ll go
out and get their own ball, or find a new friend who’s not so demanding. So
the adult who asserts the workplace equivalent of ‘‘I’ll take my ball and go
home’’ needs to know ahead of time that another ball can’t be obtained just
as easily from somewhere else. And he’s got to be sure that there’s enough
time pressure to force the other players to make a snap decision, rather than
put things on hold and try to work out a solution without him.

For the adult who’s confident that the game can’t go on without him, this is
a potent strategy. But it’s also something (much like throwing a tantrum)
that can only be used once or at most twice in a career, to avoid damage to
one’s reputation. If you let yourself become known as someone who might
walk out in a huff, you may not be invited to come to the game in the first
place—ball or no ball.

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Stick with Your Gang

Kids pick their friends, and they’re innately smart about it: From an early
age they learn to avoid malcontents, jerks, and just plain unpleasant
children. It isn’t about choosing your negotiating opponent—this technique
is a long-term negotiating tool that involves keeping in close contact with
your friends, family, and other people you trust and get along with. Having
this support structure helps you in myriad ways when you get into intense
negotiations. Children have a small but solid support structure that consists
of mommy, daddy, and close friends.

Whether they realize it or not, having a stalwart network of family and

friends helps put kids on a firm footing when they negotiate with other
children. There’s something about knowing in the back of your mind that no
matter what, somebody’s going to back you up emotionally, intellectually,
and in other ways. It’s not a matter of running home to mommy and daddy
in real life; there’s an inner strength that comes from knowing that no
matter what happens you’re going to have the love and support of the
people around you. Children learn this from experience: Loyalty is price-

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less. It’s a subconscious faith that changes the way children approach and
participate in negotiations. The importance of having people around you
that you know you can count on can’t be quan-tified, but it also can’t be
overemphasized. A child who feels that she’s got nothing to look forward to
at home will be weak at the knees.

Children develop self-confidence in small increments over a long period of

time; they’re born insecure. Children take—well, pardon the pun—baby
steps toward being poised and assured; and these steps are helped by
knowing that mommy and daddy will be there for them.

The same is true for adults involved in business negotiations.

An adult who is new to a town and has not yet made friends and is far from
his family will almost always be at a disadvantage when up against an
adversary who is in a familiar setting, surrounded by friends and a loving,
supportive family. It’s perhaps an unfair advantage for the person who
happens to have the support of a loving family, but whoever said life was
fair?

Kids often have best friends: They seek out having a best friend.

Best friends work wonders for kids. It’s not just that a best friend is a
child’s favorite playmate, it’s that knowing you have a best friend gives you
something to look forward to. A best friend breeds optimism and
hopefulness—philosophies that are as essential in business as in every other
aspect of life.

You don’t negotiate against a computer. There are always people involved,
some of whom are directly part of the negotiations, some of whom are not.
And some of the people on your own team have complex, not always
transparent objectives, just like you.

Would it be too bold to suggest that not everyone in every office in America
is a team player? Isn’t it true that some of your coworkers covet your
office? To help protect you against these backstabbers, you need friends.
Friends are the only antidote to those who are

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not your friends and who don’t have your best interests at heart.

True friendship, inside and outside of the office, can provide a number of
substantial benefits:

• Friends can give you frank advice.

• Through friends, you have strength in numbers—you know that you’re not
the only one who believes what you believe.

• Friends provide emotional support, which even the strongest

businessperson needs.

• Friends can inspire and help you to fight for what you want; in
negotiations, they encourage you not to give up or compromise on what
they know is most important to you.

Friends offer something else, too, that’s a little less tangible but equally
important: Because friendships also involve a lot of negotiations and suffer
from highs and lows, friendships provide continual, if not subconscious,
negotiating practice (as do marriages and families). As with many human
activities, the more you do something, the better you get at it.

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Give Yourself a Time-Out

If you’re feeling down because things haven’t been going well, your family
life is in the pits and your kids hate you, then the best thing for you (and
your company) may be to let somebody else do the heavy lifting until things
get better for you.

Most people know that pilots have to undergo regular medical checkups.
But what many people don’t know is that pilots are supposed to take
themselves off of active flight duty if they’re feeling sick or mentally under
the weather. Pilots perform a checklist, I’M

SAFE, which stands for illness, medication, stress, alcohol, fatigue, and
emotions. Pilots who can’t give an okay to each of those items, personally
validating that they are not impaired by any of those conditions, don’t fly.
Having a good support network of family and friends doesn’t help with
things like illness and alcohol (for pilots, that means having had a drink in
the past eight hours), but knowing that you have good friends and family
you can count on goes a long way toward reducing stress, the need for
medication, and emotional issues.

Kids call off play dates (or their parents do it for them) when

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they don’t have the energy level needed to deal with other people.

An observant mom knows when her child is too fussy or stressed to enjoy a
play date and would rather make the call to cancel than put her child on
overload. But with adults, well, that’s another story: Businessmen and
businesswomen like to think of themselves as superheroes, able to endure
the pains of coach seating for hours on end, willing to live out of a suitcase
for days and days, and willing to crawl behind all sorts of furniture to
connect to the Internet. You can visualize this scenario in your mind’s eye:
Two children are vying over a toy fire truck. One child’s got a little fever
and feels achy; the other is healthy and feisty. The answer to the question of
which child’s going to end up with the fire truck is indisputable.

If you’re feeling sick or stressed you’re going to make mistakes.

Even if you’re not thinking about other things—the problems in your love
life, when you can get to use the bathroom next, whether you’re going to
watch the hotel movie this evening or just go directly to sleep—you’re
simply going to be subpar. Trying to be stoic is more often
counterproductive than helpful. In your own childhood days you might have
heard the ancient fable of the Spartan boy and the fox. The boy came upon
a fox, captured the animal, and stuck it under his tunic. He knew that he
wasn’t permitted to have an animal and might be punished for it, so when
the fox, hidden under his clothing, began to gnaw at his flesh, he remained
stoic and did not utter a single cry. He was a model Spartan, suppressing the
pain he felt—right up until the moment that the fox bit into a vital organ
and killed him. Not exactly a model for modern people to emulate,
however.

If you’re feeling less than 100 percent—all right, maybe less than 90
percent, since it’s rare for any of us to be 100 percent all the time—slow
down the negotiations. You don’t have to vacate the meeting, cancel the
meeting, call in a substitute negotiator, or anything like that. Just slow it
down. Discuss something that’s not

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

critical to the negotiation; get to know each other; talk about your
company’s history—just don’t do anything critical while you’re not at your
best.

Parents are often able to use the excuse, ‘‘Johnny wasn’t feeling very well
—he was up coughing most of last night. That’s why he didn’t do well on
his spelling test.’’ But adults can’t say to their boss: ‘‘Sorry, I blew the $5
million negotiation. I was still getting over that bout with Montezuma.’’
Offering an excuse after the fact, well, that just seems lame.

What adults need to do is monitor their health and well-being on an ongoing

basis. If you feel you’re getting overwhelmed, take the break you need (the
vacation, the sick days, the sabbatical) before you’re called upon to
undertake some difficult task. Then you’ll come back to it, rested and ready.

The trouble is, vacation days must often be scheduled months in advance;
sick days are limited; and sabbaticals don’t even exist in many occupations.
If you’re in a position where you’re not able to schedule time off when you
need it most, then you’ll have to look for ways to take care of yourself on
weekends and before or after work. Some people take mini-vacations over
the weekends, reserving time for themselves at a spa or at a romantic inn on
a regular basis—perhaps once a month or every other month. That can be a
real rejuvenator. Others claim the answer is to get a good night’s sleep
every night, regardless of what’s going on at work. For these people, a
special mattress or a particular type of foam pillow or a soundproof
bedroom is what it takes to create a haven of peace every night. One idea
that’s been around for a while is the ‘‘power nap.’’ Stressed-out
businesspeople can learn to fall asleep in short intervals during the day,
awakening refreshed and reenergized. Any of these techniques might work
for you.

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Let the Other Guy Think He’s

Won

It’s a brilliant strategy. Read on.

Being a child has a number of things going for it. For one, you can fit in
small spaces, which helps when the remote control has dropped behind the
headboard and is lost under the bed. Okay, that’s not too helpful when it
comes to negotiations. But another thing about being a child is that your
ego’s not yet fully developed.

You’re not so concerned with saving face, maintaining a certain image.

Self-image can be a killer: It gets in the way of so many things. Children
have the luxury of negotiating without trying to live up to an image, and
they are better off for it.

How does not having an ego help kids when they negotiate?

The most significant way it contributes an advantage is that it allows

children to use the strategy of letting the other guy think he’s won—or,
more accurately, not worrying about whether it appears that you’ve lost.
Actually winning what you’re after does matter, and if being mistaken for
the loser works to your advantage, that’s okay as far as children are
concerned. If children are trading toys, they’re interested in what they’re
interested in: That’s why

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

you often see one kid trading baseball cards for another kid’s model car.
Neither the appearance nor the reality of ‘‘winning’’ matters.

In fact, helping the other side feel that they’ve won, by giving up things that
you don’t really want (for instance, if you no longer collect model cars),
helps you achieve your goals.

Kids apply this technique very subtly. Here’s a report from one parent,
whose child won an argument by very cleverly tricking her mother into
thinking she won:

My little master negotiator is my two-year-old daughter Noelle. I was

intending to take her shopping for new shoes on Saturday. When I got her
settled in the car seat, she asked where we were going, and the following
conversation ensued:

‘‘Shopping,’’ was my reply.

‘‘I say not,’’ said the tyrant of the backseat.

‘‘But we need to go to the store to get a few things.’’

‘‘I say not. I want to swing.’’

‘‘No, we are going shopping.’’

‘‘I say not.’’ At this point, she appealed to my mother, who was with us.
‘‘Mim, I not go shopping. I go to Pawpaw’s house.’’

My mother, always the pushover, replied, ‘‘Okay, sweetie, but let’s go to the
store first. We need to get you new shoes.’’

‘‘Not! I not want shoes. I want Pawpaw,’’ the tyrant said again.

‘‘Wouldn’t you like to have some pretty new shoes? You need new shoes.’’
This time it was my mother and I, two adults, pleading in unison. At this
point, there was a moment of silence in the backseat. The toddler examined
my face in the rearview mirror and then looked down at her feet. Suddenly,
her face lit up.

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‘‘I got shoes on. Let’s go Pawpaw’s.’’

The battle was over. She won.

There was a certain synergy going on here. The little girl decided that the
only way she could achieve her objective, going to her grandparents’ house
instead of shoe shopping, would be to try and get her mother to believe that
the ultimate objective would be achieved by merely putting on shoes. Her
mother certainly recognized the difference between buying new shoes and
putting on shoes, but the little girl figured—and was right on the money
about this—that her mother would accept this change. The strategy of
changing the rules would not have worked unless the little girl knew (or
guessed) that her mother would cave in to the change of objective.

Can you make this method work in the business world? Oh, yes. Of course,
it won’t be as easy as it was for this toddler. She had the advantage of
having an adversary who really wasn’t prepared to fight about the shoes.
Across a real bargaining table, you’re going to have to come up with some
kind of plausible alternative that will allow your counterparts to imagine
that they’re walking away with a victory. This happens all the time in
politics: When defeat on a particular bill draws near, all a legislator has to
do is redefine the objective to be able to declare victory.

Modifying the rules so that the other side thinks it’s won—or gotten
something important—is one way to apply this technique.

Simply making sure that the other side doesn’t lose or is happy with what it
gets, all the same, is another way. In an August 8, 2004

article (‘‘The Poker Player’’) in The New York Times, Brian Roberts, CEO
of Comcast Corp., said: ‘‘I’ve been able to perpetuate what my dad started.
He always told me that in any negotiation, let the other guy feel [as if] he
won. Don’t take the last nickel from the

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

table.’’ Letting the other side win—a little or a lot, depending on what you
can offer—can help you secure what you want.

There’s something else I want to mention about this technique.

Getting her mother to think that she won the argument was part of the little
girl’s strategy, but the girl also added a dash of ‘‘changing the rules,’’
another technique discussed in a separate chapter.

Often, these techniques are not independent, but part of a continuum of

strategies. Sometimes you need to add the smidgen of another strategy to
make your technique work effectively. How did this girl change the rules?
By slightly redefining the goal from buying new shoes to putting on shoes.

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Break the Rules

Before we get any further into the merits of changing the rules, let me cover
the more extreme application first: breaking the rules.

After all, as that old cliche´ goes, rules were made to be broken.

Children love that line—especially when they’re up against a rule they

don’t like. It’s a rite of passage to test the rules and find out which ones
aren’t enforced. (Witness the administration of George W. Bush and its
efforts to ignore, contravene, and rewrite the Ge-neva convention regarding
the treatment of prisoners.) Sometimes breaking the rules is inadvertent—
who knows all the rules for everything? (Right on red, but only after a full
stop and not into a two-way street—but that’s only for certain states.) Rules
may be so complex and even contradictory that it is impossible to follow
them all the time. There’s a running joke in aviation: If you follow all the
Federal Aviation Administration regulations you’ll never have an accident.
True. But you’ll never get off the ground, either. (That’s the joke part.) The
impossibility of obeying all the rules all of the time—be they society’s laws
or a business’s rules—means that at some time or other, you will have to
make a

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

semiconscious or deliberate decision to violate a rule (maybe even several

times during any given day). It’s not a matter of whether you might do it:
You will break rules. And this has nothing to do with how ethical you may
be. Society and the business world are so complex that even the most
ethical and decent human beings are going to break the rules now and then.

That’s different, of course, from breaking the rules on purpose.

But just as it’s true that you must violate some laws, regulations, rules, and
customs during your day-to-day life, it’s also true that not all laws,
regulations, rules, and customs are, in themselves, just or moral—or even a
good idea. Within the guidelines of morality, your conscience, and what
society allows, you can decide that breaking certain rules is justified and
necessary in your business life.
The party you’re negotiating with may or may not be completely versed in
what the rules are, either—and that may be one of the discoveries you can
use to your advantage. If the other side—your boss, perhaps—is very busy,
she may not have the time to keep up on all the company’s rules. But that
doesn’t mean that she won’t look them up if she needs to. So be cautious to
test your limits when using this technique.

That caveat aside, testing is worthwhile: Probing how timid or hesitant your
negotiating opponent is will give you a sense of how far you can push and
how tough you can be during an actual negotiation. In order to know
whether you need to ‘‘sweat the small stuff,’’ you need to learn whether
you’re dealing with a loosey-goosey crowd or are among people who are
sticklers for propriety in every area. If you break a minor rule and your
boss, contractual partner, or colleague points out your transgression, you
know that the ‘‘break the rules’’ advice won’t work for you in this situation.

But if your environment is more like the Wild West than a tightly run ship,
well, pardner, make the most of it.

Which brings me to an important point about testing the other

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side before you break any rules: Do it well in advance of negotiations. You
need to find out what you can about the other side’s attention to detail and
probe their attitudes about rule-keeping before you start doing anything
they might consider off-limits. When you were a child and you stayed at a
friend’s house, you learned that you had to observe the rules where you
were. The same holds true now that you’re an adult. If your mother
wouldn’t let you sleep in your clothes but it’s fine with the mom at the
sleepover party, then sure, sleep in your clothes. But if the parents hosting
the sleepover expect you to make your bed in the morning—something your
own parents never asked you to do—then you’d better be prepared to do it
right, hospital corners and all.

How do find out what the rules are in each situation . . . and which ones can
be safely broken? Again, you do what kids do: You gently, but regularly,
test the other side’s will, resolve, and views by crossing the artificial line
created by ‘‘the rules.’’ If this technique sounds vague and imprecise, with
no clear objective delineated, that’s because all of those things are true:
Testing the other side is just that—you’re poking it with a stick just a little
bit to see what happens. You need to keep your ears and eyes open for
whatever reactions ensue, because they may not be all that obvious to you.

Not every negotiating tool should be reserved for the actual negotiations—
people who anticipate that they will have to negotiate at some point in the
future and who plan for those unknown but inevitable negotiations often
win.

One last point: Expect to be tested yourself. Some people do this by design;
others because they retain some childlike qualities.

While you’ll have an advantage over your opponents (or negotiating

partners) by knowing how these techniques work, you may also find that
many other people use these kid-negotiation techniques too, either innately
or because they resemble another negotiating skill they are familiar with.

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Change the Rules

Although some aspects of this negotiating technique were just covered, I’m
including some additional information about it, in part because we adults
like to have things compartmentalized in folders, computer directories, and
even book chapters. While breaking the rules is a separate technique, you
may need to tone it down, depending on your business environment, so that
you’re merely changing or revisiting the rules.

Children are notorious for ignoring ‘‘the rules.’’ They talk loudly in
restaurants. They treat a newly painted wall as a canvas for their finger-
painting. They like to run up and down the aisles of grocery stores.

Children may know the rules of the adult world—because you’ve told them
a million times—but that doesn’t mean those are the rules they have to play
by. Your admonishment, ‘‘Be quiet in church,’’ often changes to, ‘‘If you
can sit quietly during the service, I’ll take you out for ice cream afterward.’’
See what’s happened? By chafing under the adult’s rule, the child has won
something she wouldn’t have otherwise. Children know that you have to
obey the

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rules, and they know it’s worth something to them to get you to agree to a
negotiated settlement that’s more to their liking.
We’re often told to ‘‘think outside the box’’ or ‘‘color outside the lines.’’
Even better is making your own box. If you’re creative enough to come up
with new rules that result in a more useful sort of box or a more
spectacularly colored picture, no one will resent you for taking liberties
with the old rules. They’ll celebrate you as a visionary, an innovator,
someone to be emulated. Until, of course, the new rules you invented
become stale, and someone else needs to come along and rewrite them to
create a new and better design.

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Follow the Rules to the Letter

There’s a television commercial in which a boy who’s maybe ten years old
is bothering his sister by lying right next to her on the beach. Ugh—cooties!
The girl appeals to her parents, who are relaxing in beach chairs nearby, to
tell her brother not to touch her. The brother obliges, and for the rest of the
commercial he hovers over his sister with his finger a fraction of an inch
away from her, saying,

‘‘I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you.’’
Anyone watching this commercial has immediate sympathy for the girl and
certainly wouldn’t mind if she smacked him.

So the brother is literally sticking to the terms of his agreement, but in so

doing, he’s driving his sister crazy. Being a child, that’s probably his goal.
Being an adult, you’ll have a worthier goal in mind when you use this
technique.
Here’s how I used this technique in a contract dispute with a former
employee. The former employee had her husband, a lawyer, call us to argue
on her behalf. It so happened that her husband worked for the government,
and he had called us from his office, leaving a message on my office voice
mail that included his govern-

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ment title—an attempt to scare us into thinking that he could in-vestigate us

from his position as a government lawyer. Once I told him that I would
make an issue of his improper use of his office (implying it was as if he had
threatened to bring the weight of the United States government to bear on a
private business matter), he had to worry that I was going to report his
actions to his supervisor.

Although I knew full well that he had not been speaking as a government
employee, what mattered is that he had, in fact, violated the rules regarding
the use of his government title. We could make the case to his superiors that
he was guilty of abuse of the government’s power. He had broken the rule,
and even though we hadn’t really been intimidated by his use of his title, we
could demand that his superiors start an investigation of our complaint—
because a rule’s a rule. We were no longer arguing over the issue the ex-
employee had raised; now the argument had shifted to something I knew I
could win, because he’d been caught breaking a rule.

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Be Naive

Appearing naive and following the rules to the letter are very different
strategies that may achieve the same effect: They frustrate the other side. I
call this the ‘‘Joey Syndrome,’’ named for the lovable but somewhat dim
character on the television series Friends. Joey often got what he wanted
not through the logic of his arguments, the force of his personality, or any
other traditional method. He got his way because people thought he was
genuinely perplexed and needed their help in some way.

We’ve all encountered this pattern in our lives—especially when talking

with children. They can’t be expected to handle everything on their own.
No matter how slowly you speak, how simple the words are that you
choose, or how much you do to get them started, you have to do more. And
more. And then you end up doing their whole job for them—they don’t
need to lift a finger.

I recently saw this happen on a flight from London to the United States. An
elderly couple was seated behind us; they didn’t speak English, and you
could tell from they way they gripped the back of the seats in front of them
—our seats—throughout the en-

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tire flight that this was their first time on an airplane. In what was perhaps
the most cliche´d moment I have ever experienced, the flight attendant
asked these passengers if they wanted some coffee.

They didn’t understand and smiled blankly. So she asked in a louder voice,
‘‘Would you like some coffee?’’ They still didn’t reply, so the flight
attendant spoke even more loudly: ‘‘DO YOU WANT

COFFEE?’’ Finally, she realized it was no good trying to take an order. She
came back with both coffee and tea and let them point to what they wanted.
Then she served them immediately; they didn’t have to wait for their order
to be filled. Now I’m pretty sure that this elderly couple wasn’t using this
technique to get served ahead of everyone else, but the effect was the same:
The flight attendant just gave up because she got frustrated with the
apparent in-ability of the other party to understand her.

Nobody has unlimited patience or time. Eventually the other party will
either give in and do what’s needed to complete the deal, or walk away. The
couple on the airplane could easily have ended up with nothing. But
because they were smiling and not demanding—just sweet but somewhat
befuddled travelers—the flight attendant served them first.

But here’s the risk in this strategy: If it becomes apparent that you do
understand, but just aren’t cooperating, the other side will walk away—and
probably tell others that you’re a faker. If you present yourself as
charmingly, helplessly naive, it helps to really be that way.

Yet sometimes in business, that’s just what you want. When you’ve got a
persistent salesman who keeps calling, it’s in your interest to be unable to
comprehend what he’s trying to sell. ‘‘So let me see,’’ the potential
customer says. ‘‘If we take the car with five years’

additional service warranty’’—which, by the way, is what you’ve already

decided you don’t want or need—‘‘we get a brand-new computer and you
need to fix our old one for free if something goes

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wrong?’’ It’s one thing to negotiate over the price of a purchase, but
sometimes the deal gets so dragged out with attempted sales of extras that
this negotiating technique is called for. When you’re the naive one, the
negotiations aren’t about facts, or money, or position, or power, or anything
substantive: They’re over—well, that’s the problem— they’re never over.
The only way you are going to end the discussion is when you make clear
that no amount of explanation is going to get the salesman anywhere.

Perhaps this negotiating tool is most useful in avoiding negotiations that

you don’t want to enter into altogether. Think about it: How do you
negotiate with somebody who doesn’t understand what the purpose of the
negotiating process is? How do you negotiate with somebody who doesn’t
seem to have the ability to grasp the intricate details of what’s involved in
making a deal? In other words, how do you negotiate with a child? You
can’t. So you cut your losses and stop bothering the person. You think
you’re wasting your time—and you are. And the naive one has stopped you
from wasting his time, too. The naive party has caught you in a brilliant
trap.

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Go Out of Your Way to Please

the Other Side

Some kids—though certainly not all—do whatever they can to please their
friends. These are nice kids, happy kids, kids that others want to be around.
There’s a good deal of psychobabble about how children (and adults) who
seek to make others happy have low self-esteem. There’s even a group
therapy exercise in which you have to put a dollar in the ‘‘loony bin’’ every
time you say ‘‘thank you’’

when you don’t mean it—that is, every time you say ‘‘thanks’’ re-flexively.
Pleasing others is considered a disability and a liability when it comes to
dealing with other people.

I disagree. Making the other side happy, comfortable, and content is not a
sign of weakness; it’s not a psychological disorder that indicates you have
some deep-seated problem. Rather, it can be a simple, even elegant, way to
ease tensions and put others in a mood to be receptive to your ideas. You do
not become subservient or a

‘‘doormat’’ simply because you bestow little courtesies on others; you come
across as gracious and pleasant, setting a cordial tone at the outset, making
it apparent that you anticipate the development of a warm and mutually
respectful relationship.

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This is what children learn to do when the put on their ‘‘Sunday best’’ and
their ‘‘Sunday manners’’ (or the appropriate cultural equivalent for those
without observances on Sundays). Now this isn’t natural behavior for
children by any means, but it certainly is useful, and it’s a shame that so
many children, as they grow older, start to look down on the idea of
formality and good manners.

One of the reasons this technique can be so successful is that the other side
may not expect to be treated with super-politeness.

They’ll probably be caught off guard. They may jump to the conclusion that
you are servile and fawning and thus easy to manipu-late. So when you
come back at them in negotiations with your hard-nosed terms—gently
draped as they are in the rhetoric of courtesies—they may not even notice
how the substance is in your favor.

Let’s also consider one of the more commonplace uses of ex-travagant

politeness: Just think about the last time you were stopped for speeding.
(You haven’t ever been stopped for speeding?

Then remember when you were searched at airport security.) If you handled
yourself right, you addressed the officer as ‘‘sir’’ or

‘‘ma’am’’ at every utterance. You didn’t curse, whine, or try to play the
officer for a fool. You were the model of cooperation. Your every gesture
made clear that you did not want to do anything to hinder the officer from
doing his duty. You just wanted to do your best to help. If you succeeded in
being humble enough and gracious enough—and the officer you were
dealing with was sufficiently pleased to be shown some rare respect, instead
of being treated, as usual, as just an oaf with a badge—you found you were
allowed to continue on your way, either with just a warning (for the
speeding stop) or without having to give up your favorite pair of nail
scissors (that you forgot to pack in your checked luggage).

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Be Needy

Kids are often able to position themselves well to win negotiations because
they need adults. You have to help them buy clothes, feed them, make their
beds. That’s the nature of childhood (especially when it comes to younger
kids). They just can’t do that much for themselves. You, the parent, must do
certain things for them.

Try as you might, asking a two-year-old to make her own maca-roni and
cheese is going to make your kitchen resemble modern art. Sticky modern
art, at that. The child wins because there is no other way that the negotiation
can be successfully concluded.

Although the timing is something that can (sometimes) be negotiated, who

actually does the work is preordained. You might delay feeding your
daughter by twenty minutes, but ultimately you are the one who’s going to
make the meal. (Trying to negotiate the time in the face of other child-
negotiating techniques, such as throwing a tantrum, may also be difficult!
Kids often combine negotiating techniques or use their various techniques
in quick succession.) You might think that adults can’t appear needy; that
showing yourself to be unable to do something without the help of some-

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body else puts you in an inferior position. While this can certainly be the
case, it’s not always going to be true that you lose if you appear weak. Even
some of the most hardened executives harbor a desire at least to explain and
show others the ropes, if not to out-right help them. People feel better about
themselves (this is the enlightened view of humankind) when they can help
others; people feel superior and more potent (the cynical perspective) when
they can show that they’re more capable or knowledgeable than others.

When you have legitimate needs that must be met before a deal can go
forward, then it’s in the other side’s interest to help you—just as it is in that
parent’s interest to make lunch for her hungry child.

If you don’t have the skills, experience, background, adequate staff, or

intellect (from your negotiating partner’s perspective), the other side has a
dilemma: They must either provide you with the support you need or
abandon you. That’s a huge risk, of course, and so you should choose this
strategy only after having calculated the equation from the other side’s point
of view. Make sure you know that you have enough to offer so that
abandonment is not an option. As with most of these childhood-based
negotiating techniques, there’s a need for a levelheaded, very adult sort of
analysis before pro-ceeding.

Once you are set on this course, and if you are successful at this strategy,
here are some of the things you can expect the other side to do for you:

• Lend you staff

• Give you access to their technical skills

• Show you how to do things your company couldn’t have done before

Instead of making the negotiations just that, a negotiation, you have added
another element: The negotiations are now a teaching

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exercise and/or support effort. With needy kids, parents either do whatever
it is they need for them or painstakingly try to teach them how to do it.
(Remember giving shoelace-tying lessons to your kids?

How many times did you simply end up tying their shoes for them, just to
speed things up?)

Remember, being needy isn’t the same as being weak; it’s a way to gain
more expertise or have a burden you can’t handle shared by somebody else,
which helps your company to conserve resources and build skills, so that in
the end you emerge much stronger.

Something to consider before you set out on this course: Being needy
changes the nature of the relationship you have with your negotiating
partner. It prevents you from assuming the status of an equal. You put
yourself in the position of the junior partner, the one in need of mentoring,
and it will become difficult, if not impossible, to be viewed as other than the
junior partner—at least in that particular relationship—on into the future.
However, as you or your company grows and benefits from the help you’ve
received over time from that relationship, you will be able to enter into
other business arrangements as either an equal or even the superior partner
yourself.

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Ask the Person Who’s Most

Likely to Say ‘‘Yes’’

All children quickly learn that there is no unified, single mind known as
‘‘The Parent.’’ There is Mommy and there is Daddy, and they have different
personalities, interests, and abilities. Sometimes it’s better to ask Mommy
something; sometimes it’s better to ask Daddy. In our house, I’m the person
who’s lenient about getting to bed at night, but I’m a terror when it comes
to leaving for school on time in the morning. My wife, Peggy, is the
opposite. So which parent do you think our children will turn to when they
want to play for ‘‘just another five minutes’’ and it’s past nine o’clock?

Here’s what one parent told me: ‘‘My toddler responds to discipline from
my husband far better than he does from me. If my husband gets after him
for something, sometimes he will run over to me for ‘comfort’ or
‘sympathy.’ ’’

When you negotiate with somebody, it’s important to make sure that you’re
negotiating with the right somebody. Clearly you want to ensure that the
person you’re negotiating with has the authority—or access to the right
authority—to make decisions. (The

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child knows that it’s no good to ask Grandma if you can have a dog, since
Grandma only serves an advisory function.) Not only does that person have
to have the authority to give you what you want, but two other conditions
may have to be met as well:

• They have to be willing to use that authority.

• They have to be willing to back it up under possible pressure to reverse

the decision from some other person that you could have asked but didn’t.

Children quickly discover this trick, and so they grow to expect that the
strategy may fail on either count, as in this example: 1) After Mom said
‘‘no’’ to sewing a new Halloween costume but Dad said ‘‘yes,’’ it turned out
that Dad didn’t know how to help make the costume—so no new costume;
or 2) Dad said ‘‘yes,’’ meaning he would try to get Mom to reverse her
decision about not sewing a new Halloween costume this year, but Mom
was able to with-stand his pressure, and so her ‘‘no’’ held firm.

Adults discover that these limitations apply to business situations, too. You
might be able to get the head of one division of a company to agree to help
develop a new product, but then the head of the actual production unit says,
‘‘No go.’’ Or you get the head of the production unit to agree to make a
prototype, but then the chief financial officer overrules the decision on the
grounds of a budget crunch.

Children are usually stuck when either one parent or the other says no. But
adults in business usually have more options. You might be able to lobby
the person saying no by marshaling the facts and figures to make the case
that one party has already approved.

You might be able to enlist other allies that can make your case for

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HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

you (a variant of the ‘‘get your gang to stand by you’’ strategy discussed
earlier in this book). A project or a negotiation will almost always involve
multiple decision makers with varying degrees of influence over the
outcome.

One way to help ensure the success of the strategy is to scope out the
situation well before you make your first pitch so that you can choose the
person most likely to react positively from the start.

Then let that person approach the next person that he or she thinks can be
persuaded to support the project. Ask each new ally to bring in others. By
the time you get to those you are most worried will turn you down, you’ll
have built up momentum for acceptance.

You’ll have created a feeling that consensus already exists.

Children do this when seeking permission for things that other parents have
allowed but their own parents have forbidden. The child says, ‘‘All my
friends’ parents let them go to the mall on their own.’’ Parents tend to
respond with the classic and indisputable argument: ‘‘If all your friends’
parents let them jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, do you think that would
make us let you do so, too?’’

At this point, if the child is savvy, she doesn’t argue further. She can see her
new task is to make her parents aware that going to the mall without a
supervising adult present is not at all the same as jumping off the Brooklyn
Bridge. And the person to make that case is one of those responsible parents
of a friend who has allowed her child to go with friends to the mall and can
attest that her trust has not turned out to be misplaced. However, if the child
is bluffing and the reality is that very few parents of children she knows are
actually allowing their kids to go to the mall unaccompanied—or if the
parents who have allowed their children to go shopping on their own have
ended up with outrageous bills from stores, or the kids have been caught
smoking at the mall—then the child is probably going to lose the
negotiations on the merits.

The fact is, children are seldom as skilled at using this tactic as

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ⅷ97

an adult would be, because children lack the foresight and the judgment to
analyze the data and figure out in advance if they can build a winning case.
They claim all other parents are permitting something, when all a mom or a
dad needs to do is make a few phone calls to discover that’s not true. But as
an adult, you can avoid these kinds of pitfalls—now that you’ve been
warned.
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Play One Side Against the

Other

This is a variant of ‘‘Ask the parent most likely to say yes,’’ but with a
slightly more devilish twist. You’re not looking for one authority to
persuade another to do things your way; you think they might cancel each
other out. Playing two sides off each other can be an effective negotiating
tool, especially if there are three or more parties to the talks. A skillful
negotiator—a child—knows how to do this well. Adults, well, not so well
(at least not yet).

My seven-year-old daughter, Claire, wanted to bring home two newly

hatched chicks from her classroom for the weekend. This was fine with me,
but I knew it was not high on a list of things my wife wanted to do. From
her previous kindergarten experience with a guinea pig, Claire knew that
her mother was unenthusiastic, because Mom was the one who ended up
cleaning out the cage. So Claire came to me first to ask if she could take the
chicks home: ‘‘Please.

Please. Please,’’ she wheedled. ‘‘I’ll help clean the cage, I really will.’’

I knew she couldn’t do it herself and that one parent would probably end up
doing all the real dirty work. And I also figured, again, that my wife would
be the one to handle it . . . but once the chicks were

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PLAY ONE SIDE AGAINST THE OTHER

ⅷ99

here, and she saw how cute they were and how much Claire enjoyed having
them, she really wouldn’t mind. ‘‘Well, okay, as long as it’s okay with
Mommy,’’ I responded. Little did I realize what Claire would do with my
conditional assent. She went straight to her mother and told her that I’d said
okay to the chicks and I would take care of all the cage cleaning! As soon
as my wife heard that I’d taken on the chore entirely, she agreed to the deal.
By the time we each realized how we’d been played off each other, the
chicks were here—and we both ended up cleaning the cage—with our
daughter’s help, of course (limited though it was). But in the end we
weren’t sorry: She did love having those chicks at home!

Children use this strategy all the time. They know that their parents
disagree: Because their parents aren’t in complete harmony about a
particular issue, their chances of getting what they want are many times
better if both parents argue about it, otherwise the opposed parent may have
first shot at the decision. In the normal course of events, the advantage goes
to the side that wants the status quo; the onus is on the side that needs to
muster enough support to effect a change. But by exploiting the differences
between the parties, the child may be able to tip the balance in favor of the
child’s desired end.

If there’s no natural inclination for one parent to agree, the child must coax
one parent to the child’s side. What’s important to note about this strategy is
that the child doesn’t have to dilute his energy by trying to get both parents
to say yes—one parent, once that parent has been induced to argue in the
child’s stead, will do.

In business, you need to find your campaigner, too. Often there’s an

individual who will benefit from the deal going through—or has a lot to
lose if the deal doesn’t go through. If you start buying a lot of calendars
from a company, for example, the person who runs that company’s calendar
department may get a bigger budget: That is the person you want to
approach. Often somebody in the company you’re negotiating with can be a
stronger booster than you can.

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Delay Matters (Or ‘‘I Have to

Ask My Mommy’’)

When kids say, ‘‘I have to ask my mommy,’’ they mean it. When car
salesmen say, ‘‘I have to talk to my manager,’’ we know that they don’t
mean it (which is a nice way to say that we know that they are lying), but
we let them get away with it.

Why? Why do smart, savvy adults let sleazy car salesmen get away with
this childlike negotiating tactic, even when we know better? There’s no
good answer other than we do. (Okay, not all of us fall for this one, but then
nothing in the realm of human interaction is a constant.) A partial answer is
that we’re caught by surprise by this tactic (how you can be surprised after
your third car purchase is another question), and that we’re not quick-witted
enough to say to the car salesman, ‘‘No. If you’re not able to negotiate with
me yourself, I’m leaving.’’ So the tactic winds its way down to its
inevitable conclusion—it wears you down.

Delay, delay, delay. Asking one’s mommy isn’t about seeking permission
from a higher authority—it’s really about delay. Slowing down the
negotiations works to your advantage because it tires out and frustrates the
other side. They’re left alone with their

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DELAY MATTERS (OR ‘‘I HAVE TO ASK MY MOMMY’’) ⅷ

101

thoughts, and thinking inevitably leads to worry. People worry because

there’s an unseen decision maker involved in the process—an unpredictable
element. And worry leads people to want to come to some arrangement,
even if it’s not the best deal you could possibly get.

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Move Slowly and Procrastinate

You can use the ‘‘I have to ask mommy’’ technique, as discussed
previously, to bring about a needed delay, or you can delay by any number
of other means. Kids are masters of the art of procrastination. They may not
understand the strategic applications of what they’re doing, however.
They’re just plain old kids, after all, who like to put off the unpleasant or
prolong something enjoyable, like a play date, when the parents are ready to
go home. A lot of the time it just seems that they plain won’t do what you
want them to do. We call it dawdling; they call it victory.
Let’s say you’re off to the shoe store and your daughter doesn’t want to get
new shoes: It’s a scary place, the shoe store is. So she’s slow to dress. She’s
slow to brush her teeth. (When have you ever not had to remind her to
brush her teeth?) She insists on having her hair put into a fancy braid. You
make it to the car, but then the car seat is uncomfortable. And the
inevitable: ‘‘I forgot my blankie!’’

And that’s if you’re driving to the shoe store. If you have a store that you
can walk to, you’re going to find that your daughter’s feet move as if they
weigh hundreds of pounds each.

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MOVE SLOWLY AND PROCRASTINATE

103

Kids succeed at procrastination for several reasons. First, they haven’t yet
internalized adult concepts, such as ‘‘Time is money’’

or ‘‘We haven’t got all day.’’ They really do think they’ve got all the time in
the world. Second, they don’t worry too much about coming across as
inefficient planners when they call for a delay for something they should
have done earlier. When your four-year-old says, ‘‘Wait, I have to go to the
potty,’’ you may fire back, ‘‘You should have done that a half hour ago
when I first suggested it’’—but you can’t really get too mad about it; you
know your child is still learning about timing of bathroom breaks.
Adults, on the other hand, are far more limited in their use of
procrastination. Adults, for obvious reasons, aren’t going to want to come
across as oblivious to the time constraints of others. No adult in his right
mind would offer up as an excuse for delay, ‘‘Gee, it took me a long time to
tie my shoes this morning.’’ Even the tried-and-true adult-type delaying
tactics—‘‘I was caught in traffic,’’ ‘‘There’s an emergency call from my
family,’’ and various types of home or car repair misadventures—can be
countered, sometimes quite easily. The other side points out, ‘‘We could
have set up a conference call so that you could participate.’’ Or, ‘‘We would
have sent a car service to pick you up.’’ Or, ‘‘We would have faxed the
papers over to you or e-mailed them to you—we could have wrapped up
this business any number of other ways.’’

To show how delaying can work to your disadvantage, especially if not

done with finesse, consider the Michael Jackson case.

Twice he failed to show up on time in court. The first time the judge let it
go. The second time—despite the offered excuse that Jackson had been in
the hospital—the judge issued an arrest warrant and only in the last five
minutes decided not to revoke the latecomer’s bail for the remainder of the
trial.

So the message is clear: Adults, use this technique sparingly, and be sure
your delaying tactics are plausible. Anticipate the likely

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objections that may be offered by the party who’s been made to wait. Only
embark on this course if you are sure of the benefits that you will reap from
gaining that extra time. Here’s a valid, though perhaps extreme, case in
point. You are the attorney in the case of client on death row. You’ve lost all
the previous rounds of appeal to the courts. Your client’s only hope now is
for the governor to grant clemency. But you know there are still facts about
the case that could save your client if uncovered in time. If your delaying
tactics fail, your client dies. If you succeed, then there’s a chance that he’ll
not only stay alive but be exonerated of the crime altogether. How could
you not look for every possible reason to slow the process down?

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Do a Bad Job

I have a friend who has successfully integrated this technique into his entire
life. Once, years and years ago when he was first married, Roger was asked
by his wife to do the dishes. (This is a true story, by the way.) He did a bad
job. Now anybody can do a bad job with the dishes, but doing a passable
job isn’t hard, either. Roger never could get those dishes clean—even with a
dishwasher. So, after some weeks of marriage, Roger’s wife stopped asking
him to do the dishes. Roger had succeeded.

Kids use the same technique when it comes to cleaning their rooms. Some
of them are good cleaners; other kids learn that the worse they do, the more
likely it is that somebody (a parent) will finish the job for them. Children
also use this technique when it comes to homework, but unlike knowing
how to clean a room, knowing algebra is actually important. (Really, it is!)
If you do a bad job in something, nobody is going to ask you to continue
doing it anymore. It requires a sacrifice of ego to deliberately do something
badly because your colleagues and coworkers

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are going to think less of you. Your status and prowess will be diminished
—at least as far as that particular task is concerned.

There is only one sure way to use this technique: You must do something
else exceptionally well. Kids are able to get away with not ever cleaning
their rooms because they are exceptional at being much-loved sons and
daughters. But chances are that you’re not going to have a boss who will
love you for your adorable self alone, as a parent loves a sometimes
naughty child. So, if you decide to do badly at some task as a way to show
your boss that it should never have been assigned to you in the first place,
you’d better be pretty darn good at whatever it is that you need to do,
whether it is technical support or analysis or finding the lowest-cost
supplier or winning customers.

The question is: What is this technique good for? The answer is that doing a
bad job is a minor negotiating technique that can help to position you
properly within your own organization. It’s used for lateral movement, not
significant negotiations. It’s certainly not for someone who aims to end up
at the top; it’s far better suited to someone who loves what he does and
doesn’t want to be transferred away and made to do something else.

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Make a Deal That You Can

Exchange for a Better Deal

Later

Kids use this practice fairly frequently, but adults hardly ever do.

Adults tend to become focused on the long-term objective and worry that if
they accept something less than their objective, they’ll lose out on the
chance to get it later. So they hold out too long and miss the chance for any
deal, rather than settle for less than a perfect deal. (Could this be the real
reason the Middle East peace negotiations keep falling apart?)

Kids, on the other hand, frequently ‘‘sign’’ deals and use them as leverage
later on. Let me give you an example. Your child wants you to read her
Watership Down, a long and, depending on your perspective, overrated
novel. She discovered the novel and became interested because the story is
about bunnies. You agree to read it to her when she’s ‘‘old enough,’’
thinking that she’ll either forget or, more likely, lose interest in the course of
the year that you’ve asked her to wait. You’re wrong. Believe me, you’re
wrong. A year comes and goes, Ellen reminds you, and then what? You
either have to read the entire novel out loud or you have to agree to
something else. That something else might be reading Harry Potter, or it
might
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be buying her the book on tape. You quickly agree to whatever reasonable
terms she suggests because you know she settled for less than what she
could have obtained if she’d kept fighting. Her seeming acquiescence the
year before left her in a strengthened position that gets her what she wants
when ‘‘the deal’’ comes up for renegotiation.

Why did you agree to read the book to her aloud in the first place? Well, for
one thing, you knew that Ellen was too young to understand it, so you
weren’t going to have to read it at the time, which your brain interpreted as
‘‘ever.’’ Second, you wanted to please her, to make her smile; agreeing to
something that wasn’t meaningful or problematic to you at the time was an
easy way to keep her happy.

In the adult world, you’re most likely to use this technique in contract
negotiations. Lawyers add clauses to contracts to cover various
contingencies and to correct the mistakes of previous contracts.

Clever lawyers put in clauses that can be used later on—years from now,
perhaps—as negotiating tools. Clever lawyers know that circumstances
change over time and that parts of contacts that seem irrelevant today may
take on significance later. As you’re negotiating, throw in those clauses.
You’ll be surprised how many far-fetched conditions and terms you can
include; any of them have the potential to turn into negotiating tools later
on.

Here’s where imagination, as well as basic business instincts, can be a

powerful tool. Those people who foresaw the growth of the home computer
and cellular telephone industries became very rich. They looked forward
and had imagination. As you negotiate today’s deal, think about what might
be down the road for you. Be careful not to limit your options, and not to let
the other side limit them, either.

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Win Through Sympathy

When your child’s been injured, suffered a disappointment, or had a bad

day at school or on the playground, you do your best to make up for the
loss, even if it means saying yes to something that would ordinarily rate a
‘‘no.’’ That extra cookie, the ten minutes more of playtime—anything to put
a smile back on that sad, sad face. It doesn’t take children long to discover
how advantageous it can be to have things go wrong.

The same thing is often true in business, though you won’t be able to
capitalize on your misfortunes quite as easily as a child can.

You can’t walk into a business meeting complaining that Mr. Howell was
mean to you or that you never got your turn at the Xerox ma-chine. Your
tale of woe needs to be something that will elicit genuine nods of
understanding. It must rise above the merely whiny into the truly miserable.
Only then will you earn your ‘‘sympathy points.’’
Two caveats: Your sufferings can’t be made up. As children quickly
discover, wild tales are too easily unraveled, and then you lose credibility.
And you can’t pull this trick too often. If you’re always claiming to be the
victim of injustice, your business associates will soon realize that you’re
really a deserving victim.

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Act Forlorn

This technique is akin to angling for sympathy, discussed previously, but

without dragging in your personal life. This is a pure business strategy. You
make the point that unless you get the concessions you need, you’re in
danger of losing everything, with consequences that hurt your negotiating
partner, too.

Children use this technique when they ask to be passed onto a higher grade
despite having failed a course. The teacher or the school system may grant
the request because it hurts the school’s overall performance evaluation
whenever a child is held back. Big corporations play the forlorn card with
even greater success: When Chrysler was about to go under in 1979, its
executives appealed successfully to Congress for bailout loans to save the
jobs of thousands of workers and prevent a big downturn in the automobile
industry as a whole.

You might think that if you put yourself in the forlorn position, presenting
yourself as the poor little orphan in need of rescue in a storm, you’ll never
be able to hold your head up again. But just look at what can happen. Years
later, many of the corporations that
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had to beg for bailout money are reaping huge profits. And some of those
kids who were promoted to the next grade have gone on to graduate with
honors. (A far rarer occurrence, I grant you, but the cases do exist.) It’s
essential that after you’ve had the rescue that you negotiated, you fulfill
your end of the bargain by doing your part to avoid the same pitfalls that
put you there in the first place.

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Change the Subject

Changing the subject is the thing to do when the subject at hand is

something that puts you at a disadvantage. Changing the subject can also be
used in tandem with delaying tactics as a way to derail negotiations when
they’re charging full steam ahead to a conclusion you don’t want to reach.
Changing the subject can throw you off on a tangent that needs to be
explored, giving your side the time it needs to come up with alternatives
that might be accepted.

Children change subjects almost at random; non sequiturs come naturally to

them. Sometimes children lose sight of the main subject and start discussing
another randomly introduced subject, possibly forgetting all about the first
subject altogether. Children being teased sometimes discover the worth of
this tactic. The subject at hand may be Henry’s unzipped fly. Immediately
after zipping up, Henry notices a foul smell in the air and accuses someone
else of ‘‘cutting the cheese.’’ Then all the children are busy pointing fingers
at each other and holding their noses.

You wouldn’t think a tactic so juvenile would work among adults, but it
does. When it involves people changing the subject

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from an accusation hurled at them to a new and different accusation that

they throw at someone else, the strategy is generally covered under the
saying, ‘‘The best defense is a good offense.’’ You could make the case that
this is the tack that President Clinton’s opponents took when they went after
flaws in his personal life rather than policies implemented by his
administration—the adult equivalent of ‘‘Billy’s pee-pee is showing!’’
Changing the subject isn’t something that you can use in all circumstances
(remember, none of these techniques work for every kind of negotiation). It
works best when you know that you’re negotiating in a hostile environment.
When you’re in a situation where you’re outnumbered, where the other side
wants to berate you or complain about you or get you to completely change
your point of view, the best thing you can do is to change the subject and
make them answer some other question entirely. Raise a small legal point
that might require some research that will take a few days to complete.
When changing the subject is masterfully done, you can take the other side
completely by surprise and prevent the opposition from even playing their
opening move. At worst, you gain yourself a little breathing room before
the others come back to the original subject that you’d rather avoid.

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Give Your Business ‘‘Lemonade

Stand’’ Appeal

Children always do well with their lemonade stands. Have you ever heard
of a child whose lemonade stand lost money? Even when there are four
competing lemonade stands within a six-block radius, they all make money.
Selling lemonade might be the only business in America that is guaranteed
to make money.* Why is that? Because the customers are so eager to be
supportive of those enterprising kids that they’ll buy lemonade even when
they aren’t thirsty.

They’ll buy from each lemonade stand along the way to the beach.
They never complain about the price or the lemonade formula that’s overly
sweet or too sour. These customers are endlessly forgiving simply because
they know they’re dealing with children. People want children to succeed.

You can’t become a child again to recapture the customer’s endless

goodwill, but you can look for other ways to store up goodwill from the
people you do business with.

* The exception may be Las Cruces, New Mexico, where city officials
required four young girls to jump through multiple regulatory hoops to set
up a lemonade stand.

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One way is to make sure your business is linked to good deeds in your
community. Your business should donate generously to school fund-raising
auctions, support the scout troops, adopt a highway or park, plant trees, or
donate a bench at the senior center.

You should get your business’s name listed every time supporters are being
sought for community benefits and events. People may not remember every
single good deed you do, but they’ll have a sense of which businesses are
community-oriented and which just come in, try to grab the biggest profit in
the shortest time, and then leave.
Let me give you an example of how a business used its community appeal
to its advantage. Down the street from my house is a block of shops that
included an ice cream parlor. The owner was well known and beloved in the
neighborhood as a guy who loved his work, loved the neighborhood he
served, and supported all the local schools and causes. He knew all his
customers and their families. One day the landlord announced a plan to
redevelop the whole block. He wanted to kick out all the small businesses
first, but most of them had leases with renewal options. He raised the rent
each year until finally he drove most of the businesses out. The owner of
the ice cream store, however, was stubborn. He didn’t want to move and he
didn’t want to keep paying the increased rent. So he posted a sign in the
window letting all his customers know his plight. The customers—
especially the children—rallied around the ice cream store. They came to
zoning committee meetings and neighborhood community association
meetings and spoke out about the desire the keep their neighborhood ice
cream vendor.

Many of the customers signed a petition aimed at preventing the block from
being developed. Although, ultimately, the ice cream seller did have to
move, he won at least a two-year reprieve because the community showed
support for his position, and when he eventually did relocate, he was able to
persuade a high percentage of his customers to travel to his new location to
patronize his shop.

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Solicit a Bribe

Early on, children learn that if they stand their ground, they’ll often be
offered something if they instead do what their parent wants.
This something is what parents call ‘‘a bribe’’ and what businesses call an
‘‘incentive.’’ Raise your hand, parents, if you’ve ever given your child a
reward during potty training. Okay, you can all put your hands down, now.
Children catch on quickly: All they have to do is hold out for what they
want and they might be offered a little something extra for doing what they
knew they’d have to do in the end. And if their parents don’t offer a bribe,
the child can always say, ‘‘Last time I went pee-pee in the potty you give
me a sticker.’’ (Without parents, how else would the sticker business
thrive?)

The same system works in business: Why settle for a little something when
you can have more? If you’re buying widgets for cash, wouldn’t it be nice
to have a ‘‘sample’’ of that company’s new super-widget, too? Soliciting
bribes works especially well when you’re close to closing a deal: Keep
those pants up and refuse to go near that potty until you see that sticker.

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The key thing here is to make sure that everyone knows what you’re doing.
When I use the term ‘‘bribe,’’ I mean that only figuratively: What you’re
doing is asking for something that’s simply a little extra—not a tangible
‘‘suitcase full of cash.’’ That’s likely to be turned down. But money to the
extent that money is for buying things . . . maybe you can acquire free
travel, a dinner, or even a regular massage. (It pays to have employees in
tip-top shape, right?) Ask for something out of scale, something that the
other side can’t afford or will raise eyebrows, and you’ve got a deal breaker,
not something of benefit to your company. The bribe ideally should be
something the other side doesn’t mind throwing in, because it keeps you
happy and coming back to them for more.

Of course, sometime down the road, the giving side may get tired of having
to keep on giving. Parents don’t want to keep handing out stickers every
time a child goes potty after, say, age three and a half. The same goes for
business. A business that is expected to keep handing out little gifts may
want to break the habit at some point. Often, it’s when new management
comes in and is looking for ways to cut corners. Like the child who’s
outgrown the potty chair, you’ll want to be aware of when you are getting
too big to continue a practice that the other side no longer finds rewarding.

It’s best to be proactive about it and graciously and spontaneously give up

accepting your ‘‘bribes’’ before you need to be asked.

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Keep Coming Back to the Same

Question

Children just never give up. Once they decide they want something, you
know how stubborn they can be. They just come at you and keep coming at
you until you’ve used up all your reasons why they can’t have what they
want. ‘‘Why can’t I have a puppy?’’ You talk about your work schedule,
your travel plans, the size of your yard, the cost of veterinary bills, and a
million other reasons why it doesn’t make sense for your family to own a
dog. And yet somehow you still end up with that cute little cocker spaniel.
And you know what—you’re not sorry afterward. That’s how all your
neighbors ended up with their dogs, too.

Children are relentless about asking and asking and asking.

Slowly but surely, they eliminate your defenses until you give them what
they want.

Here’s how one mother described her life: My son tends to wear me down. I
am using time-outs in the crib with some success. I give two verbal
warnings, then on the third time, he goes in his crib for about ten minutes
or until

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he simmers down. The problem is sometimes defining what is acceptable.

For instance, I say ‘‘No throwing.’’ Does dropping something deliberately
count as throwing? My problem is also being consistent. Sometimes I am so
frustrated, irritated, and fed up that enforcing time-outs becomes a problem
in and of itself.

The same thing works in business. As long as you maintain a professional

demeanor and you have something of substance to offer, you can, by asking
and asking again, make slow inroads in the resistance the other side puts in
your way. Sometimes businesses appreciate that you’re persistent because if
you pursue them so doggedly, that shows how effective you’ll be as a
partner, collaborator, or advocate.

Here’s where a person’s experience running marathons, or completing long

cross-country ski trips, or having backpacked through the mountains with
llamas and swum a mile a day, comes into play: Physical stamina counts.
People assume that in negotiations it’s cleverness, or having the right
contacts, or business acumen, or mental toughness that will make the
difference. To some degree that’s true, but pure physical strength also
counts for more than most people realize. Long meetings, hectic travel,
eating on the run, fasting, hauling around projectors and papers, dashing
around airports—these are not tasks for the physically weak or, dare I say it,
obese. The sheer length of meetings and negotiations can determine who
wins: The side with the most people still standing (or awake) may be the
victor. The tired, exhausted, weary, drowsy, and fatigued negotiators lose in
part because they’ve been worn down.

Staying trim and fit, getting ample sleep, and eating well are as important
for business as they are for life. Looking fit—having a tan, a well-fitting
suit, and so on—isn’t the same. You need to be in good shape in order to
wear the other side down and, just as

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important, not be worn down yourself. It would be a real shame to lose
some negotiating points just because you’re pooped.

Often it’s impossible to tell when is the best time to strike a deal. You can’t
know the internal budget or priorities of the company you want to do
business with: So, by asking on a regular basis, you increase your chance of
hitting that company at the right moment.

Children learn from The Little Engine That Could. That book is the perfect
how-to guide for being relentless. Defeat and losing are not possible,
children learn, if they will unleash their boundless energy and self-
confidence. I bet you never thought of that book as a business book, did
you? Well, pick up a copy and give it a read.

It only takes a minute but you may make its refrain, ‘‘I think I can, I think I
can,’’ into your mantra.

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Play the Repeat Game

Here’s something my kids like to do to drive each other crazy. My older

daughter says something like, ‘‘It’s my turn to play on the computer.’’

My younger daughter responds by parroting back those exact words: ‘‘It’s

my turn to play on the computer.’’

‘‘No, it’s not. It’s my turn,’’ says Karen.

‘‘No, it’s not. It’s MY turn,’’ echoes Claire.

‘‘Stop repeating what I say,’’ Karen sputters in frustration.

‘‘Stop repeating what I say,’’ Claire predictably spits back at her.

This exchange can go on for some time, until either a parent comes along
and makes the repeater knock it off . . . or until the one whose words are
being parroted gets sick of the game and flees to find some other activity,
relinquishing the computer altogether so it is free for game-playing by her
parrot-mouthed sister.

Is there an adult business application of this extremely juvenile technique?

Yes, but it can’t be copied at such a primitive level. If all you do is repeat
the other side’s statements, they’ll think you’re a

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lunatic and quickly conclude they can’t do business with you at all.

Translated into an adult negotiating technique, the purpose is not to drive

your adversary insane and risk a punch in the mouth; the purpose is to use
the other side’s own words to emphasize those places where you are in
agreement. This technique can help to move stalled negotiations forward,
especially if you have detailed minutes or a transcript of a previous
discussion at your disposal.
Look over the notes or records carefully. Pull out those sentences and
phrases that you can echo as your own, to show that you have enough of a
common vision to keep moving forward. Rather than attempting to make
the other side give up in frustration (which is usually the goal when a child
of mine is at this game), you are trying to achieve just the opposite: to bring
two widely separated positions closer together.

Let’s say you’re negotiating over a profit-sharing arrangement.

The other side has made the point that the partner taking the greater risk
should reap the largest share of the profits. You can agree to this position in
principle, even as you continue to disagree about how risk is calculated.
What you can do here is repeat that your side, too, believes that risk must be
rewarded proportionately.

But then you need to concentrate on the various types of risks that each side
assumes. If you are convinced that the other side is trying to assume a
greater share of the profits than is fair, point out those risks that your side is
taking—less obvious risks, perhaps, that have not been given proper weight
in the negotiations thus far—that deserve consideration. Now you are no
longer divided over a matter of fundamental fairness, but are simply
haggling over percentages.

You can move forward from there.

Another technique that kids bring to this strategy is to change the emphasis
over the words that they parrot back. Lawyers use this technique in court to
great effect. In answer to a question, a witness says, ‘‘I saw the car dart
across the intersection, and I braked, but

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I couldn’t avoid hitting it.’’ The lawyer repeats the words back,
emphasizing the words, ‘‘ And I braked,’’ to imply that the witness didn’t
start braking as he approached the intersection; he started braking only after
he saw the other car. In other words, the other car was already in the
intersection and had the right of way; it was his fault for noticing that too
late.

One more little twist you can bring to the echo game: Change a word or a
few words and see what effect you can get from it. If you want to see some
great examples of this technique in action, watch some old episodes of
Perry Mason from the 1950s and 1960s.

The witness would swear, ‘‘I never asked him whether he changed his will.
. . .’’ And Perry Mason would echo back, ‘‘You never asked . . . ’’ and then
go on to add the new words, in his most intimidating voice: ‘‘But isn’t it
true that you saw the new will? You never asked . . .’’ ( Big dramatic pause)
‘‘. . . because you already knew . . .’’

And in the show, of course, the witness is forced to echo the words, ‘‘Yes,
yes, okay . . . I knew.’’*

* Results from this technique may vary widely. I cannot promise that it will
work for you as well as it does for characters on TV shows.

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Be Irrational

We tend to be prejudiced in favor of logical, mature behavior. But being

irrational and unpredictable can have its place, believe it or not. Some of the
biggest names in business—Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airways
leaps to mind—are proud of their reputations as wild men who are willing
to walk the line and push things to extremes. In certain situations you can’t
let yourself be pigeon-holed. It’s better to be seen as a loose cannon, as
someone who might do or say anything. When you’re in danger of being
pushed to the side, it might be just the right time to stand out, to do
something risky, bold, and dramatic, something that makes the people
around you sit up and take notice—anything to shake them up and make
them realize they don’t know you and can’t chart out your responses for
you. If you can come across as eccentrically brilliant (rather than just
flaky), you can use irrationality to your advantage.

If people think there’s a chance you might walk out in the middle of a
project, then they’ll work to keep you satisfied. Divas, movie stars, and
Hollywood directors are all notorious for this sort of behavior (that is to say,
behaving like irrational children), but

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when they have enough talent and charisma, they can get away with it. That
is to say, it works.

But, to my mind, the champion of the ‘‘act irrational’’ technique was

Richard Nixon, who worried that because he was weakened politically at
home by the Watergate investigation, he would be perceived as vulnerable
by his Soviet adversaries in the Kremlin.

He was afraid they’d be emboldened to take advantage of his do-mestic

distractions to foment insurrection in many Third World countries. So he
allowed Henry Kissinger to start whispering to others that Nixon might do
anything—including using nuclear weapons—against communist
insurrection. The Soviets had to believe that Nixon was capable of doing
anything. He was irrational, and irrational people should be treated with
extreme caution. Release of Soviet files since the end of the Cold War
proved Nixon correct: The Soviet leaders were worried that his response to
certain actions might be out of proportion to the threat, and they trimmed
their activities accordingly.

Acting irrationally may coax the other side into giving you want you want
in order to prevent you from doing something really irrational. It goes
without saying that you have to have the power to make people afraid that
you can use it. That’s why this technique, though often used by small
children, rarely gets them anywhere.

When a toddler is behaving irrationally, the adult can pick the child up and
put her in her crib. When an adult is behaving irrationally—and that adult
has real power over people’s lives—people tend to do whatever’s necessary
to pacify the person.

The risk, it must be noted, is that those who perceive your behavior as
dangerously irrational may feel compelled to remove you from a position of
authority. That was certainly the case with Nixon. So if you employ this
technique, you not only need to be sure that you currently have power to
wield, but that you have the ability to hold onto it, even if others start
working to pull you down.

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Worry the Other Side That You

Might Be Sick

‘‘I don’t feel so good, Mommy.’’ With those words, many a child has stayed
home from school or missed a piano lesson.

If they can’t fake being sick, they can hold their breath until you worry that
they’ll faint. Anything to get their way. Let’s not forget that kids also use
‘‘being sick’’ as a method of accumulating toys.

The same technique can succeed in business, too. When you get down to
the nitty-gritty of business, you have to deal with individuals, not
companies. People call in sick all the time, and in some cases, there’s no
question that it’s just a negotiating technique. Ever heard of ‘‘blue flu’’?
That’s a tactic that police unions have used that stops short of a strike. The
officers don’t all call in sick at once; just enough of them miss work each
day to send the clear message to city administrators that there will be
continuing manpower shortages until the union’s salary demands are met.

In the book publishing business—my line of work—authors routinely say

that they can’t complete a manuscript on time because they’re suffering
from carpal tunnel syndrome, have back pain, or

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WORRY THE OTHER SIDE THAT YOU MIGHT BE SICK

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their spouse is in the hospital (they conveniently omit the fact that it’s for a
tummy tuck). Do writers have more illnesses than other people? Probably
not. Do writers claim to get sick more than others? I can’t speak to that . . .
and I promise that I’ve never used this technique. I’m not advocating it,
merely reporting something others have been known to use to their
advantage.

As with so many of these child-inspired techniques, from acting irrationally

to playing the forlorn victim role, you can’t play the sick card too often.
Overuse it and you’ll be tagged as a malingerer.

Make absolutely sure no one’s going to see you at the baseball stadium on
the day you’ve said you were stricken with the worst flu ever. You’re
generally better off going for a little-understood syndrome, one that can
come and go mysteriously. That way, you can claim the need to fly home to
see your specialist the day your negotiations reach the critical point, forcing
the other side to accede to your demands or lose the deal.

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Make Weak Promises

‘‘If we get a dog, I promise to walk it.’’ Thousands of parents recall their
child’s voice saying those exact words—as the parent walks the dog at 6:30
a.m. in the rain.

But it’s not the child’s fault, entirely: You knew, of course, that this was a
false promise the moment you heard it. But hope nearly always triumphs
over experience.

‘‘I will clean up my room right after supper. I promise.’’ And so you let
your kids play outside for another half hour. And the room never gets
cleaned. But you knew that, too.

In the book business, for example, publishers often make promises that
they’re not going to keep: ‘‘We will promote this book like crazy!’’ the
publisher says. And authors, too, make their fair share of hollow promises:
‘‘I will get a foreword from a former United States President,’’ the author
says. Yes, of course, the author has sent off an e-mail asking the former
President to do the foreword.

And he certainly has the hope that the former President will say yes. Still,
he’s not entirely surprised when the answer turns out to be no. But by that
time, the book contract is already signed and the

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book has taken up a slot in the fall release schedule. So the author goes for a
substitute: a foreword from a former secretary of education. It doesn’t
exactly live up to the hype, but if it’s a well-crafted piece, it’s a fair enough
substitute.

Making weak promises ranks among the riskiest of negotiating tactics.

The problem, from the vantage point of the party that’s on the receiving end
of them, is that we want so much to reach an agreement that we give in.
Even when we know deep down that the other side is not likely to abide by
the agreement, we sometimes give in just to get the process over with.

When you are on the offering end of a weak promise, you risk losing
credibility, so make sure that there is something in the deal that you can, in
fact, abide by. You don’t want to completely break your promise or go back
on your word because that’s a reputation that will shadow you forever. You
absolutely want to be able to point to promises you’ve kept. So, if you
promise a foreword written by an ex-President, be sure you’ve got that
former cabinet secretary already lined up to call on as a backup.

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Win Through Cuteness

When you look into a child’s face you have to say yes. When they blink
their wide eyes, you have to say okay to everything. Children were
designed to cause parents to become weak at the knees. From the moment
they’re born to their first smile, to when they say

‘‘Mama and Dada’’ for the first time—they’re adorable. Even when
children do things like spill a glass of milk on the floor or knock over your
antique vase, you forgive them in an instant because they look so guileless
and endearing. But don’t think they don’t know that.

How can you translate that quality into a sound business practice?

It sounds glib to suggest that you send in your most physically attractive
negotiators, but that’s exactly what can help. People react better to beautiful
individuals than to plain ones, as has been demonstrated in countless
psychology experiments. You know the setup: The sales script is exactly the
same and the speech is delivered at the same pace, with the same gestures,
but the target audience in one room hears the presentation from a man
who’s six feet tall,

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well dressed, well groomed, and movie-star handsome; the target audience
in the other room hears the pitch from someone with, let’s just say, a much
less appealing presence. It’s no surprise that the test group that heard the
pitch from the handsome salesman buys more every time. Perhaps you will
be surprised to learn that women care just as much about the looks of the
salesman as men seem to care about the looks of saleswomen.

Is there hope, then, for the noncute among us? Glossy magazines would
have us believe that anybody can be made to look appealing. While
physically attractive men and women enjoy certain advantages, there are
lots of ways to make somebody appear attractive, interesting, attention-
grabbing, desirable, or popular. Turn your negotiators into winning- looking
negotiators.

Grown-ups can be cute. It’s often a matter of smiling a lot more than you’re
used to, or wearing a brighter color than usual, or having something fun or
funky on your lapel. If you outfit yourself entirely from Brooks Brothers,
you don’t have much hope at being able to use your looks as a negotiating
tool.

Do you really think that famed defense attorney Gerry Spence is that great a
lawyer? Or could his success possibly, just possibly, have something to do
with the fact that he’s not a conventional dresser? (He’s the one with the
shaggy head of longish white hair, who always wears a fringed leather
cowboy jacket with a bolo tie in the courtroom.)

You must be comfortable in your own style. Gerry Spence does fine with
his western look, but I doubt that he’d be as formidable in polyester. Think
about what you’re wearing, how you look (even men can make use of
makeup), how you walk, how you smile, how you speak. Get coached if
you want or need to—and virtually everyone can use a speech coach to
learn some presentation pointers. If you think that coaching is a waste of
time, consider

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this: Your opponent might be getting coached. Persuasion involves

performance, and it helps to remember Shakespeare: All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays
many parts.

When you’re in the midst of a serious negotiation (and all negotiations are
serious), become immersed in your role. Look the part, just as children do.

Not every use of this technique is aimed at winning, however.

One parent told me that her child ‘‘will smile and giggle, then get silly
when I ask him not to do something. It’s a test.’’ This technique can be used
to probe your opponent, which in fact can be a somewhat more
sophisticated use of ‘‘cuteness.’’ It goes without saying that the more you
know about the other side, the better a position you’ll be in when it comes
time to actually negotiate.

Intelligence—get it.

One big caution here is that cuteness alone is never enough (except perhaps
when we’re talking about babies). If it were, then you’d just send in the
best-looking person in your outfit to be your point person every time. Not a
good idea. But put a team together that has both beauty and brains, and
there’s a winning combination. Sometimes companies don’t send either on a
mission, and that’s a sure recipe for losing the negotiation.

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Don’t Fear Failure

There are two kinds of people: Those who watch adventure documentaries
on television and those who actually do things like snow-board on Mount
Everest, fly airplanes upside down at 200 mph, and swim with great white
sharks. There are those of us who are normal and those of us who are
fearless. Fearless people can do things that normal people can’t.

And so it is with children. Sure, some children are more fearful than adults,
but childhood fear is a different sort of thing. Children know fear because
there are ghosts, skeletons, monsters under the bed, and thunder. But the
one thing that children are not afraid of is failure. When their egos are still
young and underdeveloped, they haven’t yet begun to focus on questions
like, ‘‘What will people think of me if I lose?’’ or ‘‘Will I end up looking
ridiculous if I fail?’’ That’s an adult kind of fear, and it’s something that
holds adults back from trying things they might turn out to be good at.

Kids aren’t so burdened with thoughts of reputation. They don’t worry

about what goes in their file; they aren’t concerned about a

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loss of prestige, power, or face. And this quality gives them a great deal of
power when it comes to negotiating.

Analyze an intense negotiation over bedtime between a parent and child.

The parent is worried about setting a bad precedent and losing ‘‘power’’
over the child if she gives in. Parents will freely admit that. Does that mean
that the parent is going to be more dogged when it comes to the
negotiations? Perhaps. But what it also means is that the child can extract
compromises. The child says, ‘‘If I can’t stay up late, can I at least watch an
episode of Blue’s Clues?’’ Or, ‘‘I’ll go to bed, but can I have another
bedtime story first?’’ This inner boldness that comes from not caring about
one’s image is something that all children, but few adults, have.

How do you achieve this state, this ability not to fear failure? It is
something that probably can’t be explained in a book of any length. Only by
experiencing fearlessness in some area of your life can you incorporate that
spirit in your negotiating repertoire. Am I suggesting that you start climbing
mountains or learning to pilot an airplane? Absolutely! Piloting a plane is
something I will recom-mend to you personally—it’s given me great
confidence in my own abilities and unquestionably broadened my sense of
what I can accomplish. Taking up an adventure sport is something that’s
worked to give many people a depth of perspective that helps them
negotiate without the fear of failure.

An adventure that gives you a new sense of boldness does not have to come
in the form of a death-defying activity that automati-cally cancels your life
insurance. Standing in front of an audience performing karaoke, watching a
somber documentary or two (if all you ever see on the screen are action
thrillers), taking a class in something you’ve never studied before,
exploring a wing of a mu-seum that’s been invisible to you all these years,
these are the kinds of things that can help you break out of your cocoon.

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Be Prepared—But Not

Overprepared

Children are often caught unprepared. That’s okay for them, because adults
think that’s something they’ll learn as they grow up and come to understand
the consequences of being unprepared. Or they think it’s something their
kids will pick up if they become Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, as part of the
movement’s ideology. I’m not about to knock preparedness as a good life
lesson. There’s no question that it’s a virtue in most business negotiations.
But while acquiring habits of good preparation, adults sometimes lose one
of the virtues of childhood: their spontaneity. Kids have an innate liveliness
about them. They are bubbly and show enthusiasm and are able to think on
their feet—qualities that have a tendency to fade away as they mature. And
that’s a shame.

You know what kids do when they’re not prepared for class?

They’re often funny and inventive in their excuses for why they’re not
prepared. The kid with little imagination claims ‘‘The dog ate my
homework,’’ and the teacher groans at the same old line. The kid who says,
‘‘I know my dog didn’t eat it—I just wish I knew what he did with it,’’ at
least has some freshness to his response.

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(He may still be marked down for not having done the assignment, though.)
But sometimes a truly novel and unusual response can win a reprieve.
Here’s an approach that, depending on the teacher and subject, might stand
a bit of a chance: ‘‘I wanted to write that book report, but I realized I just
couldn’t come up with anything new or important to say. I thought it was
better to admit that than to hand in something inferior.’’

When an adult is unprepared (and despite our best intentions, there will
always come a time when we find ourselves in that situation), the tendency
is to flounder around, come up with lame excuses, and make things worse.
A common reaction is to blame others; but that almost always has
repercussions, hurting teamwork.

Some adults think they can wing it, pass themselves off as prepared, either
by good guesswork or by drawing on some past experience that makes them
seem prepared when they’re not. Here’s where it might help to have
retained a bit of childlike spunk and spontaneity. See what you can come up
with—or as they say in the military, when they’re not sure how something
might fly, ‘‘Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.’’

It’s the rare adult that can face up to the situation squarely and say, ‘‘Sorry,
I’m unprepared. My fault.’’ That’s undoubtedly the most mature—but least
childlike—thing to do.

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Win Your Friends Back

What is amazing about children is how extreme enemies can become

friends again. It’s almost like a broken bone being mended, the way kids
can repair their relationships. The renewed friendship can be better,
stronger, than it was to begin with. Of course, children have several
advantages over adults when it comes to undoing bad relationships: They
usually don’t brood over the problem all evening after work, and they have
lots of school breaks and family time—time apart from the other child that
can help mend the wound.

I’m not suggesting that all childhood animosities are forgotten, only that
chances of that happening are better among children than adults. And
unfortunately, I can’t prescribe a method for turning adversaries back into
friends, since human relationships are as complex as they are varied. But
what I am saying is that adults can learn from children how to put aside
their grudges and move on.

It could be that if you apply—or perhaps, misapply—some of the advice in

this book, you will step on some people’s toes. Oftentimes people feel
they’ve been hurt when one person gets ahead,

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even if that person has done nothing wrong. Adults are touchier than
children; they’re quicker to perceive slights. (They’re definitely more
litigious.) One of the things all children are supposed to learn to do is to say
‘‘sorry’’ when an apology is called for. But that’s something that few
children and even fewer adults ever learn to do well. Children may be
prompted to mumble the word sorry insincerely. Adults learn to pack in a
few excuses and self-justifications while delivering the apology: ‘‘I’m sorry
if you were offended by what I said, even though it was meant to be taken
ironically. I guess I didn’t realize that anyone could take what I said so
literally.’’ (In other words, it’s your own fault for being such a stodgy,
humorless twit.)

A truly great gift for someone in a leadership position to have is the ability
to know when an apology is called for and to deliver it simply, without
caviling or embellishment, without cravenness or condescension: Just a
simple and sincere, ‘‘I’m sorry.’’

This is one of those things I wish they’d teach in business school, for all
those adults who have come through every grade in school, from
kindergarten onward, and have never managed to learn how to do it right.

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Sorehead

Win or lose, children move on. They get over it.

In other words, children grow from their experiences. They may not be able
to intellectualize what they’ve learned, but this lack of ability to dwell on
the past is also a plus for them, because they’re not so apt to get caught up
in a cycle of asking, ‘‘What went wrong?’’ They’re short-term focus is their
strength.

Three things are likely to happen when children lose: 1. They cry.

2. They go on to something else.

3. They forget about it.

Let’s look at each of these reactions one at a time. Adults often want to cry;
children frequently do. Crying isn’t always a bad thing to do (earlier I
explained why)—although it’s not a negotiating strategy I would say you
should make part of your usual repertoire.

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Crying doesn’t tend to go over well at the negotiating table, and it certainly
doesn’t hasten the day that you’re going to occupy that corner office.

But crying does do some useful things for children, which are worth
keeping in mind. The main thing it does is help the child dry out
emotionally. Children cry because they feel sad. Adults feel sad, but don’t
cry—and they may not have developed any other way to let their sad
feelings out. Well, they may drink, but that’s seldom a productive outlet, is
it? I don’t know why getting drunk when you lose isn’t more stigmatized
than crying in public; certainly the consequences for the people around you
can be worse, especially if nobody’s managed to take away your car keys.
But, for some reason, most guys would rather be seen stumbling around
drunk after a bad day at the office than sitting quietly at the desk, head in
both hands, with tears escaping from the corners of their eyes. I say both
children and adults need to find an outlet for their negative emotions. If
crying does the trick, then cry—though it may be worthwhile to learn to
hold back the tears till you’re in a private place, or at least among very good
friends.

What about moving on to something else? Children have so many things

going on in their lives—it’s as if their lives are com-prised of a hundred
mini-projects and that within minutes of not getting what they wanted,
they’re on to something else. They have no choice about it. Adults are
usually not as lucky, since we tend to work on just one or two projects at a
time. It’s often our misfortune that we’re required to do a postmortem, to
write a report about what went wrong. Occasionally that’s a helpful
exercise, such as when it’s not clear why a deal fell through. But more often
than not, we know what we did wrong. Taking the time to spell it out is just
rubbing our noses in it. It’s painful and unnecessary. Think back to when
you were a kid and you blurted out some inappropriate response in class
and were made to write a hundred times on a

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sheet of paper ‘‘I will not talk in class’’ or some other recantation.

Did that help? Of course not! It just left you with a sense of futility and a
hand cramp. A brief chat with the teacher after class would be much better,
because then the teacher would have a chance to tell you, privately but
sternly, why your outburst was disruptive, and you’d have a chance to
apologize simply but sincerely (as discussed in the preceding chapter).

Then again, adult mistakes tend to be more serious than the wrong word
tossed out in a class full of kids with short memories.

Kids move on because their mistakes don’t matter as much. When you’ve
blown a negotiation that was supposed to land your company a
multimillion-dollar contract, you probably won’t be able to put the whole
episode behind you quite as quickly as the child who’s made a boo-boo at
school. We get to let everything that didn’t go right during the negotiations
roll around in our brains from the moment we put our head on the pillow
until, say, 4 a.m.

Don’t you envy being a kid?

You need to keep telling yourself that if you dwell on your past problems—
or more significantly, let others dwell on your past problems—you will
have a hard time shaking your association with that failure. Your best shot
at changing your status is to get yourself associated with other, better
outcomes. Put the misery behind you as quickly as possible, move forward
into something else, and focus on that task. As they say in Hollywood,
‘‘You’re only as good as your next big hit.’’ For someone coming off a
project that wasn’t a hit, that’s actually a positive thought. Your next
success is the surest way to cancel out a past failure.

Now, what about just forgetting about it? (Or, as we New Yorkers are
famous for saying, ‘‘Fuggedaboutit!’’) If you are able to follow the advice
to quickly move on to something else and you manage to make it to the end
of ‘‘the next big thing,’’ and this time with success, people will let you
forget. Yes, you may encounter the
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occasional needler who just won’t let go of your flop from the past, and you
may feel like looking for some fast way to make him wipe that sneer right
off his smug puss—but if you do, then what are you? A sorehead.
Magnanimity is called for when dealing with people who would try to taunt
you about the past. You turn away with a shrug as if to say, ‘‘This too shall
pass.’’ Remember that many of the Wright brothers’ early airplane models
ended up smashed to smithereens. They didn’t let the naysayers slow them
down.

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Optimism Rules

There’s more to learning to negotiate like a child than what’s en-compassed

in the specific techniques discussed in this book. Leveraging tantrums,
appearing naive, playing by the rules, and so on are important, but without
understanding what the essence of childhood is, these techniques are just
tricks and gimmicks. You may be like the bad actor in a B-grade movie: just
moving your lips and saying your lines without any ability to improvise.
Memorizing these techniques isn’t what negotiating like a child is really
about.

They way children view life gives them strength that adults no longer enjoy.
Just as kids’ bodies are able to repair themselves after an accident with
incredible speed and apparent ease, children’s minds operate in a way that
gives them considerable negotiating vigor. It’s not just the negotiating
techniques that are important—it’s the way children’s brains work that
makes them such negotiating powerhouses. In other words, the techniques
that I’ve been talking about in this book are an integral part of being a kid.
It is childhood itself that makes these techniques possible.

You can use any and all of these various techniques—throw a

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tantrum, win through cuteness, take your ball and go home, be nice—but
they are just isolated tools unless you learn to think like a child. Or rather,
think once again like a kid. Children’s bodies and minds are strong and
resilient. Witness a child’s ability to resist drowning. Children can stay
submerged under water for prolonged periods of time and still be okay.
There’s one documented case of a child being submerged for seventy
minutes and surviving. Adult brains lose this resilience, I’m sorry to report.

Adults long to be youthful. But we long to be youthful of body, not

necessarily of mind. Plastic surgery for drooping body parts; creams and
ointments to rejuvenate skin; potions for silkier hair—we buy such
procedures and products to the tune of $160

billion a year worldwide. We fret over how old we’re looking; we spend
hours putting on makeup. Advertising promotes these things like almost
nothing else. (Except for automobiles, perhaps. But when you think about
it, what’s the main theme of automobile advertising: youth and power.) I
would bet that most adults over the age 40 spend at least a significant
portion of each day thinking about and/or doing something about looking
younger.

And to some degree we succeed. Cosmetic surgery works.

Makeup works. Skin creams and shampoos can achieve their promises, if
only for a limited time. Health clubs and exercise equipment (which weren’t
even included in the $160 billion figure) also take up much of our money
and time—and again, to make us look and feel younger.

But what about our attitude and approach to life? What about our minds? At
a lot of health clubs, you can pound the treadmill while watching CNN. But
if what you’re trying to do is look and feel younger, wouldn’t it be better to
have all of those televisions tuned to classic TV— Leave It to Beaver,
Bewitched, and Mayberry RFD? Watch a movie like Big, starring Tom
Hanks. Don’t waste your time watching what kids watch today, especially
sitcoms that

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show kids as miniature grown-ups, all smart-mouthed and sexy.

Watch the old black-and-white kids’ shows on Nickelodeon to see what it

was like when being a kid meant being innocent, not ironic.

Kids used to be fresh and full of curiosity, not ‘‘full of it.’’ There are some
exceptions, of course, but as a general rule of thumb, classic television from
the 1960s does a much better job of showing how children actually
negotiate.

Decades ago Rod Serling wrote a story, ‘‘Kick the Can,’’ in which several
elderly residents of a seniors’ boarding house decide one day to play a
children’s game called kick the can, something they enjoyed when they
were kids. They start running around (well, sort of, since one person is in a
wheel chair), kicking a can, yelling, hooting, and otherwise acting childish.
There’s one holdout, however: a curmudgeonly old man who stubbornly
refuses to engage in these juvenile antics.

The others go on playing kick the can without inhibition.

While they have fun, the curmudgeon stays in his room, trying not to listen
to the running around. Then the noises change from wispy, out-of-breath
shouts to high-pitched squeals. His friends have changed: They’ve been
transformed into children, with their whole childhood to enjoy again. They
were transformed through the magic of their minds.

I’m not suggesting that you dispense with being an adult and act like a kid
all the time. People who do that end up working behind the counter in
computer game stores, so my advice is not meant for the most literal
interpretation. What I am suggesting is that you develop a partnership with
your childhood. That you reach back into time and bring back those things
that gave you power: optimism, energy, spontaneity, a sense of adventure,
looking at the world in new ways.

Generally—and perhaps universally—speaking, children are happier far

more often than adults. ‘‘Today is the best day of my

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whole entire life,’’ Katy says to her aunt who’s baby-sitting, according to
the words of a Christine Lavin song. As they swirl and twirl around the
living room, the aunt is thrilled to hear her niece say that she’s never had a
better day in the three years she’s been alive.

When Katy’s parents come home and her aunt relates this story to them, the
parents smile and say that she says this about almost every day of her life.
Nearly every day is a great day for a child because children have the
capacity—and desire—to enjoy life. Happiness translates into enthusiasm
and potency. When you’re ‘‘up,’’ you’re going to be better at negotiating. If
you’re feeling down, depressed, disheartened, or glum, the other side’s
going to walk all over you.
You can’t out-negotiate the person who knows how to discover what’s best
and most wonderful about everything in life.

I’ll admit that it’s not that easy to recapture the mind-set of being a child.
While children suffer from anxiety and stress, they suffer much less than
adults. Children don’t worry about money, disease, leaking roofs, neighbor
problems, parking tickets, or grades at school or work. Mostly their lives
are carefree because they have fewer responsibilities and fewer rules than
adults. They have it easy.

Oddly, few kids are aware that they have it so good. They have no way to
compare the freedom and playfulness of childhood with what’s around the
corner: The real world. The real world is a uni-verse apart; another
dimension that they can’t even begin to fathom. You may think that kids
really want to hear the answers when they ask you, ‘‘Why? Why? Why?’’
about what goes on in the adult world, but more often than not, they’re
asking just to ask.

Your detailed attempts to explain why you have to file taxes or what
happens when a court case is appealed sail right over the head of the eight-
year-old, despite his apparent burning curiosity just moments before. You
may turn around and discover he’s already gone off to ask somebody else
another question entirely.

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Children rarely have a sense of foreboding, of pessimistic doom.

They are filled with optimism. My oldest daughter, Karen, has—or had
during her toddler years—three special blankets. One by one, she lost them,
until there was only one soft green blankie left. You have to understand that
for Karen, her blanket was the most precious thing in the world. Yet even
after she lost two and had only the one left, she couldn’t conceive of leaving
the remaining one safe at home. She always insisted on bringing it along on
trips and outings. Pessimist adults that we were, we warned her darkly that
she could lose her last and only blankie—no, probably would lose it, just as
she’s lost the other two. We feared Karen losing her blanket, but she never
had any such worry! While our fear was sensible, and her lack of fear
irrational, we were the ones suffering stress while Karen was blithely
oblivious to our gloom. And she turned out to be right. She has that symbol
of toddler hope to this day as proof.

‘‘There’s a right way and there’s a wrong way.’’ ‘‘Don’t ask stupid
questions.’’ ‘‘Experts are always right.’’ ‘‘Don’t be silly.’’

‘‘Don’t make a mistake.’’ These are rules adults live by. They are rules that
children violate nearly every waking minute. There often is an alternative
way to do something; asking stupid questions can yield new insights;
experts are often wrong; being silly can be liberating from the pressures of
conformity; and sometimes mistakes have led to the most brilliant insights
and great discoveries.

Everything is a toy to children: empty cheese wheels, inkless pens,

expensive watches, swivel chairs ( especially swivel chairs), television
remote controls, dandelions in a field. Children have the extraordinary
capability to turn mundane objects into play things.

Like some ‘‘matter transformer’’ out of a science fiction story, children can
transmute the dull and ordinary into the fun and energizing. When
everything has the potential to become something else—that’s imagination.

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Tapping Into Your Childhood’s Power

At the risk of invoking another cliche´, kids not only think outside the box,
their entire world is outside the box. Their vision is pure, uninhibited, and
intelligent in ways that most adults can no longer comprehend. Imagination
is the underlying theme behind children’s special negotiating powers.

How do you tap into your childhood’s power? I wish all you had to do was
gather your old friends and play a round of kick the can. I wish I could give
you step-by-step instructions on how to rejoin your childhood. But I can’t—
in part because everyone’s journey backward takes a path that’s determined
by their own life and experiences. If you grew up as an army brat, spending
time in this and that town, your childhood and early adulthood may be very
different from somebody who spent their formative years growing up in
downtown Chicago. That’s why a chapter on how to restore the vigor,
imagination, vitality, curiosity, and inner strength of childhood is
impossible. Your path back to your childhood strength and power is unique
to you. I can only offer general guidelines and the reason.

I’ve talked about various things you can do to develop a child’s eye view of
the world and thereby help develop your negotiating skills. Reading about
these skills isn’t sufficient; you need the practical experience that the
connection to children can bring. Here are a few ways to get that
experience:
• Spend more time with children. Start with your own children, if you have
them. If you’re not a parent or if your children are grown, borrow some. (I
do mean that figuratively, not literarily.) Take them someplace that’s fun for
you and for them, but don’t be too forward or controlling. Hang back a bit,
watch, and listen. If you don’t have any young nieces, nephews,
grandchildren, or god-

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149

children, then be sure to keep an eye out for children you may observe in
your day-to-day activities. Shopping. In the park. At the bus stop. In line at
the movies. It’s especially useful to watch children in places where they are
prone to do a lot of negotiating, such as on airplane flights. (If you’re on a
cross-country flight where the toddler behind you is kicking your seat for
hours without end, turn the situation from a stressful event into an
educational experience.) Transportation venues in general—trains, highway
rest stops, airport waiting areas, and ticket lines—present many situations to
observe how children negotiate.

• Allow playfulness back into your life. I know, you golf. You watch the
World Series. You explore a new section of the Louvre every time you visit
Paris. But that’s not acting childlike. Those kinds of activities don’t do
anything to restore your sense of wonder and fire up your imagination.
Well, what should you do? Go out and have fun for the sake of fun.
Obviously, running around, kicking a can with your friends isn’t going to
happen. (But why not?) If you can’t overcome the fear of looking silly in
public (which almost all grown-ups have), then try something that’s a little
less, well, embarrassing. Play a game of Monopoly, or Chutes and Ladders.
Play Paint Ball. Go orienteering—a navigation competition that’s sort of the
adult version of hide and seek. It’s fun, often challenging, and good
exercise.* Instead of ‘‘real’’ golf, try a round of miniature golf every once
in a while. Reread a favorite book from your childhood.

Listen to the songs you grew up loving and used to play over and over.

It’s surprising how many adults don’t listen to music anymore.

When did we stop? The answer to that question is probably around

* For more information about orienteering, visit www.online-

orienteering.net or www.us.orienteering.org.

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when we got serious about our work: when we were angling for partner at
the law firm; when the VP of marketing position was within our sights;
when we knew that we might become the director of operations. Why did
we stop? You’ll have to answer that question. But as you try and answer it,
my guess is that you won’t have a good answer. Why did you enjoy
listening to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Spice Girls, and then one day
no longer enjoy it? If you don’t have a good answer to that question, then
go back to listening to music once again. And better still, look for new
music. There are countless bands and musicians in every musical genre, and
probably some genres you haven’t even heard of. Finding new music is
easy (easier than most things), and it may pave the way for you to explore
other areas that invigorate your imagination, boost your energy, and give
you insights that you never had (and that the people you’re negotiating with
don’t have, either.)*

• Look at the everyday, familiar things in your routine with an eye toward
seeing something new and inspiring. At some time everything is brand-new
to children. But some things—seeing a butterfly alight on a flower, for
example—can be new only once. Or can it? You have never seen that
particular butterfly alight on that exact petal of that particular flower before,
have you? Nothing when investigated is ever completely the same as
another thing. There’s always more than meets the eye . . . when you know
how to look for it.

For a child, each new object, event, animal, insect, food, sound, smell
brings forth an endless stream of questions. Children only articulate a small
fraction of what they are thinking, because they are too captivated by what
they see to think too hard about it.

* Here are some of my favorite places to start looking for new music. No
matter what you like, or liked to listen to once upon a time, these three Web
sites—www.cdbaby.com, www.musicaldiscoveries.com, and www.ecto.org
—will stimulate your ‘‘imagivision.’’

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OPTIMISM RULES

151

Seeing the world in new ways, seeing new things, is a vital aspect of
knowing how to negotiate like a child.

If everything you know comes from The Wall Street Journal and
BusinessWeek, then you’re probably not a creative person. But if you look
at the world from the perspective that there’s going to be something new to
learn, then chances are you’re going to come up with new ideas on how to
win the negotiation. So when the delegation from China comes to the pre-
negotiation reception, be friendly, step right up, and ask questions. Ask
about their homes and families. Politely, of course. You don’t want to come
across as nosy. But you want to be friendly while you learn whatever you
can about the people who will be on the opposite side of the table from you
for the next week of talks. And not just because you want to gain an
advantage. You want to know because it’s good to know things. Because
you have retained that childlike curiosity about the world that you had when
the world was new to you.

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Back to the Beginning

If you want to outnegotiate your opponent, you have to go back to the

beginning, the basics. Recall the technique that you successfully used to get
your parents to push you in the stroller when you really could walk.
Remember how you got your parents to let you have a candy bar before
dinner, even though everyone knew that it really would ruin your appetite.
Think about the technique you used to convince your parents to let you stay
up late to watch your favorite television show, or how you got your friend
Jenny to let you borrow her sweater, or how you got a pet dog that you
never walked after the first day. Those techniques worked back then and
can work now, provided you recognize and incorporate them into your adult
life by becoming a bit of a child again.

If I had to summarize How to Negotiate Like a Child in a single word, it

would be imagination. That is what this book is about—expanding your
imagination and your ability to innovate, think on your feet, improvise, and
develop brand-new solutions to vexing problems. The power of imagination
will give you an undeniable

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BACK TO THE BEGINNING

153

advantage over your negotiating partners, most of whom are using old, tired
playbooks that stick to strict rules and procedures.

I know it’s easy to talk about imagination, creativity, and the ability to think
quickly and adapt. It’s almost a cliche´ to say that these things will give you
an edge in negotiations. But I wouldn’t have written this book if I thought I
was just dishing out some shopworn stuff you’ve heard plenty of times
before. It’s one thing to know about stuff; it’s another to know when and
how to use it.

I fly airplanes. Most of the time, flying airplanes is an easy thing.

All those buttons, knobs, and gauges can pretty much be ignored because
flying is mostly a matter of keeping the airplane moving fast enough so that
there’s enough airflow over and under the wings to keep the plane aloft.
Sometimes things go wrong. There’s bad weather; ice forms on the wings;
or something’s the matter with the fuel. Then that airport, which is only ten
miles away, might as well be a thousand miles away. You smell something
strange coming out of the engine compartment: Now what do you do?

Well, you can read all about it. Pilots read aviation publications all the time.
But reading or listening to a lecture about something is vastly different from
actually practicing it. Reading can enlighten you intellectually, but reading
alone does not translate into practical benefits. Only ‘‘doing’’ allows you to
master a skill. Before I ever performed a simulated emergency landing in an
airplane, I read about dozens of them. I memorized the steps and had them
down cold. What happened when my instructor pulled the power and I was
on my own? I messed up about 25 percent of those steps. Only after doing
several simulated emergency landings did I manage to get it right. Business
and aviation skills are different, of course: Aviation involves both studied
skills and physical skills, whereas in business, you’re rarely required to be
able to do anything physically.

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ⅷ
154

HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

But the general principle applies: You can’t just expect to read something
and be able to master or apply it.

The techniques in How to Negotiate Like a Child must be brought into your
business way of life, or else they’ll vanish and reading this book will have
been a waste of time (although you’ll have enjoyed my sparkly humor).
That brings me back to the book’s kernel, which I mentioned just a moment
ago: Deploy your imagination. But don’t just tell yourself that you’re going
to be more imaginative, creative, and innovative: Do it. Start using these
techniques. If you’re reading this book because you are in the world of
business where negotiations occur in one form or another a dozen times a
day, it makes sense to start using these techniques right away.

Kids are successful negotiators in part because they’re fearless and will try
all kinds of new things without stopping to think of the reasons not to try
them. How often have you seen a kid dive into a swimming pool and do a
belly flop? And then he gets back up and tries the dive again and belly flops
again, or back flops instead. Sooner or later the kid gets the dive right, and
then soon after that, he tries a back flip. It’s all fun to the kid, too. Even
falling on your face in front of a lot of people is fun. That’s the spirit I
admire most about kids. It’s their willingness to mess up that I love best
about them. If only we adults had that freedom from the pressure of our
own expectations!

In other words, kids generally operate stress-free. Even when they seem to
be exploding with stress—throwing a tantrum—they seem to be throwing
the stress out. Once the tantrum has passed, they’re cleansed of stress. A
lack of stress gives children incredible strength. Indeed, the absence of
stress (which is the kind of worry, angst, and anxiety that causes adults to
drink, take pills, and spend hours in therapy) goes a long way toward
explaining why a child can get away with so many of these techniques that
an adult just

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BACK TO THE BEGINNING

155

can’t manage to pull off. Sorry, but it’s a rare fifty-year-old who can
wheedle and charm his way into getting a deadline extended for the third
time. He’s just too worried the other side will see through him to give it a
go. (He’s probably right, too.) The child, having not learned from
experience to worry about failure, just does it.

And wins.

Using these techniques may not bring you to a complete state of childlike
absence of stress, but the more you act like a carefree child, the more you
may feel childlike in spirit—and that is an incredibly important thing. Just
as an absence of stress is useful, being stressed can dramatically reduce
your chances of coming out on top in negotiations. Stress clouds your mind
more than alcohol or drugs. Stress makes it impossible to think clearly, to
tap into your creativity, to figure out what you need to do next. The more
stressed you are, the more likely you are to fail—and fail big time.

Study after study among pilots clearly confirms this fact: When under great
stress, pilots make bad decisions and miss opportunities to make good
decisions. No matter how good the pilot, stress (and believe me, all pilots
feel stress and fear at some point) adversely affects a pilot. The same is true
for other professions and activities, whether you are practicing medicine,
driving a car, climbing rocks, or restocking grocery store shelves. Aviation
is just better studied, and there’s better data. Lack of sleep gets a good deal
of press as a factor that adversely impacts decision making and overall
cognitive ability. Yet stress, which is often harder to quantify, may be even
more of a problem.

There are lot of techniques (and prescription drugs, apparently) that can
help lower your stress level. Over the past decade numerous books have
been written about dealing with stress, not to mention countless magazine
and newspaper articles. You can choose from a dozen or more meditative
techniques, or you can select the yoga style of your choice to help reduce
your stress level. It’s not my

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156

HOW TO NEGOTIATE Like a Child

purpose here to give you pointers on how to reduce stress, other than to say
that the more you can incorporate a child’s perspective, the less stress you
will feel. That’s not to say that children can never get stressed (obviously,
that’s not so), but when they do they tend to be able to throw it off quickly
and bounce back faster. Children are mostly happy, playful, inquisitive, fun-
oriented, and cheerful (despite what the guests who appear on morning talk
shows have to say). When was the last time you saw a four-year-old not
being able to fall asleep because he was worried about something in
preschool?
If nothing else, behaving a little more like a child and a little less like an
adult will help clear your head and make you a more innovative, energetic,
and successful negotiator.

There’s one other wonderful thing about children, too. All the possibilities
are limitless to them. Any single deal is sometimes an all-or-nothing
venture. There’s no make-or-break point because they haven’t yet learned to
define themselves by whether they succeed or fail at whatever they attempt.
We adults, who get so bound up in our work that we stress out over it and
feel devastated by setbacks, are the ones who need to change. We need to
unlearn our self-defeating lessons and go back to the child’s sense of
boundlessness. When you know you can always try something anew, start
over, do better next time, you have confidence in yourself and enjoy what
you’re doing.

On the opposite side of the coin, someone who feels bound by rules on all
sides, unable to maneuver, and afraid to take a risk is someone whose
buttons you can push to get the results you want.

That’s not even a negotiation; it’s like playing against a crude computer
game with limited memory and limited processor capability.

When you’re bursting with life and could go off in any of a million ways,
have lots of energy and strategies in reserve, and a sense that even if you
fail, you can still come back with a new and better idea, then you bring real
power to the table. And that is how to negotiate like a child.

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Index
adventure sports, 134

aviation, 7, 37, 72, 79–80, 134, 153–

see also aviation

154, 155

aggression, 43

alliances

backup, calling in, 41–45

decision-making authority and,

effective use of, 43–45

95–96

problems of, 41–43

knowing your own team, 58–61

being nice, 3, 51–53, 89–90

in playing one side against the other,

being yourself, 56–57

99

Big (movie), 144

sticking with your gang, 69–71

birthdays, celebrating, 59

blaming others, 136

tantrums and, 15–16, 18

bluffing, 19–20, 26–36, 96–97

apologies, 137–138, 141

board games, 44, 62, 149

appearance

Branson, Richard, 124

attractiveness and, 130–132

breaking the rules, 79–81

of losing, 75–78

intentional, 80–81

of youth, 6–7, 144

testing other side before, 80–81

attractiveness, 130–132

unintentional, 79–80

authenticity, 56–57

bribes, soliciting, 116–117

authority to negotiate

Bush, George W., 79

determining, 94–97

playing one side against the other,

caller ID, 29

98–99

Candy Land (board game), 62

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INDEX

capitalism, 67–68

tendency to side with crying person,

capitulation, tantrums and, 10

21–23

Careers (board game), 44

cuteness, 130–132

cell phones, smart, 29

changing the rules, 76–78, 82–83

deals, exchanging, 107–108

changing the subject, 112–113

decision-making authority

checkers, 62

determining, 94–97

chess, 62

playing one side against the other,

child-negotiating techniques

98–99

business applications of, 8–9

delaying tactics

combining, 91

changing the subject, 112–113

developing partnership with child-

effectiveness of, 100–101

hood and, 145–147

moving slowly, 72–74, 102–104

list of, 2–3

pretending not to hear or understand,

negotiation as teaching tool, 92–93

26–36, 86–88
richness of childhood experiences

procrastinating, 102–104

and, 5–9

tantrums and, 18

determination, 118–120

strengths and limitations of, 4–5

directness about needs, 65–66

tapping into childhood’s power,

distracting thoughts, handling, 47–50

148–150

divide and conquer approach, 98–99

Chrysler, 110

doing a bad job, 105–106

Chutes and Ladders (board game), 149

Clinton, Bill, 113

echo game, 121–123

Cold War, 125

changing emphasis over time in,

Comcast Corp., 77–78

122–123
common interests, 37–40

emphasizing areas of agreement in,

community service, 114–115

122

competition, playing your best game,

Eisner, Michael, 11

62–64

Ellison, Larry, 11

concession, get other side to offer,

e-mail, bouncer programs, 29

34–36

escape clauses, 64

conformist mode, 6

ethics, sense of, 54–55

contract negotiations, 107–108

cooperation, 64, 87, 90

failure, fearlessness toward, 133–134,

creativity, 148–156

154

crying, 21–25
Farrell, Colin, 27

after losing, 139–140

fearlessness, 133–134, 154

in the movies, 21–22

following the rules to the letter, 84–85

overuse of, 24–25

forgetting, 141–142

planning to use, 23–25

forlornness, 110–111

risks of, 24–25

friendship

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159

benefits of, 71
Little Engine That Could, The, 120

best friends, 70

long-range goals, 4, 107–108

with business colleagues, 59, 60

losing

sticking with your gang, 69–71

giving appearance of, 75–78

after winning, 137–138

responses to, 139–142

Friends (TV series), 16, 86

low-quality work, 105–106

Frost, Robert, 48

loyalty, sticking with your gang, 69–71

lying, 54–55

Gates, Bill, 11

genuineness, 56–57

Marx, Karl, 67–68

gifts, 116–117

meetings, coping techniques for, 48–50, good deeds, 114–115

119–120
gracious approach, 89–90

Microsoft, 11

grudges, 4, 137–138

milestones, celebrating, 59

miniature golf, 149

Hanks, Tom, 144

mistakes

happiness, 145–147

of adults versus children, 141

hearing, problems with, see pretending need for time-outs and, 73

not to hear or understand

Monopoly (board game), 62, 149

here-and-now approach, 4–5, 46–50

morality, sense of, 54–55

hobbies, sharing information about

moving on

common, 38–39

grudges and, 4, 137–138

honesty, 54–55

after losing, 140–141

hopefulness, 70

moving slowly, 102–104

humble approach, 89–90

music, 149–150

‘‘my dad can beat up your dad’’ tech-

imagination, 148–156

nique, 41–45

Imus, Don, 28

effective use of, 43–45

incentives, 116–117

problems of, 41–43

irrationality, 124–125

naive approach, 26–36, 86–88

Jackson, Michael, 103

in avoiding negotiations, 88

‘‘Joey Syndrome,’’ 86

effective use of, 31–33, 86–88

just do it approach, 4–5, 46–50

examples of use, 27–28

getting the other side to offer some-

Kissinger, Henry, 125

thing, 34–36

impact of, 28–30

Lavin, Christine, 145–146

preventing use of, 33

leaving negotiations, 67–68

problem of, 31

‘‘lemonade stand’’ appeal, 114–115

silence and, 34–36

leverage, in exchanging one deal for an-technology and, 29, 31

other, 107–108

timing and, 30, 32

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INDEX
naps, 74

examples of use, 27–28

neediness, 91–93

getting the other side to offer some-

needs, directness about, 65–66

thing, 34–36

niceness, 3, 51–53, 89–90

impact of, 28–30

Nixon, Richard, 125

preventing use of, 33

problem of, 31

office politics, 56–57

silence and, 34–36

optimism, 70, 143–151

technology and, 29, 31

Oracle Corp., 11

timing and, 30, 32

orienteering, 149

procrastinating, 102–104

outside experts, calling in, 63–64

public service, 114–115

Outwitting Neighbors (Adler), 17

overanalysis, avoiding, 46–50

quality of work, lowering, 105–106

overplanning, avoiding, 46–50

quiet tantrums, 11, 14

ownership, responsibilities of, 67–68

reading, versus doing, 134, 153–154

Parcheesi (board game), 62

renegotiation, 107–108

Perry Mason (TV series), 123

repeating game, 121–123

persistence, 118–120

changing emphasis over time in,

personal relationships, sharing informa-122–123

tion about, 39–40

emphasizing areas of agreement in,

Phone Booth (movie), 27

122

physical stamina, 119–120

resilience, 143–144

pilots, 7, 37, 72, 79–80, 134, 153–154, respect, showing the other party, 89–
90

155

Roberts, Brian, 77–78

planning

rules

overuse of, 46–50

breaking, 79–81

to use crying, 23–25

changing, 76–78, 82–83

play dates, calling off, 72–73

following to the letter, 84–85

playfulness, 149–150

playing one side against the other,

sabbaticals, 74

98–99

self-confidence

playing your best game, 62–64

as coping technique, 119–120

pleasing the other side, 3, 51–53, 89–90

from sticking with your gang, 69–71

politeness, 89–90

Serling, Rod, 145

power naps, 74

sharing important information, 37–40

pre-negotations, 63–64

effective use of, 37–39

preparedness, 135–136

problems of, 39–40

pretending not to hear or understand,

sick days, 74, 126–127

26–36, 86–88

silence, effective use of, 34–36

in avoiding negotiations, 88

sleep, importance of, 74, 119–120, 155

effective use of, 31–33, 86–88

slowing down, 72–74, 102–104

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161

smart cell phones, 29

teasing, changing the subject during,

smiling, 131, 132

112–113

socializing, role of, 59

telemarketers, naive approach to, 27

soliciting bribes, 116–117

telephones

Sorry (board game), 44, 62

caller ID and, 29

speaking out, 48–49

dealing with telemarketers, 27

speech coaches, 131–132

smart cell phones and, 29

Spence, Gerry, 131

testing, of other party’s attitude toward sportsmanship, 64

rules, 80–81

losing and, 139–142

threats, 19–20

winning and, 137–138

effective use of, 19–20

Stewart, Martha, 39–40

examples of use, 19

Stockholm Syndrome, 60

leaving negotiations as, 67–68

stress, lack of, 154–156

time-outs, 72–74

stubbornness, 118–120

timing

subject, changing the, 112–113

in pretending not to hear or under-

suffering, winning through sympathy

stand, 30, 32

and, 109

see also delaying tactics

super-politeness, 89–90

Trump, Donald, 19

support networks, sticking with your

Trump Tower (New York City), 19

gang, 69–71

sympathy

understanding, problems with, see naive forlornness and, 110–111

approach

winning through, 109

vacation days, 74

Virgin Atlantic, 124

taking your ball and going home, 67–68

tantrums, 10–18

Walt Disney Company, The, 11

defending against another person’s,

Watergate investigation, 125

15–18

weakness, neediness versus, 93

examples of use, 11

weak promises, making, 128–129

in group settings, 14–15

Williams, Anthony, 19

overuse of, 12–14

winning

quiet, 11, 14

letting the other guy think he’s won,

responding to, 15–18

75–78

risks of using, 12–14

responses to, 137–138

throwing, 10–15

through sympathy, 109

teamwork

wonder, stimulating sense of, 150

knowing your own team, 58–61

skills for, 59–61

youth, appearance of, 6–7, 144

sticking with your gang, 69–71

see also alliances

Zen techniques, 48, 49

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