|
 To
a roomful of IT professionals at Gartner Spring Symposium/ITxpo – many
of whom make their living in the Art of the Deal buying and selling
expensive hardware and software – master negotiator Herb Cohen
dispensed some home-spun wisdom on how to get from “No” to
“Yes.”
Mr. Cohen, channeling veteran comedian Jerry Still
(whom he favored in appearance and comic timing) amusingly reminisced
about deals gone well, and bad. Amid
the laughter, however, he offered up nuggets of negotiating advice
panned from his experience as a worldwide hostage negotiator and
enterprise deal broker.
For
more than 30 years, Mr. Cohen has played an often invisible but crucial
role in helping to defuse hostile takeovers and global hostage crises.
As an occasional adviser to U.S. presidents since the 1970’s, he was
involved in the Iranian Hostage Crisis and high-profile airplane and
cruise ship hijackings. He is the author of the bestseller You Can
Negotiate Anything.
 Taming the Ego
Negotiation, he explained, is “voluntary decision
making. It requires two
people to voluntarily say ‘yes.’”
Reaching that end, however, can be difficult because of
cross-cultural phenomena, i.e., “we see things as we are, rather than
as they are,” he said, adding that opposing sides in a negotiation
often are blinded by their own needs and fail to see the situation from
the other’s perspective.
“The operative attitude for success is to
care…but not too much,” Mr.
Cohen said. To be effective
in face-to-face negotiating, he urged listeners to do the following:
- Don’t
spend time talking and pushing you own point of view
- Listen
actively, showing in a nonverbal way (through nods and smiles) that
you’re absorbing what the other person is saying
- Ask questions
- Take
notes (even if what the other person is saying is “gibberish,”
he added), which shows respect
- Probe
deeper and listen “louder”
- Avoid
all arguing and debating
Through these techniques, Mr. Cohen stressed,
negotiators can unearth the other side’s underlying concerns.  Once identified, those concerns open up to the deal proponent
a path to address them, instead of just hawking a technology.
“You help them solve their problems while you solve yours,”
he said.
“In negotiating,” he said, “stupidity is
better than being smart. People
will respond favorably to vulnerability,” Mr. Cohen cited
self-deprecation as a useful tool, e.g., being young and inexperienced,
being new to the industry, being a man in a roomful of women.
He also urged the audience to slow down the process of
negotiation, and “dwell amidst uncertainty and ambiguity.” |
