When most people think of negotiation, they picture big, high stakes moments: haggling over the price of a house, or hammering out the terms of a business deal. But negotiation is also something we do every day: working out who s taking on which chores, convincing a coworker to help on a project, or even deciding where to go for dinner with friends. The better you understand negotiation, which is really about influencing other people s decisions, the better you'll be at navigating conflicts and opportunities, both big and small. My guest has spent decades studying the art and science of wielding influence.
00:04:36.260My next door neighbor in the dorm was like, I'm signing up for negotiation, but don't
00:04:41.000bother because it's too hard to get into.
00:04:43.280There's going to be 200 people applying for 24 spots.
00:04:46.640But I didn't know what else to put, so I put it, and I got really lucky.
00:04:50.900The reason it was so hard to get into then was because Fisher, Roger Fisher, the guy who wrote Getting the Yes, was the main instructor, and he was taking the year off.
00:04:59.060So his assistant guy, Bruce Patton, who was also one of the authors of Getting the Yes, for the first time was soloing, and they gave him a tiny little class of 24 people.
00:05:07.880But then the next year, Fisher was back, and he went back to having 144.
00:05:13.080And so all of us who were in that little tiny class got invited to be TAs for the bigger class.
00:05:38.820And it was super fun in a chess game sort of way.
00:05:41.920and I didn't feel like I was on the wrong side because I kind of felt like the people on both
00:05:46.680sides were dirtbags. I mean, there were all people who were trying to, you know, because the stuff I
00:05:50.920was defending was a bunch of like real estate limited partnership tax shelters. And the stuff
00:05:56.300that my clients were doing wasn't technically illegal, but I wouldn't have left them alone
00:06:01.620in a room with my mother. So I felt like, well, is this what I really want to do in my life?
00:06:06.740At the time, my wife or I was dating this girl, and then we got engaged, and she was still back up at Harvard.
00:06:14.540She had been a year behind me, and we had met because we were teaching assistants together for Fisher.
00:06:19.120She was from Nebraska, so I was like, okay, I'm going to get her to move to New York.
00:06:22.580So I got an apartment down on St. Mark's Place, you know, Lower East Side, and I thought, she's going to see the sophistication of the big city.
00:06:30.180She'll fall in love with it. Game over.
00:06:31.600But the first day, she came down and dumped her stuff, and we were going to drive her car back to my parents in Connecticut the next day.
00:06:38.500We get out the next morning, and car's not there.
00:06:42.300So that kind of New York took a hit with that.
00:06:45.100And then her counter move was she waited until I was really frustrated with life at the law firm, and she got Fisher to offer me a job helping him write a book.
00:06:56.500And so then I was like, ah, you know, it's promoting negotiation.
00:08:20.420I probably spend more time doing that than I do at Sloan. So partly it was, we were all teaching
00:08:27.360negotiation at Harvard. The thing about it is people who taught negotiation in law schools
00:08:32.000and business schools were either lawyers, especially on the law school side, or economists
00:08:36.960or psychologists. And I thought, well, we, the lawyers actually understand negotiation the best
00:08:43.220because we do it all the time. And you don't really do a whole lot of negotiation. I mean,
00:08:47.680OK, you're still negotiating with your wife and kids and your neighbors as an economist, but your job isn't all day negotiating with people like lawyers.
00:08:56.960I thought we lawyers understood the topic better, but we just made good arguments about why we were right.
00:09:03.540We didn't have experimental design and statistical analysis and that kind of stuff.
00:09:07.500So I thought people are listening to the economists and the psychologists instead of us.
00:09:12.240So one of us needs to go and get a PhD in psychology and learn all that stuff, and then
00:09:18.540we will crush them and conquer and take over the world.
00:09:39.440And that's not what helps you get ahead in academia.
00:09:41.400And at the same time, I was having trouble with my dissertation committee and I got and then I got offered the MIT job.
00:09:49.640So I said, OK, great, I'll take that. I'll still get to teach negotiation and then I can write whatever I want.
00:09:54.980But while I had been doing the Ph.D., my wife had been building a consulting firm and she was making stacks of money and she was, you know, flying out and doing work with clients a lot.0.57
00:10:06.100You know, there's a whole line of research about when a wife makes more than a husband in a marriage like that can that's greatly increases your risk of divorce.0.58
00:10:16.540But really what our family needed was someone to pick up the kids after school and go to the grocery store.0.72
00:10:22.480So I figured, all right, what if I do that?
00:10:24.720But on the other hand, you know, then am I still the man in the marriage?
00:10:28.880You know, when we first got married, I was the one making tons of money at the law firm.
00:10:32.300And then I saw the sign, you know, firefighters wanted at the place.
00:10:36.640And I thought, well, you know, who's a man is a fireman.
00:10:39.640So if I do that, then I've still got the manliness thing on lockdown, even without making more money.
00:10:44.880And I can do that while the kids are in school.
00:10:47.060And, you know, I've still been doing that 15 years later.
00:11:52.760One is their idea of what negotiation is, is one that makes it more frightening.
00:11:58.380A lot of people think negotiation is like wearing a really bright red tie and pounding the table and yelling at them until they give you whatever you want.
00:12:07.460And I think if you start to think about negotiation, what it really means is trying to affect the decisions that other people are going to make.
00:12:16.580And in that sense, you're negotiating all the time.
00:12:19.400And Brett, when you say you're terrible at negotiation, I'll believe you that you didn't do well in the antique store.
00:12:26.000But how have you managed to build such a giant, successful platform if you're terrible at
00:14:39.280For those who aren't familiar with his work,
00:14:41.300what's his overarching philosophy to negotiation?
00:14:44.380And then talk about how you brought in
00:14:47.560ideas from chris voss who we've also had on the podcast yeah so fisher's whole thing well okay
00:14:54.140so fisher's background is important to understand this he was in the eighth air force in the second
00:14:59.840world war and of the you know i think that might maybe the submarine service had a higher death
00:15:07.240rate but that was one of the worst possible things you could be doing and one time we were at a
00:15:13.520wedding together at the Memorial Chapel at Harvard. And off to the side, there's this little
00:15:19.020room with a giant marble. It's not a little room. It's actually, you know, about 20 feet tall.
00:15:23.900But there's a marble wall with something like 2000 names on it of Harvard guys who got killed
00:15:29.880in World War II. And he wandered in there and he was older at the time and I was one of his young
00:15:34.960guys. So I wanted to take care of him. So I go in there with him and he's just pointing at names
00:15:39.300at the wall. And he's like, I knew this guy. I knew this guy. I knew this guy. These guys were
00:15:44.440identical twins. I never liked that guy. You know, the number of people he knew who'd been killed in
00:15:50.680the war was enormous. And it wasn't just that, that what they had suffered as a group, and they
00:15:57.940were incredibly brave and suffered terribly, you know, the young officer class of the United States
00:16:03.780at that time. But it was also what they did. You know, look, we didn't start that war. We didn't
00:16:09.260start the atrocities. We didn't do the worst atrocities. But when we joined in, everybody
00:16:14.320else was already doing it. And we started doing things, too. We wiped out whole cities full of
00:16:21.160people with incendiary bombing. And then for Fisher, he particularly felt guilty over Hiroshima.
00:16:28.420He was a weatherman. He was an amateur weatherman before he started in the war.
00:16:32.180and they made him a weatherman in the air force and you might think that's a pretty good gig but
00:16:37.060no it was terrible because they didn't have satellite imaging then what they did if they
00:16:40.880wanted to know you know if the weather was too bad to send planes out you send one plane out
00:16:46.400with a weatherman on it and you see if it comes back and you know he barely survived doing that
00:16:52.600in europe and then they sent him to japan and every day he would be in a b-29 and you'd fly
00:16:58.860over Japan to do the weather. And they told him, you know, bring a couple of bombs and just drop
00:17:04.720them on anything you see. You know, it was a very small bomb load because they mostly gave them
00:17:08.740extra fuel and they had all this weather equipment. And they would drop a bomb or two and Japanese1.00
00:17:14.700fighters would come up to try to shoot them down. And he didn't like getting shot at by Japanese
00:17:19.240fighters. So he said to his commander, hey, what if we didn't bring the bombs? These guys are short
00:17:23.880of gas, but they can't let us bomb them without shooting back. But if we stop bombing them,0.97
00:17:29.320maybe they'll let the weather plane go by without attacking us. And his commander said,
00:17:33.920no, that's never going to work, but you want to try it, fine. And they did. And after about two
00:17:38.740weeks, it worked. And the Japanese stopped trying to come up and shoot him down when a lone B-290.93
00:17:43.940went over Japan. And he felt great about that. And he thought it was a tremendously successful0.97
00:17:49.860negotiation he had with the Japanese. But then when the Enola Gay goes over Hiroshima,0.91
00:17:56.360they think it's the weather plane and they don't even pull the air raid siren. So the kids,
00:18:01.920the school kids are out on the playground when it happens. And, you know, he thought he had been
00:18:07.200complicit in this incredible evil that he didn't even intend. And that's why he devoted his life
00:18:14.140to improving negotiation. He was trying to stop other young guys from getting killed.
00:18:18.340And the thing is, my father, his parents died when he was really young, but he had a much older brother who was 11 years older than him who basically raised him. And he was in the Eighth Air Force as well. And he also got killed and didn't come back. So I grew up seeing, you know, that wound in my father.
00:18:37.560And so Fisher's crusade to keep that from happening to other people, you know, was really seductive to me.
00:18:44.160But that's what Fisher was trying to do.
00:18:46.320And his basic philosophy was two things.
00:18:48.720He would say interest-based negotiation.
00:18:50.860And that's what we were talking about before is figure out what each side wants, you know, not just what they say they want, but why do they want that?
00:19:00.520And then you can try to reconcile those much more easily than you can reconcile the positions.
00:19:06.120you know, what their demands are, if you look under the demands and see what's motivating them.
00:19:12.080But then on the distribution side that we were talking about, he called it principled negotiation,
00:19:17.760which basically meant we should try to figure out some legal or other standard, something like
00:19:24.400Kelly's Blue Book, to tell us what we should do rather than threatening each other, that we should
00:19:30.540look for a source of legitimacy rather than a source of destructive power over the other person.
00:19:36.740And so that was his fundamental thing. That's kind of what you do. And then later on,
00:19:41.660you brought in the ideas of Chris Voss, who has this experience as a hostage negotiator.
00:19:46.620Yeah. So I met Chris because he had a knee operation. And so he was off duty for the FBI
00:19:53.560for like three months. And he figured he had just been through, he had a great record of success as
00:19:59.360a hostage negotiator, but he didn't win them all, of course. And he had just come off one that went
00:20:04.100really badly. And he wanted to, he said, okay, we got to learn more. And he said, I'll go up to
00:20:09.300Harvard and see if there's anything that they have that we can steal and make part of our practice.
00:20:14.840And I think he got some good stuff, but dude, we got so much more out of him. Because at that point,
00:20:20.360like law enforcement negotiation and university negotiation teaching weren't really in contact
00:20:26.820with each other. And he was the guy who bridged that gap and started the ideas flowing back and
00:20:32.260forth, which, you know, even if he had never done anything else in his career, that would have been
00:20:36.860a tremendous achievement. But then Chris came and taught a course at Harvard with me. And then he
00:20:46.400invited me to come with him when he retired from the FBI to teach negotiation to friendly governments
00:20:52.980in the Persian Gulf. And man, that was one of the greatest experiences of my life. And I learned so
00:20:59.460much from them. But even more, the thing that struck me was we tried really hard to get people
00:21:05.620to be better at things like, you know, listening instead of talking. But it's very hard to change
00:21:10.460people's behavior on that. And we would find that, you know, if you really drill it into people,
00:21:14.920you can get them to change for about a week and then they start to drift back to what they've
00:21:18.800been doing before. But Chris and his guys got massive behavioral change much faster than I
00:21:25.800ever thought was possible. And I was trying to figure out, well, what is it that they're doing
00:21:30.420that's so much better? And I think it was two things. One, it was they talked about ideas much
00:21:35.920less and just did a lot more practice, you know, like very much more brass tacks. Okay, what do
00:21:41.120you say? Not what's the theory behind it? You know, so some people learn from top down from
00:21:47.840what are the big theories and then work on how do you implement that. Other people, and I think
00:21:52.680there's probably a lot more people like this who go up from the specifics. And if they ever need
00:21:57.980to get to theory, maybe they'll get to it. But the important thing is the specifics of how you do it.
00:22:03.500So they would break down negotiation skills instead of saying, hey, you know, be really
00:22:07.960empathetic listening to them. They would say stuff like, all right, you should make a minimal
00:22:12.400encourager about, you know, 10 times a minute. And a minimal encourager is like the little noise you
00:22:17.520make when somebody's talking like uh-huh uh-huh wow whoa you know so they were at a much greater
00:22:23.560level of specificity and then they just did drill again and again and again and it was like it is
00:22:31.040the same as when i was coaching little league you know you don't explain the theory of baseball you
00:22:35.620just have the kid you know first hit it off a tee then you pitch it to him slow underhand you know
00:22:41.980and at each step, you got to go like, okay, keep your back elbow up. Okay, no, like turn more.
00:22:47.860And that was the way they taught negotiation. And I thought it was hugely effective. But,
00:22:53.760you know, hostage negotiation is a very specific kind of negotiation. There are a lot of parts of
00:23:00.340negotiation that really don't come up there. Like, for example, using standards of legitimacy,
00:23:06.580that's not as much a thing there or you know inventing creative options usually not much of
00:23:12.980a thing what you're mostly focusing on is information gathering and relationship building
00:23:19.100and they got incredibly brilliant at that stuff but then i thought well all the other stuff that's
00:23:24.900in fisher's work we need to do the same kind of breakdown that they did and turn it into little
00:23:31.360very specific you know things that people can drill again and again all right so yeah you're
00:23:37.420combining the the theory of fisher for business negotiation life negotiation with the brass tack
00:23:44.260tactics of chris voss the tactics and also the uh i guess you'd say pedagogy but how do you teach
00:23:51.360it yeah yeah i think before our conversation we were talking about mark ripeto yeah you got into
00:23:56.040barbell training and we were talking about how what ripeto is really good at is breaking down
00:24:00.860relatively complex movements into step-by-step things where like anyone can go to a seminar
00:24:07.020or watch a video of rip a toe teaching and like you'll be deadlifting perfectly after that exactly
00:24:12.360or another great example of it is the series you had on barbecuing you know of like well how do i
00:24:18.320make a charcoal fire well how do i make you know three heat zones on my grill well what do i do
00:24:23.180differently for a steak or a hamburger that's it's the exact same kind of thing applied to
00:24:27.780negotiation. Yeah. I remember when we did that, I did that negotiation class in law school and
00:24:31.940we read getting to yes. And then they're like, all right, go do a mock negotiation. I had no
00:24:36.600clue what I was doing. They didn't give you any specific things to say or to do or how to carry
00:24:41.320it out. So you're trying to do this with your book. All right. So let's talk about some of
00:24:45.140these skills. So you and your coauthor break down negotiation to a discrete set of skills
00:24:49.700and you give people exercises that they can do in their day-to-day lives so they can practice
00:24:54.360these skills. The first skill is called give them a sandwich. What's this skill all about?
00:24:59.960Well, that title is ripped off directly from Chris and his FBI people. So in hostage negotiation,
00:25:06.980you know, there's different kinds of things. There is, well, what if you get captured by,
00:25:10.100you know, a gang in Mexico versus get captured by Al-Qaeda? One of the ones they talk about is
00:25:15.640an unplanned barricade, which is, let's say you go in to rob a bank and you're not planning to
00:25:21.560take any hostages. You just want to wave a gun around and get money. But the cops show up before
00:25:25.760you get away. And so, you know, you point your gun at the customers and the tellers and you say,
00:25:31.460all right, here's what I want to the police. And that kind of situation used to be about 50-50,
00:25:38.240is someone going to get shot today or not? You know, because what they would do is they say,
00:25:42.020all right, you got 10 minutes to surrender and then we're coming in. And what they do now is
00:25:47.060they surround the bank and let you see them surrounding it so you know you can't get away
00:25:51.860and they throw in a phone to talk to you and they just start asking you questions like hey are you
00:25:57.400okay like do you need any medical help okay what about the other people in there are they okay
00:26:02.080and they'll just keep talking to you at forever because they you know can do a shift change if
00:26:08.300they get tired and you can't so they're just tiring you out but then what they're really
00:26:12.280waiting for is for you to get hungry because you didn't have a plan to do this and then
00:26:16.940when you get hungry and you say, Hey, I want some food. Oh, that's when they're perfectly happy.
00:26:21.440And they'll talk to you for like a half hour about, well, what's your favorite kind of sandwich do
00:26:25.680you want? Like, okay, we're going to go get that. And then they give it to you. And they, then they
00:26:30.920say, Hey, you know, the Lieutenant here is really mad at me because I gave you that sandwich, but I
00:26:35.420think you're a good guy. So I wanted to help you out. Could you help me out and let one of those
00:26:40.080people go? And almost always they do. And then you give them some water and you get somebody else
00:26:45.140out. And you just keep doing nice little things for them and asking for something in return.
00:26:51.020And Bob Cialdini, he was at University of Arizona, had a wonderful book that I recommend to all your
00:26:56.280listeners called Influence. And he talks about reciprocity in there. And, you know, you see this
00:27:01.420happening in car dealerships when they give you a cup of coffee, you know, when a charity sends you
00:27:07.100mailing labels or something like that. They want to give you a little thing that's really cheap for
00:27:11.840them to give. And that triggers a reflex in you of, oh, I owe them and now I have to give them
00:27:18.840something back. But people are really, really terrible about measuring how much they got and
00:27:24.480how much they give back. It's what they call accounting insensitivity in the economics
00:27:29.280literature. And so you give somebody a tiny little thing and very often they'll give you back
00:27:35.380much, much more. But even more importantly, they start thinking of you as a friend and an ally.
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00:36:14.040And now back to the show. All right. So the reciprocity helps you build that relationship
00:36:18.360of trust. So you can have this conversation to figure out what everyone wants. Another
00:36:23.020reciprocity tactic is using someone's name during a negotiation. Yeah. Why does this work? And how
00:36:31.420do you, here's the thing, how do you do this in a way so it doesn't feel gross? Because I'm sure
00:36:34.540everyone's encountered a salesperson and every like five words, it's Brett. Well, what do you
00:36:41.340think, Brett? Brett? And I'm like, oh, geez, this is gross. You're, no. You're really laying on
00:36:45.260thick here, man. Yeah. So, so first on the technique, which is people, if you're trying
00:36:51.560to get someone's attention, the thing that their brain is most wired to pay attention to is their
00:36:58.440own name. To the extent that you can get people who are, you know, in a coma or in a vegetative
00:37:04.560state. And if you say their name, you know, and you're measuring brain activity, there's a little
00:37:10.800spike in brain activity. That's like the last thing your brain loses because that's the first
00:37:17.220word you learn is, you know, your mother whispering your own name to you. And people will tend to
00:37:23.780think that if you know their name and you use their name, that you must be friends. Now, about
00:37:31.040overdoing it, a lot of these things are about skill level. One of the skills that the hostage
00:37:38.440negotiators use in listening is what they call mirroring, where you'll repeat a word or two
00:37:47.240that somebody uses. And then they'll usually talk more about whatever that was. And I had had people
00:37:54.420use that technique on me in a way that was really fake and annoying. So I was talking to Chris,
00:38:00.360the FBI guy, when we were teaching together and I was like, dude, some of your techniques,
00:38:04.000like, you know, minimal encouragers, those are fantastic. But this mirroring thing,
00:38:07.480it's really fake and it's really annoying because it's really annoying. I was like, yeah,
00:38:11.400it totally cheeses me off because like this guy's trying to manipulate me and I'm a negotiation
00:38:15.220expert. He goes, you're an expert. And I was like, I've been doing this for like 20 years. And you
00:38:20.500know, he did it like four or five times in a row before I realized, and I was so pissed off,
00:38:25.500but he's practiced it a lot and he's really good at it. And there's a big difference between
00:38:32.080someone who's learned the idea of a technique and is doing a terrible job at it, which makes it come
00:38:38.760across as fake and annoying versus somebody who's you know really got it dialed in and you know
00:38:45.880chris practices incessantly all the time i mean one time i went to a diner with him for breakfast
00:38:51.620and he knew the names of everybody who worked at the place all the waitresses the cashier all the
00:38:58.100bus boys he knew where their kids went to school and he just does that kind of thing all the time
00:39:03.560is practice and if you do that where you're just practicing a little bit every day you know it's
00:39:09.060just like working out each day of practice doesn't make a big difference but if you do it solidly for
00:39:15.180a year it's going to be a huge transformation all right so use people's name but you have to
00:39:19.940practice it and you might kind of be awkward at it so i think an everyday practice as you're having
00:39:23.780conversations with people just every day learn how to drop their name in throughout the conversation
00:39:28.380And especially I think this is great for young people today because being on screens tends to isolate us from other people. And a lot of people go through life, you know, their only contact with other people is on, you know, social media. But by learning people's names, you learn the name of the person at the counter at the coffee shop you go to, you know, you learn the name of the guy who sweeps up in your office.
00:39:50.380office, now you're turning your own environment into an environment of human connection instead
00:39:56.860of isolation, you know, and anonymity. And that's, that's like a huge help for your mental health.
00:40:03.580All right. The next skill you talk about is managing your emotions during negotiation.
00:40:08.540And I think it's a big one because like, you know, whenever I have to negotiate,
00:40:11.720I can start feeling the cortisol, the cortisol dump. What can we do to get a handle on our
00:40:16.720emotions because as you said our brain recognizes this as a conflict a fight yeah well your brain
00:40:21.800recognizes a conflict but your brain doesn't realize it's not the stone age anymore and this
00:40:26.660is very unlikely to turn into a violent conflict right so your brain still thinks i you know i
00:40:32.100might have to kill this guy so what do you do to manage that okay so a couple things one is you
00:40:37.940know if you know this is going to be an emotional thing you can try you know you can imagine it0.90
00:40:42.500ahead of time and imagine how scary it's going to be and imagine your own emotional reaction
00:40:47.480and kind of have your freak out in advance. You know, anything gets easier the more times you do
00:40:53.420it. But the interesting thing is just visualizing it and walking through it mentally counts as one
00:40:59.240of those times you do it. And so there's some benefit there. A technique that I really love,
00:41:04.460which again, I learned from Chris, is what they call emotion labels. And this is a thing that
00:41:10.080they used in hostage negotiation, if the guy you're talking to is freaking out and you think
00:41:14.700he might start getting violent, you say, wow, it seems like this is really upsetting to you.
00:41:21.080And you got to be cautious about saying it seems like, because if you say to the person,
00:41:25.060oh, I see right through you and I know exactly what's going on in your mind,
00:41:28.740that's going to piss them off even more. So you want to say, it seems like this is making you mad.
00:41:34.000And the interesting thing is, like we were talking about when you get that cortisol dump,
00:41:38.180the oxygen and glucose you know the blood flow leaves not all of it but some of it goes out of0.96
00:41:46.300your brain and into your muscles and that makes you measurably stupider if we make you angry and0.98
00:41:52.540have you take an iq test you'll score about 20 points lower so what you want to do is to get0.98
00:41:58.560the prefrontal cortex the thinking part of your brain that's right behind your eyes and your
00:42:03.220forehead back in the game. So you wish you had like jumper cables hooked up to that. If you
00:42:08.540could get them thinking again, instead of feeling upset, then they'll be able to be more rational.
00:42:14.380And the way you do that, okay, what we know is that these emotion labels have a huge calming
00:42:19.820effect on people. There are different theories about why that works so well. But one theory
00:42:25.120is that there's a thing in the back of your prefrontal cortex, the superior frontal gyrus.
00:42:31.360And that's the part of your brain, the part of your thinking brain that looks at and observes your own emotional state, but it's in the thinking brain.
00:42:42.200So if you activate that, you will trigger more activity in their rational, non-emotional brain.
00:42:50.480But the reason it's hard to re-trigger the non-emotional brain is because when you're angry or afraid, you tend to reject any stimulus that's not connected to the threat or the target of your anger.
00:43:04.860And the reason that's such a cute spot to go after is because it's connected to the emotion, but it triggers their rational brain into a higher level of activity.
00:43:16.080So, you know, I listened to this one conversation where there's this guy, he was a Marine sergeant who disappeared out of Basra in, I think, 2004, you know, during the height of the Iraq war.
00:43:29.140And he shows up a week later, nobody knows how he got there, at his ex-wife's house in Hawaii.
00:43:34.860And he's got a gun and the cops show up and he says, well, you know, I found out she was