Compete While You Collaborate
Fisher and Ury had one critical blind spot. They ignored a central element of anynegotiation—namely, power. In Getting to Yes, self-interest is the sand in the gears of “non-adversarial bargaining.” Conflict is counter-productive, something to be “managed” and “resolved” by an invisible hand: “[W]here your interests conflict, you should insist that the result be based on some fair standards independent of the will of either side.” [My emphasis added.] In this ideal world, two reasonable people lay their cards on the table, divulge their interests, find an understanding—and, voila!
That’s our fundamental issue with the Harvard guys: They throw out the leverage with the bathwater. For better or worse, power counts. While twenty-first-century negotiating is indeed collaborative, you can’t wash the competition out of it. Even as we strive to expand the pie, we still compete for a bigger slice. In real life, “win-win” is often WIN-win or even—if one party is really skillful—WIN!-win.
So where do we go from here? As I noted last time, Karrass-style power negotiating still works like a charm in basic bargaining—to protect your company’s interests, first and last. When the situation fits, there is nothing wrong with that. In deals with more complex, long-term implications, however, the old tools may not suffice for new problems.
Win-win can work, too, if you have the luxury of time and a like-minded person on the other side—though it’s not always so easy “to produce wise outcomes efficiently and amicably,” as Fisher and Ury put it. Applied too loosely, win-win can be dangerously subjective. If people are desperate enough going in, they might feel like they’ve won after giving away the store.(To be fair, Ury has acknowledged the importance of conflict in his later books, including Getting Past No.)
Dad’s Third Way
But my main point is this: All negotiations are not the same. They take different paths, with different inflection points—or they may veer from one path to another in unpredictable ways. You might get every concession and still wind up with a terrible deal, because you beat up the other side and jeopardized the long-term relationship. On the other hand, you might choose to get less today in exchange for a more stable and lucrative arrangement down the pike.
With our decades of collective know-how, the Mobus Creative Negotiating team saw that contemporary businesspeople needed a new kind of training program. They needed a fusion of Karrass’s tactical practicality and the Harvard school’s strategic approach. Most of all, they required a range of negotiating skills for various situations. That insight became the seed of the Mobus Negotiating Continuum.
