At Mobus Creative Negotiating, we focus on external negotiations—the process of finding an optimal deal between two arms-length parties. In this context, insiders are the people who can’t tolerate ambiguity—who cave in to the other side’s demands to relieve their own stress. They’re so desperate to close the transaction that they block out what it will cost them. Insiders come in different flavors. Avoiders put off the negotiation process indefinitely; accepters can’t quite bring themselves to ask for a better price. But in their compulsion to reach a quick agreement, all of them will sell their own interests down the river.
Where the insiders can’t wait to say “Yes,” outsiders shout “No!” to the rooftops. Convinced that the world is out to take advantage of them, they make sure they get in the first punch. In my own experience, one extreme case was a New Jersey subcontractor named Mike. An affable cement mason by trade, Mike never met a negotiation he wasn’t willing to blow up. He cared only about getting the best possible deal for himself: best price, best payment terms, best delivery schedule, best everything. Mike approached every transaction like a game of chicken—or war. He wasn’t merely stubborn; he was ferocious, relentless. When push came to assault, he refused to turn away from a head-on collision. And since the other side usually would back off, Mike wound up winning every time.
Until he didn’t, that is. Until he got people so angry and frustrated that he ruptured every relationship he ever had, including his marriage. It reached the point where my family’s construction company couldn’t use him any more. His own workmen left him. Mike wound up with nothing.
Fortunately, there’s a middle ground between these two extremes. David Brooks calls it “the edge of the inside,” the place where we can “take advantage of the standards and practices of an organization but not be imprisoned by them.” It’s where antagonisms are transformed into complementary relationships. It’s the vantage point that allows us to see both sides with clarity.
In our next installment, I’ll consider how negotiators can find the edge of the inside—and why doing so can lead to consistently better deals.