in associationwith
strategy
‘Win/win is a rational tactic for an irrational world. It can work sometimes but at the margins, especially in big negotiations’
He illustrates the point with his involvement in the
Hollywood writer’s strike. In February 2008, he was approached by prominent Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel (model for television’s Entourage, and brother of the for- merWhite House chief of staff Rahm). “It was a Tuesday afternoon and the chief negotiator
for theWriters’ Guild, John Bowman, was going to meet that Thursday morning with five studio heads and their representatives. He needed a list of issues to prioritise. “So I got on the phone with Bowman and a bunch of
other people and I said to them: ‘Forget about the list, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go to the meeting and I want you to say to the studio heads: ‘Hi, how are you doing? Are you happy? We’re not happy. You making money?We’re not making any money. If you had to do this over again how would you do it?’ It took 30 minutes to restart the negotiations and it took two days to get an agreement in principle – after a year of conflict. “There’s two things I can say about this, a) it’s not
rocket science, and b) unless you already know how to do it, it’s completely invisible. In the Middle East they should just be going to lunch without talking about peace. Studies show that when you make a human con- nection with somebody, they’re six times more likely to give you what you want.”
Tell me more “I tell people the right answer to the statement ‘I hate you’ is ‘Tell me more’ because I need to find out your perceptions and the contents of your head, even if you’re a terrorist,” says Diamond. “Otherwise I don’t know where to start to persuade you and I have to know where to start. “So, that is the guiding principle of this book, that peo-
ple are almost everything and you really have to focus in on who they are. If somebody says: ‘I’m not buying from you, I don’t like your products’, I say: ‘Fine, tell me what you hate about me and what you like about my competi- tors?’ It’s almost impossible for people to resist that question, and they will tell me how to persuade them. “It’s completely opposite from the way most people
negotiate. They look for weaknesses in the other party. I don’t care. I look for the other party’s hot buttons – something I first learned as a reporter – and I look for ways to access those hot buttons, to start there and to bring people step by step to where I want them to go.” Speaking with Diamond, it’s not hard to see how he has achieved just that many times over.
Prof Stuart Diamond’s book Getting More – How you can negotiate to succeed in work and life is available now in paperback from Penguin Business Books.
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Winter 2010 Irish Director 41
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