Businesses are losing billions of dollars in opportunities by using negotiation methods that are outdated and ultimately noncompetitive, according to a new book by a Wharton Business School professor.
"The conventional wisdom of power, logic and even win-win is based on ideas that are now more than 30 years old and capture only 25 percent of the potential value," according to Prof. Stuart Diamond, whose book, GETTING MORE: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life (Three Rivers Press), a New York Times bestseller now out in paperback. It is based on a new method of human interaction that consists of 20 years of research with 30,000 people in 45 countries.
GETTING MORE (www.GettingMore.com) shows, simply and step-by-step, how finding and valuing the other party's emotions and perceptions creates four times the value than traditional methods. Understanding the pictures in the heads of others discovers a better starting point for negotiations. Valuing those pictures gets others to be more open to persuasion. And they work with anyone: executives, colleagues, partners, men, women, men, kids, friends, store clerks and those from any culture. The result is twice as many deals, and each deal is worth twice as much, he says.
The book has already sold 725,000 copies worldwide, and is starting to be adopted in America by major companies. Google recently selected the model to train its employees worldwide. At Microsoft, Prof. Diamond's talk at the annual women's conference last year drew more people than a talk just before him by the company's CEO. Lawyer's Weekly called the book "phenomenal." The model was used to quickly settle the 2008 Hollywood Writers strike after a year of conflict. Companies report savings of hundreds of millions of dollars in individual deals through Prof. Diamond's collaborative process.
Diamond said the traditional negotiation tools of power, logic, leverage and win-win either miss the point or are largely irrelevant. When stakes are high, people get emotional, he said, and when they get emotional, they are uninterested in "win-win" rational arguments. "They want their emotions to be valued, no matter what they are, or they will not be persuadable; they won't start listening," he said.
Comments
To post a comment, you must
register and
login.
