فصل 08

CHAPTER 8

GUARANTEE EXECUTION

During a dangerous and chaotic prison siege in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, a few years ago, a group of inmates armed with makeshift knives took the warden and some of his staff hostage. The situation was especially nervy because the prisoners were both tense and disorganized, a worrisome mix that meant anything could happen.

The negotiators sensed that, beneath the bluster, the prisoners didn’t really want to hurt the staff. They knew that they felt backed into a corner and, more than anything, they wanted the situation to end.

But there was a stumbling block: the inmates were afraid that the prisoners who gave up after taking correctional officers hostage, not to mention the warden, would end up beaten, and badly.

So the negotiators delivered a pair of walkie-talkies to the inmates and designed this elaborate surrender ritual to get the hostage-takers to end the siege. The idea was elegantly simple:

The inmates would send out one of their guys with a walkie-talkie, and he’d walk past the three perimeters of combined multiagency law enforcement that were stationed outside the prison. Once he’d walked past the final perimeter, he’d get into the paddy wagon and be transferred to jail. There, he’d use the walkie-talkie to call the guys back in the prison and say, essentially, “They didn’t kick my ass.” And they’d know it was okay to come out just like he did, one at a time.

After some haggling, the inmates agreed with the plan and the first inmate comes out. It starts off great. He walks past the federal zone, then the SWAT zone, and then he makes it to the outer perimeter. But just as he’s about to climb into the paddy wagon, some guy sees the walkie-talkie and says, “What the hell are you doing with that?” and confiscates it before sending the guy off to the jail.

The inmates back in the prison start to freak out because their buddy hasn’t called. The one with the other walkie-talkie calls the negotiators and starts yelling, “Why didn’t he call? They’re kicking his ass. We told you!” He starts talking about cutting off a hostage’s finger, just to make sure the negotiators know the inmates are for real.

Now it’s the negotiators who are freaking out. They sprint to the perimeter and start screaming at everyone. It’s life and death at stake. Or at least an amputated finger.

Finally, fifteen nail-biting minutes later, this SWAT guy comes striding up, all proud of himself. “Some idiot gave this dude a radio,” he says, and sort of smiles as he hands the negotiators the walkie-talkie. The negotiators barely stop themselves from slugging the guy before they tear off to the jail to have the first inmate call in.

Crisis averted, but barely.

The point here is that your job as a negotiator isn’t just to get to an agreement. It’s getting to one that can be implemented and making sure that happens. Negotiators have to be decision architects: they have to dynamically and adaptively design the verbal and nonverbal elements of the negotiation to gain both consent and execution.

“Yes” is nothing without “How.” While an agreement is nice, a contract is better, and a signed check is best. You don’t get your profits with the agreement. They come upon implementation. Success isn’t the hostage-taker saying, “Yes, we have a deal”; success comes afterward, when the freed hostage says to your face, “Thank you.” In this chapter, I’ll show how to drive toward and achieve consent, both with those at the negotiating table and with the invisible forces “underneath” it; distinguish true buy-in from fake acquiescence; and guarantee execution using the Rule of Three.

“YES” IS NOTHING WITHOUT “HOW”

About a year after the Dos Palmas crisis, I was teaching at the FBI Academy in Quantico when the Bureau got an urgent call from the State Department: an American had been kidnapped in the Ecuadoran jungle by a Colombia-based rebel group. As the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiator, this was my baby, so I put a team together and set up operation headquarters in Quantico.

For a few years, José and his wife, Julie, had been guiding tour groups through the jungle near the Colombian border. Born in Ecuador, José had become an American citizen and was working as a paramedic in New York City when he and Julie decided to set up an ecotourism business in his native country. José loved the Ecuadoran jungle, and he’d long dreamed of teaching visitors about the monkeys that swung through the trees and the flowers that perfumed the trails.

The business grew as ecotourists fell for the pair’s obvious passion, and on August 20, 2003, José and Julie took eleven people on a white-water rafting trip down the Mira River. After a great day on the water, everyone was smiling and soaked as they piled into Jeeps and pickups for the ride to an inn in a nearby village. José told tall tales as he drove the lead truck, Julie to his right with their eleven-month-old baby in her lap.

They were five minutes from the inn when three men jumped into the road and aimed guns at the truck. A fourth man emerged and held a revolver to Julie’s head as the thugs pulled José from the car and forced him into the truck bed. The kidnappers then ordered the caravan through several small towns to a fork in the road, where they got out and walked José past Julie’s seat in the cab.

“Just remember,” Julie said, “no matter what happens, I love you.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” José answered.

And then he and his captors disappeared into the jungle.

The captors wanted $5 million. We wanted to buy time.

Ever since the Dos Palmas debacle and the Pittsburgh epiphany, I had been raring to employ the lessons we’d learned about calibrated questions. So when José was kidnapped, I sent my guys down to Ecuador and told them that we had a new strategy. The kidnapping would provide an opportunity to prove this approach.

“All we’re going to say is, ‘Hey, how do we know José is okay? How are we supposed to pay until we know José is okay?’ Again and again,” I told them.

Although they were queasy about untested techniques, my guys were game. The local cops were livid, though, because they always did proof of life the old-fashioned way (which the FBI had taught them in the first place). Luckily Julie was with us 100 percent because she saw how the calibrated questions would stall for time, and she was convinced that with enough time her husband would find a way to get home.

The day after the kidnapping, the rebels marched José into the mountains along the Colombian border and settled in a cabin high in the jungle. There José built a rapport with the kidnappers to make himself harder for them to kill. He impressed them with his knowledge of the jungle and, with a black belt in karate, he filled the time by teaching them martial arts.

My negotiators coached Julie every day as we waited for contact from the rebels. We learned later that the designated negotiator from José’s captors had to walk to town to negotiate by phone.

My guys told Julie to answer every one of the kidnappers’ demands with a question. My strategy was to keep the kidnappers engaged but off balance.

“How do I know José is alive?” she asked the first time they talked.

To their demand for $5 million, she said, “We don’t have that kind of money. How can we raise that much?”

“How can we pay you anything until we know José is okay?” Julie asked the next time they talked.

Questions, always questions.

The kidnapper who was negotiating with Julie seemed extremely perplexed by her persistent questions, and he kept asking for time to think. That slowed everything down, but he never got angry with Julie. Answering questions gave him the illusion that he had control of the negotiation.

By constantly asking questions and making minuscule offers, Julie drove the ransom down to $16,500. When they came to that number, the kidnappers demanded she get it to them immediately.

“How can I do that when I have to sell my cars and trucks?” she asked.

Always buying more time.

We were starting to grin because success was within reach; we were really close to a ransom that the family could afford.

And then I got a phone call in the middle of the night from one of my deployed guys in Ecuador, Kevin Rust. Kevin is a terrific negotiator and the same guy who’d called to tell me a year earlier that Martin Burnham had been killed. My stomach tied into a knot when I heard his voice.

“We just got a call from José,” Kevin said. “He’s still in guerrilla territory but he escaped and he’s on a bus and he’s making his way out.”

It took me half a minute to respond, and when I did all I could say was “Holy shit! That’s fantastic news!”

What had happened, we learned later, was that with all the delays and questions, some of the guerrillas peeled off and didn’t return. Pretty soon there was only one teenager guarding José at night. He saw an opening late one evening when it began to chuck down rain. Pounding on the metal roof, the rain drowned out all other sound as the lone guard slept. Knowing the wet leaves outside would absorb the sound of his footsteps, José climbed through the window, ran down jungle paths to a dirt road, and worked his way to a small town.

Two days later he was back with Julie and their baby, just a few days before his daughter’s first birthday.

Julie was right: with enough time he had found a way home.

Calibrated “How” questions are a surefire way to keep negotiations going. They put the pressure on your counterpart to come up with answers, and to contemplate your problems when making their demands.

With enough of the right “How” questions you can read and shape the negotiating environment in such a way that you’ll eventually get to the answer you want to hear. You just have to have an idea of where you want the conversation to go when you’re devising your questions.

The trick to “How” questions is that, correctly used, they are gentle and graceful ways to say “No” and guide your counterpart to develop a better solution—your solution. A gentle How/No invites collaboration and leaves your counterpart with a feeling of having been treated with respect.

Look back at what Julie did when the Colombian rebel kidnappers made their first demands.

“How can we raise that much?” she asked.

Notice that she did not use the word “No.” But she still managed to elegantly deny the kidnappers’ $5 million demand.

As Julie did, the first and most common “No” question you’ll use is some version of “How am I supposed to do that?” (for example, “How can we raise that much?”). Your tone of voice is critical as this phrase can be delivered as either an accusation or a request for assistance. So pay attention to your voice.

This question tends to have the positive effect of making the other side take a good look at your situation. This positive dynamic is what I refer to as “forced empathy,” and it’s especially effective if leading up to it you’ve already been empathic with your counterpart. This engages the dynamic of reciprocity to lead them to do something for you. Starting with José’s kidnapping, “How am I supposed to do that?” became our primary response to a kidnapper demanding a ransom. And we never had it backfire.

Once I was working with an accounting consultant named Kelly who was owed a pile of money by a corporate client. She kept consulting because she believed she was developing a useful contact, and because the promise of a future payday seemed to justify continuing in good faith.

But at a certain point Kelly was so far behind on her own bills that she was in a bind. She couldn’t continue to work with only a vague idea of when she’d get paid, but she worried that if she pushed too hard she wouldn’t get paid at all.

I told her to wait until the client asked for more work, because if she made a firm payment demand right away she would be vulnerable if they refused.

Luckily for Kelly, the client soon called to ask her for more work. Once he finished his request, she calmly asked a “How” question:

“I’d love to help,” she said, “but how am I supposed to do that?”

By indicating her willingness to work but asking for help finding a way to do so, she left her deadbeat customer with no choice but to put her needs ahead of everything else.

And she got paid.

Besides saying “No,” the other key benefit of asking “How?” is, quite literally, that it forces your counterpart to consider and explain how a deal will be implemented. A deal is nothing without good implementation. Poor implementation is the cancer that eats your profits.

By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, your carefully calibrated “How” questions will convince them that the final solution is their idea. And that’s crucial. People always make more effort to implement a solution when they think it’s theirs. That is simply human nature. That’s why negotiation is often called “the art of letting someone else have your way.” There are two key questions you can ask to push your counterparts to think they are defining success their way: “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in.

On the flip side, be wary of two telling signs that your counterpart doesn’t believe the idea is theirs. As I’ve noted, when they say, “You’re right,” it’s often a good indicator they are not vested in what is being discussed. And when you push for implementation and they say, “I’ll try,” you should get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Because this really means, “I plan to fail.” When you hear either of these, dive back in with calibrated “How” questions until they define the terms of successful implementation in their own voice. Follow up by summarizing what they have said to get a “That’s right.” Let the other side feel victory. Let them think it was their idea. Subsume your ego. Remember: “Yes” is nothing without “How.” So keep asking “How?” And succeed.

INFLUENCING THOSE BEHIND THE TABLE

A few weeks after José got back to the United States, I drove to his family’s place in upstate New York.

I was thrilled when José escaped, but the case left me with one nagging worry: Had my new strategy failed? You see, José had gotten home safely, but not because we’d negotiated his release. I worried that our winning had less to do with our brilliant strategy than with dumb luck.

After being greeted warmly by Julie and her parents, José and I grabbed some coffee and sat down. I’d gone there to do what CNU referred to as a hostage survival debriefing. I was after insights into how to better advise people facing potential kidnappings how best to survive, not just physically, but psychologically. I was also burning to find out what had occurred behind the scenes because it seemed as if my new strategy hadn’t worked.

Finally the conversation came around to our use of calibrated questions.

“You know what?” he said. “The craziest thing was that their negotiator was supposed to stay in town and negotiate the deal but because Julie kept asking him questions he didn’t really know for sure how to answer, he kept coming out to the jungle. They all would get together and have a huge discussion about how to respond. They even thought about taking me into town and putting me on the phone because Julie was so persistent with asking how did she know if I was okay.” Right then I knew we had the right tool. It was exactly the opposite of the Burnham case, where our negotiator cut the deal with one of the guys and then the rest of them took the $300,000 and said, “No, we’re not doing that.” Causing the other side to work that hard and forcing that much internal coordination in service of our own goals was unprecedented.

Our negotiating strategy in Ecuador worked not just because the questions contributed to the environment that let José escape, but because they made sure the kidnappers—our counterparts—were all on the same page.

Yes, few hostage-takers—and few business deal makers—fly solo. But for the most part, there are almost always other players, people who can act as deal makers or deal killers. If you truly want to get to “Yes” and get your deal implemented, you have to discover how to affect these individuals.

When implementation happens by committee, the support of that committee is key. You always have to identify and unearth their motivations, even if you haven’t yet identified each individual on that committee. That can be easy as asking a few calibrated questions, like “How does this affect the rest of your team?” or “How on board are the people not on this call?” or simply “What do your colleagues see as their main challenges in this area?” The larger concept I’m explaining here is that in any negotiation you have to analyze the entire negotiation space.

When other people will be affected by what is negotiated and can assert their rights or power later on, it’s just stupid to consider only the interests of those at the negotiation table. You have to beware of “behind the table” or “Level II” players—that is, parties that are not directly involved but who can help implement agreements they like and block ones they don’t. You can’t disregard them even when you’re talking to a CEO. There could always be someone whispering into his ear. At the end of the day, the deal killers often are more important than the deal makers.

Think back to the prison siege: it was almost ruined because one bit player on our side was not totally on board. That’s what our use of calibrated questions in Ecuador avoided, and that’s why José’s case was a home run.

It only takes one bit player to screw up a deal.

A few years into private practice I’d lost sight of the importance of assessing and influencing the hidden negotiation that happens “behind the table,” and I paid a substantial price.

We were closing a deal with a big company in Florida that wanted negotiation training for one of its divisions. We’d been on the phone a bunch of times with the CEO and the head of HR, and they were both 100 percent gung ho on our offering. We were elated—we had what we thought was total buy-in from the top decision makers for an incredibly lucrative deal.

And then, as we were figuring out the small print, the deal fell off the table.

It turns out that the head of the division that needed the training killed the deal. Maybe this guy felt threatened, slighted, or otherwise somehow personally injured by the notion that he and his people “needed” any training at all. (A surprisingly high percentage of negotiations hinge on something outside dollars and cents, often having more to do with self-esteem, status, and other nonfinancial needs.) We’ll never know now.

The point is, we didn’t care until too late because we convinced ourselves that we were on the phone with the only decision makers that mattered.

We could have avoided all that had we asked a few calibrated questions, like: How does this affect everybody else? How on board is the rest of your team? How do we make sure that we deliver the right material to the right people? How do we ensure the managers of those we’re training are fully on board?

If we had asked questions like that, the CEO and HR head would have checked with this guy, maybe even brought him into the conversation. And saved us all a lot of pain.

SPOTTING LIARS, DEALING WITH JERKS, AND CHARMING EVERYONE ELSE

As a negotiator, you’re going to run into guys who lie to your face and try to scare you into agreement. Aggressive jerks and serial fabricators come with the territory, and dealing with them is something you have to do.

But learning how to handle aggression and identify falsehood is just part of a larger issue: that is, learning how to spot and interpret the subtleties of communication—both verbal and nonverbal—that reveal the mental states of your counterparts.

Truly effective negotiators are conscious of the verbal, paraverbal (how it’s said), and nonverbal communications that pervade negotiations and group dynamics. And they know how to employ those subtleties to their benefit. Even changing a single word when you present options—like using “not lose” instead of “keep”—can unconsciously influence the conscious choices your counterpart makes.

Here I want to talk about the tools you need to ID liars, disarm jerks, and charm everybody else. Of course, the open-ended “How” question is one of them—maybe the most important one—but there are many more.

Alastair Onglingswan was living in the Philippines when, one evening in 2004, he hailed a taxi and settled in for a long ride home from Manila’s Greenhills shopping center.

He dozed off.

And he woke up in chains.

Unfortunately for Alastair, the cabbie had a second business as a kidnapper. He kept a bottle of ether in his front seat, and when a target fell asleep he would drug him, imprison him, and ask for ransom.

Within hours, the kidnapper used Alastair’s phone to contact his girlfriend in New York. He demanded a daily payment to “take care” of Alastair while he researched the family’s wealth.

“It’s okay if you don’t pay,” he said. “I can always sell his organs in Saudi Arabia.”

Within twenty-four hours, I’d been charged with heading the negotiation from Quantico. Alastair’s girlfriend was too nervous to handle the family side of the negotiation, and his mother, who lived in the Philippines, just wanted to accept any demand the kidnapper made.

But Alastair’s brother Aaron, in Manila, was different: he just got the idea of negotiation and he accepted that Alastair might die, which would make him a better and more effective negotiator. Aaron and I set up an always-on phone line and I became Aaron’s guru on the other side of the world.

Through the kidnapper’s comments and demands, I saw that he was experienced and patient. As a token of his intentions, he offered to cut off one of Alastair’s ears and send it to the family along with a video of him severing the ear.

The demand for the daily payment was clearly a trick to quickly drain the family of as much money as possible while at the same time gauging their wealth. We had to figure out who this guy was—Was he a lone operator or part of a group? Did he plan on killing Alastair or not?—and we had to do that before the family went broke. To get there, we were going to have to engage the kidnapper in a protracted negotiation. We were going to have to slow everything down.

From Quantico, I loaded Aaron up with calibrated questions. I instructed him to keep peppering the violent jerk with “How?” How am I supposed to . . . ? How do we know . . . ? How can we . . . ? There is great power in treating jerks with deference. It gives you the ability to be extremely assertive—to say “No”—in a hidden fashion.

“How do we know if we pay you that you won’t hurt Alastair?” Aaron asked.

In the Chinese martial art of tai chi, the goal is to use your opponent’s aggressiveness against him—to turn his offense into your way to defeat him. That’s the approach we took with Alastair’s kidnapper: we wanted to absorb his threats and wear him down. We made sure that even scheduling a call with us was complex. We delayed making email responses.

Through all these tactics, we gained the upper hand while giving the kidnapper the illusion of control. He thought he was solving Aaron’s problems while we were just reading him and wasting his time. You see, it’s best not to go chin to chin with aggressiveness like that of Alastair’s kidnapper; rather, default to using “what” and “how” questions to avoid making bids or adjusting your own negotiating position. Dodge and weave.

Finally, following days of back-and-forth bargaining on the daily rate, Aaron got the kidnapper down to a token amount and agreed to deposit a portion of the funds in his bank account. After that partial payment was made, Aaron came up with the perfect way to nonconfrontationally confront the cabbie with a calibrated “When/What” question.

“When we run out of money, what will happen?” Aaron asked.

The kidnapper paused.

“It will be all right,” he finally responded.

Yes!

Without realizing what he had just agreed to, our killer had just promised us he wouldn’t hurt Alastair. A repetitive series of “What” and “How” questions can help you overcome the aggressive tactics of a manipulative adversary.

As you can see in that last exchange, the kidnapper’s protracted chats with Aaron had turned Aaron almost into a friend. Over time the kidnapper had become unguarded about spending time on the phone with his “friend.” Finally, the Philippine National Police investigators tracked the phone to a house and raided it. The kidnapper and Alastair were not there, but the kidnapper’s wife was. She told the police about another house they owned. The police quickly raided the other house, freed Alastair, and arrested the kidnapper.

There are plenty of other tactics, tools, and methods for using subtle verbal and nonverbal forms of communication to understand and modify the mental states of your counterpart. As I run through some of them here, I want you to take a moment to internalize each one. These are the kind of tools that can help observant negotiators hit home runs.

THE 7-38-55 PERCENT RULE

In two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody,1 UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian created the 7-38-55 rule. That is, only 7 percent of a message is based on the words while 38 percent comes from the tone of voice and 55 percent from the speaker’s body language and face.

While these figures mainly relate to situations where we are forming an attitude about somebody, the rule nonetheless offers a useful ratio for negotiators. You see, body language and tone of voice—not words—are our most powerful assessment tools. That’s why I’ll often fly great distances to meet someone face-to-face, even when I can say much of what needs to be said over the phone.

So how do you use this rule? First, pay very close attention to tone and body language to make sure they match up with the literal meaning of the words. If they don’t align, it’s quite possible that the speaker is lying or at least unconvinced.

When someone’s tone of voice or body language does not align with the meaning of the words they say, use labels to discover the source of the incongruence.

Here’s an example:

You: “So we’re agreed?”

Them: “Yes . . .”

You: “I heard you say, ‘Yes,’ but it seemed like there was hesitation in your voice.”

Them: “Oh, it’s nothing really.”

You: “No, this is important, let’s make sure we get this right.”

Them: “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

This is the way to make sure your agreement gets implemented with no surprises. And your counterpart will be grateful. Your act of recognizing the incongruence and gently dealing with it through a label will make them feel respected. Consequently, your relationship of trust will be improved.

THE RULE OF THREE

I’m positive that sometime in your life you’ve been involved in a negotiation where you got a “Yes” that later turned out to be a “No.” Maybe the other party was lying to you, or maybe they were just engaged in wishful thinking. Either way, this is not an uncommon experience.

This happens because there are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Commitment, Confirmation, and Counterfeit.

As we discussed in Chapter 5, so many pushy salesman try to trap their clients into the Commitment “Yes” that many people get very good at the Counterfeit “Yes. “

One great tool for avoiding this trap is the Rule of Three.

The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.

When I first learned this skill, my biggest fear was how to avoid sounding like a broken record or coming off as really pushy.

The answer, I learned, is to vary your tactics.

The first time they agree to something or give you a commitment, that’s No. 1. For No. 2 you might label or summarize what they said so they answer, “That’s right.” And No. 3 could be a calibrated “How” or “What” question about implementation that asks them to explain what will constitute success, something like “What do we do if we get off track?” Or the three times might just be the same calibrated question phrased three different ways, like “What’s the biggest challenge you faced? What are we up against here? What do you see as being the most difficult thing to get around?” Either way, going at the same issue three times uncovers falsehoods as well as the incongruences between words and body language we mentioned in the last section. So next time you’re not sure your counterpart is truthful and committed, try it.

THE PINOCCHIO EFFECT

With Carlo Collodi’s famous character Pinocchio, it was easy to tell when he was lying: you just had to watch the nose.

It turns out that Collodi wasn’t far off reality. Most people offer obvious telltale signs when they’re lying. Not a growing nose, but close enough.

In a study of the components of lying,2 Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra and his coauthors found that, on average, liars use more words than truth tellers and use far more third-person pronouns. They start talking about him, her, it, one, they, and their rather than I, in order to put some distance between themselves and the lie.

And they discovered that liars tend to speak in more complex sentences in an attempt to win over their suspicious counterparts. It’s what W. C. Fields meant when he talked about baffling someone with bullshit. The researchers dubbed this the Pinocchio Effect because, just like Pinocchio’s nose, the number of words grew along with the lie. People who are lying are, understandably, more worried about being believed, so they work harder—too hard, as it were—at being believable.

PAY ATTENTION TO THEIR USAGE OF PRONOUNS

The use of pronouns by a counterpart can also help give you a feel for their actual importance in the decision and implementation chains on the other side of the table. The more in love they are with “I,” “me,” and “my” the less important they are.

Conversely, the harder it is to get a first person pronoun out of a negotiator’s mouth, the more important they are. Just like in the Malhotra study where the liar is distancing himself from the lie, in a negotiation, smart decision makers don’t want to be cornered at the table into making a decision. They will defer to the people away from the table to keep from getting pinned down.

Our cabdriver kidnapper in the Philippines of Alastair Onglingswan used “we,” “they,” and “them” so rigorously early on in the kidnapping I was convinced we were engaged with their leader. I just never knew how literally true it was until the rescue. In the Chase Manhattan Bank robbery from Chapter 2, the bank robber Chris Watts consistently talked out how dangerous the “others” were and how little influence he had on them, all a lie.

THE CHRIS DISCOUNT

People always talk about remembering and using (but not overusing) your counterpart’s name in a negotiation. And that’s important. The reality though is people are often tired of being hammered with their own name. The slick salesman trying to drive them to “Yes” will hit them with it over and over.

Instead, take a different tack and use your own name. That’s how I get the Chris discount.

Just as using Alastair’s name with the kidnapper and getting him to use it back humanized the hostage and made it less likely he would be harmed, using your own name creates the dynamic of “forced empathy.” It makes the other side see you as a person.

A few years ago I was in a bar in Kansas with a bunch of fellow FBI negotiators. The bar was packed, but I saw one empty chair. I moved toward it but just as I got ready to sit the guy next to it said, “Don’t even think about it.” “Why?” I asked, and he said, “Because I’ll kick your ass.”

He was big, burly, and already drunk, but look, I’m a lifelong hostage negotiator—I gravitate toward tense situations that need mediation like a moth to the flame.

I held out my hand to shake his and said, “My name is Chris.”

The dude froze, and in the pause my fellow FBI guys moved in, patted him on the shoulders, and offered to buy him a drink. Turned out he was a Vietnam veteran at a particularly low point. He was in a packed bar where the entire world seemed to be celebrating. The only thing he could think of was to fight. But as soon as I became “Chris,” everything changed.

Now take that mindset to a financial negotiation. I was in an outlet mall a few months after the Kansas experience and I picked out some shirts in one of the stores. At the front counter the young lady asked me if I wanted to join their frequent buyer program.

I asked her if I got a discount for joining and she said, “No.”

So I decided to try another angle. I said in a friendly manner, “My name is Chris. What’s the Chris discount?”

She looked from the register, met my eyes, and gave a little laugh.

“I’ll have to ask my manager, Kathy,” she said and turned to the woman who’d been standing next to her.

Kathy, who’d heard the whole exchange, said, “The best I can do is ten percent.”

Humanize yourself. Use your name to introduce yourself. Say it in a fun, friendly way. Let them enjoy the interaction, too. And get your own special price.

HOW TO GET YOUR COUNTERPARTS TO BID AGAINST THEMSELVES

Like you saw Aaron and Julie do with their kidnappers, the best way to get your counterparts to lower their demands is to say “No” using “How” questions. These indirect ways of saying “No” won’t shut down your counterpart the way a blunt, pride-piercing “No” would. In fact, these responses will sound so much like counterbids that your counterparts will often keep bidding against themselves.

We’ve found that you can usually express “No” four times before actually saying the word.

The first step in the “No” series is the old standby:

“How am I supposed to do that?”

You have to deliver it in a deferential way, so it becomes a request for help. Properly delivered, it invites the other side to participate in your dilemma and solve it with a better offer.

After that, some version of “Your offer is very generous, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work for me” is an elegant second way to say “No.”

This well-tested response avoids making a counteroffer, and the use of “generous” nurtures your counterpart to live up to the word. The “I’m sorry” also softens the “No” and builds empathy. (You can ignore the so-called negotiating experts who say apologies are always signs of weakness.) Then you can use something like “I’m sorry but I’m afraid I just can’t do that.” It’s a little more direct, and the “can’t do that” does great double duty. By expressing an inability to perform, it can trigger the other side’s empathy toward you.

“I’m sorry, no” is a slightly more succinct version for the fourth “No.” If delivered gently, it barely sounds negative at all.

If you have to go further, of course, “No” is the last and most direct way. Verbally, it should be delivered with a downward inflection and a tone of regard; it’s not meant to be “NO!” One of my students, a guy named Jesus Bueno, wrote me not long ago to tell me an amazing story about how he’d used the multi-step “No” to help his brother Joaquin out of a sticky business situation.

His brother and two friends had bought a cannabis grow shop franchise in northern Spain, where the cultivation of marijuana for personal use is legal. Joaquin and his partner, Bruno, each invested 20,000 euros in the business for a 46 percent stake (a minority partner invested another €3,500 for 8 percent).

From the beginning, Joaquin and Bruno had a rocky relationship. Joaquin is an excellent salesman, while Bruno was more of a bookkeeper. The minority partner was also an excellent salesman, and he and Joaquin believed that growing sales was the correct strategy. That meant offering discounts for large orders and repeat customers, which Bruno disagreed with. Their planned spending on launching a website and expanding inventory also rubbed Bruno the wrong way.

Then Bruno’s wife became a problem as she started nagging Joaquin about how he should not spend so much on expansion and instead take more profits. One day, Joaquin was reviewing inventory purchases and noticed that some items they had ordered had not been placed on the store’s shelves. He began searching for them online and to his surprise he found an eBay store set up with the wife’s first name that was selling exactly those missing products.

This started a huge argument between Bruno and Joaquin, and soured their relationship. In the heat of the moment, Bruno told Joaquin that he was open to selling his shares because he felt the business risks they were taking were too large. So Joaquin consulted with his brother: my student Jesus.

Because they believed that pressure from Bruno’s wife was why he wanted to sell, Jesus helped Joaquin craft an empathy message around that: “It seems like you are under a lot of pressure from your wife.” Joaquin was also in the middle of a divorce, so they decided to use that to relate to the wife issues, and they prepared an accusation audit—“I know you think I don’t care about costs and taking profits from the company”—in order to diffuse the negative energy and get Bruno talking.

It worked like a charm. Bruno immediately agreed with the accusation audit and began explaining why he thought Joaquin was careless with spending. Bruno also noted that he didn’t have someone to bail him out like Joaquin did (Joaquin got a start-up loan from his mother). Joaquin used mirrors to keep Bruno talking, and he did.

Finally, Joaquin said, “I know how the pressure from your wife can feel, I’m going through a divorce myself and it really takes a lot out of you.” Bruno then went on a ten-minute rant about his wife and let slip a huge piece of information: the wife was very upset because the bank that lent them the €20,000 had reviewed their loan and had given them two options: repay the loan in full, or pay a much higher interest rate.

Bingo!

Joaquin and Jesus huddled after learning that, and decided that Joaquin could reasonably pay just above the loan price because Bruno had already taken €14,000 in salary from the business. The letter from the bank put Bruno in a bad spot, and Joaquin figured he could bid low because there wasn’t really a market for Bruno to sell his shares.

They decided that €23,000 would be the magic number, with €11,000 up front with the remaining €12,000 over a year period.

Then things went sideways.

Instead of waiting for Bruno to name a price, Joaquin jumped the gun and made his full offer, telling Bruno that he thought it was “very fair.” If there’s one way to put off your counterpart, it’s by implying that disagreeing with you is unfair.

What happened next proved that.

Bruno angrily hung up the phone and two days later Joaquin received an email from a guy saying he’d been hired to represent Bruno. They wanted €30,812: €20,000 for the loan, €4,000 for salary, €6,230 for equity, and €582 for interest.

Nonround figures that seemed unchangeable in their specificity. This guy was a pro.

Jesus told Joaquin that he’d truly screwed up. But they both knew that Bruno was pretty desperate to sell. So they decided to use the multi-step “No” strategy to get Bruno to bid against himself. The worst-case scenario, they decided, was that Bruno would just change his mind about selling his shares and the status quo would continue. It was a risk they’d have to take.

They crafted their first “No” message:

The price you offered is very fair, and I certainly wish that I could afford it. Bruno has worked very hard for this business, and he deserves to be compensated appropriately. I am very sorry, but wish you the best of luck.

Notice how they made no counteroffer and said “No” without using the word?

Joaquin was shocked when the following day he received an email from the advisor lowering the price to €28,346.

Joaquin and Jesus then crafted their second gentle “No”:

Thank you for your offer. You were generous to reduce the price, which I greatly appreciate. I really wish that I could pay you this amount, but I am sincere in that I cannot afford this amount at this time. As you know, I am in the middle of a divorce and I just cannot come up with that type of money. Again, I wish you the best of luck.

The next day Joaquin received a one-line email from the advisor dropping the price to €25,000. Joaquin wanted to take it but Jesus told him that he had some “No” steps to go. Joaquin fought him, but in the end he relented.

There’s a critical lesson there: The art of closing a deal is staying focused to the very end. There are crucial points at the finale when you must draw on your mental discipline. Don’t think about what time the last flight leaves, or what it would be like to get home early and play golf. Do not let your mind wander. Remain focused.

They wrote:

Thank you again for the generous offer. You have really come down on the price and I have tried very hard to come up with that amount. Unfortunately, no one is willing to lend me the money, not even my mother. I have tried various avenues but cannot come up with the funding. In the end, I can offer you €23,567, although I can only pay €15,321.37 up front. I could pay you the remainder over a one-year period, but that is really the most I can do. I wish you the best in your decision.

Brilliant use of specific numbers, and what an empathy-building way to say “No” without using the word!

And it worked. Within one hour, the advisor responded to accept.

Look at this closely: see how the mixture of mirroring and open-ended questions dragged out the information about Bruno’s financial problems, and then the “No” method exploited his desperation? It might not have been a great idea to use this method if there’d been another buyer, but with no one else it was a brilliant way to get Bruno to bid against himself.

KEY LESSONS

Superstar negotiators—real rainmakers—know that a negotiation is a playing field beneath the words, where really getting to a good deal involves detecting and manipulating subtle, nonobvious signals beneath the surface. It is only by visualizing and modifying these subsurface issues that you can craft a great deal and make sure that it is implemented.

As you put the following tools to use, remember this chapter’s most important concept. That is, “Yes” is nothing without “How.” Asking “How,” knowing “How,” and defining “How” are all part of the effective negotiator’s arsenal. He would be unarmed without them.

? Ask calibrated “How” questions, and ask them again and again. Asking “How” keeps your counterparts engaged but off balance. Answering the questions will give them the illusion of control. It will also lead them to contemplate your problems when making their demands.

? Use “How” questions to shape the negotiating environment. You do this by using “How can I do that?” as a gentle version of “No.” This will subtly push your counterpart to search for other solutions—your solutions. And very often it will get them to bid against themselves.

? Don’t just pay attention to the people you’re negotiating with directly; always identify the motivations of the players “behind the table.” You can do so by asking how a deal will affect everybody else and how on board they are.

? Follow the 7-38-55 Percent Rule by paying close attention to tone of voice and body language. Incongruence between the words and nonverbal signs will show when your counterpart is lying or uncomfortable with a deal.

? Is the “Yes” real or counterfeit? Test it with the Rule of Three: use calibrated questions, summaries, and labels to get your counterpart to reaffirm their agreement at least three times. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.

? A person’s use of pronouns offers deep insights into his or her relative authority. If you’re hearing a lot of “I,” “me,” and “my,” the real power to decide probably lies elsewhere. Picking up a lot of “we,” “they,” and “them,” it’s more likely you’re dealing directly with a savvy decision maker keeping his options open.

? Use your own name to make yourself a real person to the other side and even get your own personal discount. Humor and humanity are the best ways to break the ice and remove roadblocks.