Trump Style Negotiation: CH3--Learn about the other side

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Face Value is No Good

A fundamental rule: ‘Do not accept anything for the face value.’ You have to try to verify what the other say.

Trust Me

When someone says ‘trust me’, they are lying. They are trying to establish a ground which gives them advantage.

Constraints

Constraints impose disadvantages on a negotiation. Don’t let the other side know about your constraints. They will become your weakness. And, the other side will use it against you. Hide your weakness and exploit the weakness of the other side. 

Aura of Legitimacy

Written documentation such as (‘Final sale’, ‘last say’, ‘liquidation’) is very powerful. People tend to believe documents written for public domains. So use it to your advantage. But do not let the other side uses it against you. 

Learn about People on the Other Side

Identify the key person on the other side. Do not waste too much time deeply negotiating with the ‘messenger’. 

In the first meeting, remember names and roles of the  participants. Make notes about them and update the notes regularly. Although they may share the same goal, they may have different motive. So, you need to keep separate notes for each of them. 

Basically, you need to find out three piece of information about the other side:

1. Constraints (e.g, time, money, regulation)
2. Motivation
3. Negotiation weakness

Examples of Weakness

Here are few examples of weakness, and how you can exploit it:

1. Inability to focus on detail: You can hide something in legal documents. The chance is that the other side might never find out about it. If they did, you could just discuss normally as if it is a normal practice. 
2. Inability to stick to predefined time frame: These people tend to invest too much time. Let them invest and use the invested time principle against them. If this is your weakness, you need to force yourself to write down deadline and try very hard to stick to the deadline.

Turn the Table

Let’s consider a case for example. Suppose you’d like to buy a TV and you need it by this weekend. You should not let the salesperson know about this. Otherwise, the salesperson will use this information against you. Instead, you can turn the table by telling the salesperson that  you have an appointment and you have around 10 mins to talk to him. If he’d like to close the deal, you might get a good bargain. 

Body Language

Body language can reveal a lot of information. You should learn to read it. Here are few examples: voice, gesture, looking at friends or the boss for approval. 

Delegation

A negotiation cannot do all the jobs. You need to know when to delegate, and when to step in. When delegating, you need to be able to trust your subordinates. 

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make  notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.