Book SummaryYou Can Negotiate Anything, by Herb Cohen

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of You Can Negotiate Anything

You’re a negotiator, even if you don’t know it. According to Herb Cohen in You Can Negotiate Anything, negotiation is the art of getting other people to do what you want—and all of us do that every day. Every time you discuss what TV show to watch with your family or decide who’s going to get lunch for the rest of the team, you’re negotiating.

Although the game of negotiation is an unavoidable part of daily life, Cohen notes that many people fail to understand the strategies that lead to victory—that is, desirable outcomes for you and the people you care about. Effective negotiation skills will help you accomplish any goal that involves interacting with other people. Thus, if you can master this game, you can use this power to create a better life for yourself and a better world for others.

Cohen is a corporate negotiator and professional speaker featured in Time, The Economist, and Playboy, the latter having referred to him as “the world’s best negotiator.” During the Carter and Reagan administrations, Cohen served as a negotiation adviser, coaching the United...

You Can Negotiate Anything Summary How to Craft a Win-Win Negotiation

Many people think of negotiation as a ruthless showdown between competitors, but it doesn’t always have to be this way. Cohen asserts that the most productive negotiations are win-win, in which two parties work together to find a creative solution that’s better than what either would have come up with had they simply stated a list of demands. People are rarely fully aware of everything they want or of everything the other party is able to give them. In the process of negotiating terms and talking over various possibilities, both parties discover that they each have more to offer each other than they realize.

For example, imagine the owner of a multi-industry conglomerate wants to acquire a newsworthy 3D printing startup. However, the CEO of the printing firm refuses, wanting to retain as much control over their company as possible. Although this seems to be an impasse, the two parties agree to meet for a negotiation. Over the course of their discussion, the two executives discover that the conglomerate CEO foresees rapid growth in the 3D printer industry and wants to profit from this prediction. The 3D printing CEO wants to make sure they can continue pursuing their...

You Can Negotiate Anything Summary How to Win at Negotiation

Cohen contends that sometimes, it won’t be possible to craft a win-win negotiation. Some people aren’t interested in building trusting relationships: They want to be the only ones who win in a negotiation. They view any concession they can get from you as a victory and anything they must give up as a loss. They interpret win-win negotiation tactics (such as trusting them enough to share information) as a sign of weakness and will respond by trying even harder to take advantage of you.

When you’re negotiating with people who stubbornly cling to this win-lose mindset, you may have no choice but to try to beat them at their own game. To do this, you must learn strategies and psychological tricks that allow you to get as much from the other negotiator as you can while conceding as little as possible.

Cohen argues that even if you morally object to practicing some of these techniques, learning about them will help protect you against them. When you’re aware of...

You Can Negotiate Anything Summary Project Confidence

Cohen explains that the person who has more power in a given negotiation always wins. Power, however, is situational: If someone needs you to accomplish a specific goal, you have power over them in that situation. For this reason, you can win any negotiation by convincing the other party that they need you to fulfill their desires more than you need them to fulfill yours.

(Shortform note: If power comes from needing the other negotiator less than they need you, needing less is a viable way of increasing your power. For example, if you’re negotiating for a promotion at work, you’ll do better if you feel like you don’t absolutely need the income and benefits of your current job to be happy. You could even confidently threaten to quit. One way you might train yourself to need less is to practice poverty: Set aside several days to live beneath your means, to show yourself that you can still be happy with much less than you need.)

The key to conveying your power in negotiation is projecting confidence, says Cohen. To estimate how much power you have in a given situation, people largely rely on their...

You Can Negotiate Anything Summary Inflate Your Value, Deflate Their Value

It doesn’t matter how much value each negotiating party has to offer. What matters is how much each side believes the offerings are worth, says Cohen. Thus, you can get a better deal if you can convince the other negotiator that what you’re offering is worth more than it really is, or that what their offering is worth less than it is.

For instance, imagine you own a fast-food franchise location and want to sell it to a local entrepreneur. You could inflate your restaurant’s value by giving away free desserts to customers on the day you give the potential buyer a tour, so the restaurant is busier than it typically is. Likewise, the purchasing entrepreneur could get a better price by deflating your restaurant’s value—for instance, by purchasing online bots to publish negative reviews on your Yelp...

You Can Negotiate Anything Summary Discover Your Opponent's Negotiation Ceiling (and Hide Yours)

Cohen explains that in win-lose negotiation, each party has a negotiation ceiling: the maximum amount they’re willing to sacrifice in exchange for what they want without abandoning the deal. The goal is to discover the other party’s true ceiling so you can get them to concede everything they’re willing to part with—while hiding your true ceiling so they can’t do the same to you.

Generally, any information about either party is a clue—big or small—about their negotiation ceiling. Thus, win-lose negotiators try to reveal as little as possible about themselves and the situation they’re in. For example, if you’re looking to sell a fast-food franchise location, you would want to hide the fact that you’re moving into a more affordable house because you can’t pay your mortgage. If you even make an offhand comment about how your kids are about to go to college, it could hint to opposing negotiators that you’re strapped for cash.

To maintain an information advantage, Cohen recommends making the other party do as much of the talking as possible.

How to Extract Information

Discovering your opponent’s negotiation ceiling is all about getting them to confess as much...

You Can Negotiate Anything Summary Leverage Sunk Cost

According to Cohen, another reason it helps to be patient in negotiation is that the more time the other negotiator spends trying to make a deal with you, the less likely they are to walk away. Cohen explains that when someone has already spent a considerable amount of time and energy talking with you, failing to make a deal would mean they wasted it all. To avoid the pain of wasting this sunk cost, most negotiators will accept a lesser deal instead of walking. Thus, the longer you can extend the negotiation process, the better chance you have of getting a good deal.

(Shortform note: You can get suckered into making a bad deal because you feel you’ve sunk time and energy into negotiation, too. How can you avoid this? Train yourself to think in terms of costs and benefits across your entire life rather than the costs and benefits of an individual negotiation. For example, it may feel bad to pass on a house after you’ve been in negotiations to buy it for several months, and you’ve already spent $2,000 for an appraisal and other fees. However, if the home seller is truly offering you a bad deal, you can...

You Can Negotiate Anything Summary Manipulate Their Emotions

Last, Cohen notes that negotiators in the win-lose mindset can profit from emotional manipulation. That is, you do anything you can to evoke a specific emotional reaction from the other party that will help you get your way.

Often, this strategy involves playing up emotions you don’t really feel or outright lying to the other negotiator. For instance, if your roof gets destroyed by a falling tree and the insurance adjuster isn’t giving you a high enough settlement, you could start crying fake tears to get them to offer more money.

Another popular form of emotional manipulation is the implied threat—to make the other party give in to your demands out of fear that you’ll somehow hurt them. According to Cohen, if you keep your threat implied and vague rather than specific, your opponent will imagine that you’re willing and capable of doing much worse to them than you really are.

(Shortform note: In Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that [vague threats can...

Shortform Exercise: Plan to Win a Negotiation

It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to form genuine trusting relationships with everyone you have to negotiate with, so it’s important to know the basics of win-lose negotiation. Think strategically about an upcoming win-lose negotiation to give yourself the best chance of securing a good deal.

Think of an upcoming event where you could use your negotiation skills, or a hypothetical negotiation you can imagine yourself conducting in the next few months. Who are you negotiating with, and what do you hope to get from them? (For example, perhaps you have a budget meeting coming up at work and want to secure your department a bigger budget for the upcoming year. You’re negotiating with your boss, and you want at least a $20,000 budget increase over last year.)