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Getting to yes is easy: all you have to do is roll over. It's getting what you want that's hard.

Jim Camp's thinking is that in any conversation, it's the listener who has the power. "People have a weakness for talking," he writes, and questions should "invite the adversary to indulge this weakness."

A meaningful role for negotiation vanishes the closer the situation becomes to costless dominance or a perfect market. By contrast, the negotiation potential increases (1) the less chance there is that any given player can fully achieve its objectives at no cost by unilateral action or (2) the less perfect the market, meaning smaller numbers and different kinds of buyers and sellers, more avenues for product differentiation, and so on. In either case, a BATNA assessment suggests the extent of negotiation's potential role in a given situation, from nil to vast.

When we approach negotiations by tactically reacting to customers' requests, by merely giving in because they ask us to do so, seemingly disparate transactions have the effect of "rolling upward" and defining our negotiation strategy. We teach the marketplace, our customers and our competitors, who we are based on the deals we do. By rolling over in negotiations, we run into several problems:
1. Customers believe the initial offer was a lie and don't know where the truth really begins.
2. We fan the fire of irrational marketplace competition by setting up bidding wars.
3. We prove through our actions that while we sell on value, we negotiate on price.

At the heart of even the most mutually beneficial negotiation, there is always a haggle between two conflicting positions. A creative solution can clear a stalemate and produce agreement, but not by eliminating or resolving the conflict; rather, by suggesting new, acceptable concessions that make the conflict less intense. Making this happen is the art of negotiation.

People tend to only look at national culture when they go into international negotiations … but there is also educational culture, race culture, gender culture, a religious culture. All of these also impact the way people behave and they are all ‘cross cultural,’ which means that we’re underestimating the role of culture because we are only looking at the national one; but as negotiators, we need to try to understand all the others.

A few years ago, I came across an old acronym that was used to describe the role of managers, 'POEM', whereby the job of management was to Plan, Organize, Execute, and Measure. It seemed to me that in a business environment where hierarchies are flatter, work changes rapidly because of new technologies, new customers, new markets, etc., and where you're working in a more networked environment, this just doesn't fit anymore. 'POEM' assumes that you know what your job is, so you're able to plan it, organize, execute and measure it. But if you don't know what your job is, because of constant change - and because we have increasingly automated the repeatable tasks and processes of work - then you have a different set of priorities, and the first is to 'Define' what the job is. Is it the same today as it was yesterday? It may not be, so, it's important to ask, 'who are we?', 'what business are we in?', 'what is the value-added that we offer?' and 'what's on my to-do list this day, week, month, year?’

The second piece is 'Nurture' - the idea that managers are not just organizing pre-existing human and other assets; our job is also to develop them. It's a useful oversimplification to say that managers had less responsibility for the development of their staffs than they have now - or should have. They deployed. Today, we develop and deploy.

The third piece is 'Allocate'. The capabilities of a company are much less hard-wired than they used to be. A business can be many things to many people, so to manage is to choose. The allocation of resources is something that people used to think was only done by the executive team, but it is actually done by managers at all levels. So there you have it: management's job is to Define, Nurture, and Allocate.

It's crucial to understand just how powerful this concept [focusing on outcomes] is. Fundamentally, it recognizes that everyone owns yesterday, last week, last month, and last year, from their own point of reference. That ownership is permanent. Even given a limitless amount of discussion, the past will remain as it was, owned by those who were there.

But no one owns the future—the next 15 minutes, the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year. Therefore, when we choose to be outcome-focused, we are choosing to enter, live, and build a future together.