book: No, The only negotiating system you need …

“NO, The only negotiating system you need for work and home”
Author: Jim Camp           (see here to get the book)

Summary:
If you are a manager, buy this book. If you are in sales buy this book.  If you work in a team, buy this book.  “NO” opens a new world of approaching negotiations that can only strengthen what you already know.  It has insights that will make you reconsider how you approach any negotiation.  If I told you that you fear the word “NO”, you would likely dismiss my comment.  But after you read this book, this simple statement and what it means to negotiations will have changed how you approach any negotiation.

Do you negotiate?
Engineers often tell me that “negotiations skills” are for Project Managers and Salespeople. That is wrong. Negotiation is part of the engineering manager, team leader and team member’s life.  Have you ever:

• asked for a raise?
• asked your boss for more resources, or asked him to not take your people away to “firefight” another project?
• tried to change your manager’s mind about something?
• asked another team to help you out, but you don’t have a charge number to give them?
• argued for your solution when the team leader, or the customer,  wants something different?
• had to motivate your team to adopt yet another reporting process?

Every day, you negotiate.  So why should only PMs and salespeople learn to do it right?  After all, don’t engineers have to negotiate with PMs and salespeople internally?

A warning about this book
Jim Camp advocates the use of the word “NO” as an approach to negotiating.  Of course it is not that simple.  But to make the point, he attacks another very popular strategy known as win-win (such as in “Getting to Yes” by J. Fisher)

“If you are a devotee of required compromise… there are business people – and I’m one of them – who have you for lunch every day” (p.7)

It is my opinion that this book does not invalidate the win-win approach. Both methods can be useful, depending on circumstances.  But “NO” will definitely provide advice on why you may not be getting to “Yes”, or how to get to a “Yes” you can actually live with.

The review:

Jim Camp starts with a punch: “NO” is the best word in negotiation and “yes” is the worst word!  We learn that we fear not getting a “yes” so much that we compromise and settle for bad deals. Jim tells us, if we do not like hearing or saying “NO”, we have too much emotion surrounding the negotiations.

What does that mean to an engineering Team Leader trying to convince a customer,  PM, or another team leader of something?

Realize that you don’t want to hear “NO”.  Although you “want’ to convince, you actually think you “need” to.  In the words of Jim Camp: “You have neediness”. So what happens if the other side looks like they are going to say no?   You compromise.  You swallow some budget.  You promise something else – and you get a bad deal.

And it cuts both ways.  You may fear saying “no”, even more then being told “no”. What would you look like? If it’s your boss, what will she think of you?  Maybe you feel  other dangerous emotions highlighted by Jim Camp: “fear of rejection or fear of failing”.

“NO” breeds emotions.  Jim Camp supplies many anecdotes to drive the point home.  Those first few chapters are very powerful – because they help us see that we’re about to agree to a bad compromise, because neediness, or some other “no” related emotion is controlling us.

Once you see through your emotions, you see that “NO” means, simply – no.  The other side says “no”, I don’t like this proposal, do you have another one?  Or “I don’t like this proposal” – because I’m not convince of its value – to me.

Jim Camp does not leave us hanging there. He provides methods to remove the emotions:

• Learn to detect signs of neediness in yourself.
• Find out and reason the source of the neediness, which essentially removes it.

Example:  I’m afraid they won’t agree with my solution.  So what?  Jim Camp says that “You don’t need this deal”.  Could that be true?  What happens if I don’t get my way? Will I fail? Most likely not. Then what happens? I’ll need to come up with an alternative.  Well guess what? – that’s where I am now!  So I want to convince them – because my way is better – but I don’t need to convince them.

Sometimes neediness is not related to the result of the negotiations directly. Instead, you just don’t want to lose (maybe your manager is an autocratic type).  You think it makes you a lesser person.  That is also emotion. It is neediness that weakens your ability to negotiate.  Read the book – there are many examples of neediness emotion.

Once the neediness is removed, you negotiate without emotion.  If the other side doesn’t see things your way, and pushes for concessions, you simply say no, calm everyone down, and start exploring why they don’t see it your way.  The book discusses in details how to learn how the other side sees the negotiation.  You must understand this if you are to succeed.

The book advocates getting the other side to say no as early as you can.  If you propose something, tell them it’s OK to say no. You won’t be offended. You’ll just look for a better solution – with them.  This is a process – you can’t just “wing it”.

Above all, Jim reminds us to stick to the process.  And he tells us that fear of ‘NO”, and any related emotions kills the process.

Without going into details, “NO” hold many other nuggets of negotiation wisdom:

• Stop setting yourself up for failure with quantitative result targets. (I know it goes against every thing we learned doesn’t it?).  You can’t affect the final result directly. Instead, set up behavior goals – things you will do, or will not do, and make sure you stick to those.  The behaviors will produce the results.
• Spend more time working on activities that directly affect the negotiations instead of wasting it doing things that prepare or support the negotiation (Jim Camp calls this “payside” versus “non-payside”.
• Stop managing the friendship.  “Never take responsibility for the other side’s decisions” (p. 82)  “It’s about Respect, not Friendship”.

• Ask questions that help you discern how the other side sees the negotiations, understanding what is important to them.
• “Be a blank slate” (p. 174). Don’t assume you know how the other side thinks. Learn it from them instead.

What makes the book work is the “stories”.  Jim Camp has coached hundreds of negotiators and shares many real life stories. This is invaluable because you may want to disagree with what he says (I know I did). The stories let you see it for yourself.

This is a great book for engineers.  I don’t think we realize how much neediness we carry into negotiations.  Engineers are invested in their work to the point where our results are a reflection of us.  It is indeed personal!  So when we negotiate something that affects our work, we are prime targets for extreme neediness.  In this context, building a negotiation process that removes neediness and gets results is very valuable, I think.

If you want the book:

Amazon USA:         No: The Only Negotiating System … (by Jim Camp) – ship in USA

Amazon Canada:   No: The Only Negotiating System … (by Jim Camp) – ship in Canada