Genius is often missed the first time around, right?
One negotiating genius who’s impossible to miss is Mark
Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks. I
always quote to my students one of his best lines on
negotiation: “Every ‘No’ gets me closer to a ‘Yes.’” But
then I remind them that extracting those “No’s” on the road
to “Yes” isn’t always easy.
There is a big difference between making your
counterpart feel that they can say “No” and actually getting
them to say it. Sometimes, if you’re talking to somebody
who is just not listening, the only way you can crack their
cranium is to antagonize them into “No.”
One great way to do this is to mislabel one of the other
party’s emotions or desires. You say something that you
know is totally wrong, like “So it seems that you really are
eager to leave your job” when they clearly want to stay.
That forces them to listen and makes them comfortable
correcting you by saying, “No, that’s not it. This is it.”
Another way to force “No” in a negotiation is to ask the
other party what they don’t want. “Let’s talk about what you
would say ‘No’ to,” you’d say. And people are comfortable
saying “No” here because it feels like self-protection. And
once you’ve gotten them to say “No,” people are much
more open to moving forward toward new options and
ideas.
“No”—or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the
canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other