Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

When he arrived, his counterparts asked him how long
he was staying, and Cohen said a week. For the next seven
days, his hosts proceeded to entertain him with parties,
tours, and outings—everything but negotiation. In fact,
Cohen’s counterparts didn’t start serious talks until he was
about to leave, and the two sides hammered out the deal’s
final details in the car to the airport.
Cohen landed in the United States with the sinking
feeling that he’d been played, and that he had conceded too
much under deadline pressure. Would he have told them his
deadline in retrospect? No, Cohen says, because it gave
them a tool he didn’t have: “They knew my deadline, but I
didn’t know theirs.”
That mentality is everywhere these days. Seeing a simple
rule to follow and assuming that a deadline is a strategic
weakness, most negotiators follow Cohen’s advice and hide
their drop-dead date.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret: Cohen, and the
herd of negotiation “experts” who follow his lead, are
wrong. Deadlines cut both ways. Cohen may well have been
nervous about what his boss would say if he left Japan
without an agreement. But it’s also true that Cohen’s
counterparts wouldn’t have won if he’d left without a deal.
That’s the key: When the negotiation is over for one side,
it’s over for the other too.
In fact, Don A. Moore, a professor at the Haas School of
Business at the University of California, Berkeley, says that
hiding a deadline actually puts the negotiator in the worst