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

To show how this can be done to near perfection, I can
think of no better example than my former MBA student
Angel Prado.
While Angel was finishing up his MBA, he went to his
boss and began to lay the groundwork for his work post-
MBA (which the company was paying). During his last
semester, he set a nonspecific anchor—a kind of range—by
suggesting to his boss that once he graduated and the
company was done investing in his MBA (around $31,000
per year), that money should go to him as salary.
His boss made no commitment, but Angel was
pleasantly persistent about it, which set the idea as an
anchor in his boss’s mind.
Upon graduation, Angel and his boss had their big sit-
down. In an assertive and calm manner, Angel broached a
nonfinancial issue to move the focus away from “How
much?”: he asked for a new title.
Angel’s boss readily agreed that a new role was a no-
brainer after Angel’s new degree.
At that point, Angel and his manager defined what his
roles and responsibilities would be in his new role, thereby
setting success metrics. Then Angel took a breath and
paused so that his boss would be the first to throw out a
number. At last, he did. Curiously enough, the number
showed that Angel’s earlier efforts at anchoring had worked:
he proposed to add $31,000 to Angel’s base salary, almost a
50 percent raise.
But Angel was no rookie negotiator, not after taking my