Three points.
You knew it all the time
There is probably nothing in this book that you did not already know at some level of your experience. What we have tried to do is to organize common sense and common experience in a way that provides a usable framework for thinking and acting. The more consistent these ideas are with your knowledge and intuition the better. In teaching this method to skilled lawyers and businesspeople with years of experience, we have been told, “Now I know what I have been doing, and why it sometimes works” and “I knew what you were saying was right because I knew it already.”
Learn from doing
A book can point you in a promising direction. By making you aware of ideas and aware of what you are doing, it can help you learn.
No one, however, can make you skillful but yourself. Reading a pamphlet on the Royal Canadian Air Force fitness program will not make you physically fit. Studying books on tennis, swimming, riding a bicycle, or riding a horse will not make you an expert. Negotiation is no different.
“Winning”
In 1964 an American father and his twelve-year-old son were enjoying a beautiful Saturday in Hyde Park, London, playing catch with a Frisbee. Few in England had seen a Frisbee at that time and a small group of strollers gathered to watch this strange sport. Finally, one homburg-clad Englishman came over to the father: “Sorry to bother you. Been watching you a quarter of an hour. Who’s winning?”
In most instances to ask a negotiator “Who’s winning?” is as inappropriate as to ask who’s winning a marriage. If you ask that question about your marriage, you have already lost the more important negotiation—the one about what kind of game to play, about the way you deal with each other and your shared and differing interests.
This book is about how to “win” that important game—how to achieve a better process for dealing with your differences. To be better, the process must, of course, produce good substantive results; winning on the merits may not be the only goal, but certainly losing is not the answer. Both theory and experience suggest that the method of principled negotiation will produce over the long run substantive outcomes as good as or better than you are likely to obtain using any other negotiation strategy. In addition, it should prove more efficient and less costly to human relationships. We find the method comfortable to use and hope you will too.
That does not mean it is easy to change habits, to disentangle emotions from the merits, or to enlist others in the task of working out a wise solution to a shared problem. From time to time you may want to remind yourself that the first thing you are trying to win is a better way to negotiate—a way that avoids your having to choose between the satisfactions of getting what you deserve and of being decent. You can have both.