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

OBSERVE UNGUARDED MOMENTS
While you have to get face time, formal business meetings,
structured encounters, and planned negotiating sessions are
often the least revealing kinds of face time because these are
the moments when people are at their most guarded.
Hunting for Black Swans is also effective during
unguarded moments at the fringes, whether at meals like my
client had with his Coca-Cola contact, or the brief moments
of relaxation before or after formal interactions.
During a typical business meeting, the first few minutes,
before you actually get down to business, and the last few
moments, as everyone is leaving, often tell you more about
the other side than anything in between. That’s why
reporters have a credo to never turn off their recorders: you
always get the best stuff at the beginning and the end of an
interview.
Also pay close attention to your counterpart during
interruptions, odd exchanges, or anything that interrupts the
flow. When someone breaks ranks, people’s façades crack
just a little. Simply noticing whose cracks and how others
respond verbally and nonverbally can reveal a gold mine.

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WHEN IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE, THERE’S CENTS
TO BE MADE
Students often ask me whether Black Swans are specific
kinds of information or any kind that helps. I always answer
that they are anything that you don’t know that changes
things.
To drive this home, here’s the story of one of my MBA
students who was interning for a private equity real estate
firm in Washington. Faced with actions from his counterpart
that didn’t pass the sense test, he innocently turned up one
of the greatest Black Swans I’ve seen in years by using a
label.
My student had been performing due diligence on
potential targets when a principal at the firm asked him to
look into a mixed-use property in the heart of Charleston,
South Carolina. He had no experience in the Charleston
market, so he called the broker selling the property and
requested the marketing package.
After discussing the deal and the market, my student and
his boss decided that the asking price of $4.3 million was
about $450,000 too high. At that point, my student called
the broker again to discuss pricing and next steps.
After initial pleasantries, the broker asked my student
what he thought of the property.
“It looks like an interesting property,” he said.
“Unfortunately, we don’t know the market fundamentals.
We like downtown and King Street in particular, but we
have a lot of questions.”

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The broker then told him that he had been in the market
for more than fifteen years, so he was well informed. At this
point, my student pivoted to calibrated “How” and