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

DEADLINES: MAKE TIME YOUR ALLY
Time is one of the most crucial variables in any negotiation.
The simple passing of time and its sharper cousin, the
deadline, are the screw that pressures every deal to a
conclusion.
Whether your deadline is real and absolute or merely a
line in the sand, it can trick you into believing that doing a
deal now is more important than getting a good deal.
Deadlines regularly make people say and do impulsive
things that are against their best interests, because we all
have a natural tendency to rush as a deadline approaches.
What good negotiators do is force themselves to resist
this urge and take advantage of it in others. It’s not so easy.

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Ask yourself: What is it about a deadline that causes
pressure and anxiety? The answer is consequences; the
perception of the loss we’ll incur in the future—“The deal is
off!” our mind screams at us in some imaginary future
scenario—should no resolution be achieved by a certain
point in time.
When you allow the variable of time to trigger such
thinking, you have taken yourself hostage, creating an
environment of reactive behaviors and poor choices, where
your counterpart can now kick back and let an imaginary
deadline, and your reaction to it, do all the work for him.
Yes, I used the word “imaginary.” In all the years I’ve
been doing work in the private sector, I’ve made it a point to
ask nearly every entrepreneur and executive I’ve worked
with whether, over the course of their entire careers, they
have ever been a witness to or a party of a negotiation in
which a missed deadline had negative repercussions.
Among hundreds of such clients, there’s one single, solitary
gentleman who gave the question serious consideration and
responded affirmatively. Deadlines are often arbitrary,
almost always flexible, and hardly ever trigger the
consequences we think—or are told—they will.
Deadlines are the bogeymen of negotiation, almost
exclusively self-inflicted figments of our imagination,
unnecessarily unsettling us for no good reason. The mantra
we coach our clients on is, “No deal is better than a bad
deal.” If that mantra can truly be internalized, and clients
begin to believe they’ve got all the time they need to

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conduct the negotiation right, their patience becomes a
formidable weapon.
A few weeks after the Haitian kidnapping boom began, we
started to notice two patterns. First, Mondays seemed to be
especially busy, as if the kidnappers had a particularly
strong work ethic and wanted to get a jump on the week.
And, second, the thugs grew increasingly eager to get paid
as the weekend approached.
At first, this didn’t make any sense. But by listening
closely to the kidnappers and debriefing the hostages we
rescued, we discovered something that should have been
obvious: These crimes weren’t politically motivated at all.
Instead, these guys were garden-variety thugs who wanted
to get paid by Friday so they could party through the
weekend.
Once we understood the pattern and knew the
kidnappers’ self-imposed deadline, we had two key pieces
of information that totally shifted the leverage to our side.
First, if we let the pressure build by stalling the
negotiations until Thursday or Friday, we could cut the best
deal. And, second, because you didn’t need anything close
to $150,000 to have a good weekend in Haiti, offering a lot,
lot less would suffice.
How close we were getting to their self-imposed
deadline would be indicated by how specific the threats
were that they issued. “Give us the money or your aunt is
going to die” is an early stage threat, as the time isn’t
specified. Increasing specificity on threats in any type of

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negotiations indicates getting closer to real consequences at
a real specified time. To gauge the level of a particular
threat, we’d pay attention to how many of the four questions
—What? Who? When? And how?—were addressed. When
people issue threats, they consciously or subconsciously
create ambiguities and loopholes they fully intend to exploit.
As the loopholes started to close as the week progressed,
and did so over and over again in similar ways with
different kidnappings, the pattern emerged.
With this information in hand, I came to expect the
kidnappings to be orderly, four-day events. It didn’t make
the abductions any more pleasant for the victim, but it
certainly made them more predictable—and a whole lot
cheaper—for the families on the other end.
It’s not just with hostage negotiations that deadlines can
play into your hands. Car dealers are prone to give you the
best price near the end of the month, when their transactions
are assessed. And corporate salespeople work on a quarterly
basis and are most vulnerable as the quarter comes to a
close.
Now, knowing how negotiators use their counterpart’s
deadlines to gain leverage would seem to suggest that it’s
best to keep your own deadlines secret. And that’s the
advice you’ll get from most old-school negotiation experts.
In his bestselling 1980 book, You Can Negotiate
Anything,1 negotiation expert Herb Cohen tells the story of
his first big business deal, when his company sent him to
Japan to negotiate with a supplier.

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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

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possible position. In his research, he’s found that hiding
your deadlines dramatically increases the risk of an impasse.
That’s because having a deadline pushes you to speed up
your concessions, but the other side, thinking that it has
time, will just hold out for more.
Imagine if when NBA owners set a lockout deadline
during contract negotiations they didn’t tell the players’
union. They would concede and concede as the deadline
approached, inciting the union to keep negotiating past the
secret deadline. In that sense, hiding a deadline means
you’re negotiating with yourself, and you always lose when
you do so.
Moore discovered that when negotiators tell their
counterparts about their deadline, they get better deals. It’s
true. First, by revealing your cutoff you reduce the risk of
impasse. And second, when an opponent knows your
deadline, he’ll get to the real deal- and concession-making
more quickly.
I’ve got one final point to make before we move on:
Deadlines are almost never ironclad. What’s more important
is engaging in the process and having a feel for how long
that will take. You may see that you have more to
accomplish than time will actually allow before the clock
runs out.