Quotations 2020-Apr-01

Quotes from Getting Past No (William Ury, 1993)

# Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way. —Daniele Vare, Italian diplomat

# Broadly defined, negotiation is the process of back-and-forth communication aimed at reaching agreement with others when some of your interests are shared and some are opposed. Negotiation is not limited to the activity of formally sitting across a table discussing a contentious issue; it is the informal activity you engage in whenever you try to get something you want from another person.

# There is an alternative: joint problem-solving. It is neither exclusively soft nor hard, but a combination of each. It is soft on the people, hard on the problem.

# As in the Japanese martial arts of judo, jujitsu, and aikido, you need to avoid pitting your strength directly against your opponent’s. Since efforts to break down the other side’s resistance usually only increase it, you try to go around their resistance. That is the way to break through.

# Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. —Ambrose Bierce

# There is a saying that an appeaser is someone who believes that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will eventually become a vegetarian. 

# “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

As Thomas Jefferson once put it: “When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

The same approach has been used to head off the verbal battles that so often erupt in labormanagement negotiations. In one case, both sides adopted a ground rule that “only one person can get angry at a time.” The other side was obliged not to react; to do so would be an admission that they were weak and could not control themselves. The rule helped break the escalating cycle of action and reaction.

Follow the biblical dictum: “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to act.

Some people are afraid they will appear stupid if they say “I’m not sure I’m following you.” Ironically, they are the ones most likely to be taken in, because they don’t ask the questions they ought to ask. Successful negotiators learn that appearing a little obtuse can be a negotiating advantage. It allows you to slow down the discussion. You need not pretend to be stupid. Simply ask for some clarification: “I’m afraid I don’t understand why you waited until now to ask for a discount.”

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Never make an important decision on the spot. Go to the balcony and make it there.

Don’t Get Mad, Don’t Get Even, Get What You Want.
The secret of disarming is surprise. To disarm the other side, you need to do the opposite of what they expect. If they are stonewalling, they expect you to apply pressure; if they are attacking, they expect you to resist. So don’t pressure; don’t resist. Do the opposite: Step to their side. It disorients them and opens them up to changing their adversarial posture.

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Listening requires patience and self-discipline. It is no coincidence that effective negotiators listen far more than they talk.
...Reframing is one of the greatest powers you have as a negotiator. The way to change the game is to change the frame.

As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote more than three centuries ago: “People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered by themselves than by those found by others.”

Keep in mind the seventeenth-century abbot about whom the Pope said, “When the conversation began, he was always of my opinion, and when it ended, I was always of his.”

Remember the Chinese proverb: “Tell me, I may listen. Teach me, I may remember. Involve me, I will do it.”

“If I give an inch, you’ll take a mile.”

The best general is the one who never fights. —Sun Tzu

The harder you make it for them to say no, the harder you make it for them to say yes. That is the power paradox.


# “An eye for an eye and we all go blind,” Mahatma Gandhi once said.

# That is why more than two thousand years ago, the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote: “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

# Use power to bring them to their senses, not to their knees.
tandem

# At first sight, a warning appears to be similar to a threat, since both convey the negative consequences of no agreement. But there is a critical, if subtle, distinction: A threat appears subjective and confrontational, while a warning appears objective and respectful.

# Remember that power, like beauty, exists in the eyes of the beholder. If your BATNA is to have its intended educational effect of bringing the other side back to the table, they need to be impressed with its reality.

# The more power you use, the more you need to defuse the other side’s resistance.

# “The more brutal your methods,” wrote Sir Basil Liddell Hart, a noted British military strategist, "the more bitter you will make your opponents, with the natural result of hardening the resistance you are trying to overcome."

# When faced with a Communist rebellion in Malaysia in 1948, Winston Churchill summoned Field Marshal Templar and gave him full authority to do whatever he needed to quash the rebellion. Churchill had one piece of advice, however, for the field marshal: “Absolute power, Templar… Heady stuff... Use it sparingly.

# Or consider an international example. In 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin blockaded West Berlin, demanding that Allied troops leave the city. The Western powers considered breaking the blockade with an armed convoy but feared triggering World War III. Instead, they chose to neutralize the blockade by mounting an enormous airlift of food and supplies to the beleaguered Berliners. Realizing the blockade was not working, Stalin finally called it off and agreed to negotiate.

# Consider an extraordinary negotiation. In 1943, hundreds of German women married to Jewish men marched for more than a week in the streets of Berlin. They sought to free their husbands from Nazi prisons where the men were awaiting transport to the gas chambers. The Nazis trained machine guns on the women, but they would not budge. They presented the Nazis with a dilemma: Release the prisoners or use violence on “Aryan” women in full view of a citizenry whose support and morale the Nazis were anxious to preserve. In the end, the most barbaric of governments chose the first option, and approximately fifteen hundred Jews were saved from death. The woman were able to deploy their BATNA—the street march—while inhibiting a negative reaction—a machine-gun slaughter— because of the presence of third parties—the German public.

# As the old adage puts it: “If one person tells you that you have a tail, you laugh. If three people tell you, you turn around to look!”

# For every ounce of power you use, you need to add an ounce of conciliation.

# The most stable and satisfactory outcomes, even for the stronger party, are usually those achieved by negotiation. Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British prime minister, summed up the lesson for negotiators: “Next to knowing when to seize an advantage, the next most important thing is knowing when to forgo an advantage.” In the midst of a power contest, it is vital for you to remember that your purpose is not victory through superior power but satisfaction through superior negotiation.

# Reaching agreement is one thing; implementing the agreement is another. The other side may fail to carry out the terms. A delinquent customer may promise you, “The check will be in the mail tomorrow.” A bankrupt business-person may claim, “I’m sure receipts will come in next week.” But can you rely on their words? You need to design an agreement that induces the other side to keep their word and protects you if they don’t. You don’t need to act distrustful; act independently of trust.

# The eminent Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz looked upon war as a continuation of politics by other means. Similarly, you should treat power as a continuation of problem-solving negotiation by other means.

# There is a story of a man who left seventeen camels to his three sons. He left half the camels to his eldest son, a third to his middle son, and a ninth to his youngest. The three set to dividing up their inheritance but soon despaired of their ability to negotiate a solution—because seventeen could not be divided by two or three or nine. The sons approached a wise old woman. After pondering the problem, the old woman said, “See what happens if you take my camel.” So then the sons had eighteen camels. The eldest son took his half—that was nine. The middle son took his third—that was six. And the youngest son took his ninth—that was two. Nine and six and two made seventeen. They had one camel left over. They gave it back to the wise old woman. Like the seventeen camels, your negotiations will often seem intractable. Like the wise old woman, you will need to step back from the negotiation, look at the problem from a fresh angle, and find an eighteenth camel.

# In negotiation, your goal is not to win over them, but to win them over. To accomplish this goal, you need to resist normal human temptations and do the opposite of what you naturally feel like doing. You need to suspend your reaction when you feel like striking back, to listen when you feel like talking back, to ask questions when you feel like telling your opponent the answers, to bridge your differences when you feel like pushing for your way, and to educate when you feel like escalating.

# Let him who would move the world first move himself. —SOCRATES

# Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Quotes from "You Can't Be Serious! Putting Humor to Work (Michael Kerr, 2001)" 

# Time spent laughing is time spent with the Gods.

# ...But as business management author Tom Peters reminds us, focusing solely on profits is like trying to play tennis while watching the scoreboard.

# Many psychologists believe humor is the complete opposite of stress.

# As Will Rogers said, “Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.” We often laugh at the humorous misfortune of others for the simple reason we are not personally affected by it, and, therefore, have some emotional distance from it.

Quotes From "The Essays of Warren Buffett" 

# Dagger thesis: the metaphor of the intensified care an automobile driver would take facing a dagger mounted on the steering wheel.

# But as happens in Wall Street all too often, what the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.

# Winston Churchill once said that "eating my words has never given me indigestion."

# Bull markets can obscure mathematical laws, but they cannot repeal them.

# Yogi Berra has said, "You can observe a lot just by watching."

# GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) is a collection of commonly-followed accounting rules and standards for financial reporting. The acronym is pronounced "gap." GAAP specifications include definitions of concepts and principles, as well as industry-specific rules.

# All of human unhappiness comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room. —Blaise Pascal

# Americans are getting stronger. Twenty years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars’ worth of groceries. Today, a fiveyear-old can do it. —Henny Youngman

# The punches you miss are the ones that wear you out. —Boxing trainer Angelo Dundee

# It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. —Nathan Mayer Rothschild

# The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts. —Marcus Aurelius

# You can get ripped off easier by a dude with a pen than you can by a dude with a gun. —Bo Diddley

# In the Air Force we have a rule: check six. A guy is flying along, looking in all directions, and feeling very safe. Another guy flies up behind him (at “6 o’clock”—“12 o’clock” is directly in front) and shoots. Most airplanes are shot down that way. Thinking that you’re safe is very dangerous! Somewhere, there’s a weakness you’ve got to find. You must always check six o’clock. — U.S. Air Force Gen. Donald Kutyna

# “Do as I say, not as I do.” * This sentence could serve as the epitaph for the bull market of the 1990s. Among the “few prudent principles” that investors forgot were such market clichés as “Trees don’t grow to the sky” and “Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered.

# Graham, an enthusiastic reader of Spanish literature, is paraphrasing a line from the play Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600–1681): "The greatest crime of man is having been born."

# In “Abou Ben Adhem,” by the British Romantic poet Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), a righteous Muslim sees an angel writing in a golden book “the names of those who love the Lord.” When the angel tells Abou that his name is not among them, Abou says, “I pray thee, then, write me as one that loves his fellow men.” The angel returns the next night to show Abou the book, in which now “Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.

# The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted. —G. C. Lichtenberg

# “It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!— how consoling in the depths of affliction! ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ And yet let us hope it is not quite true.”—Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, September 30, 1859, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865 (Library of America, 1985), vol. II, p. 101.

# In the short term the market is a voting machine, in the long term, it is a weighing machine.

Quotes from "Bargaining for Advantage. Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (G. Richard Shell, 2006)"

# At the Wharton Executive Negotiation Workshop, I am fond of quoting a New York lawyer and deal maker named James C. Freund. Freund has written a number of books on business mergers as well as negotiations. He once stated that “in the last analysis, you cannot learn negotiation from a book. You must actually negotiate.

# You must bake with the flour you have. —DANISH FOLK SAYING (The First Foundation: Your Bargaining Style)

# A negotiation is an interactive communication process that may take place whenever we want something from someone else or another person wants something from us. 

# Negotiation scholars have observed this phenomenon so often both in experiments and in real life that they have a name for it: “escalation of commitment.” People lose sight of their real goals in competitive situations and pay far too much money, spend too much time, or sacrifice too many other interests for the privilege of saying they have won. It usually does not take long for regret to set in after such a victory, teaching the winners that it is not enough to prepare goals—you must remember them during the negotiation. In auction situations, the final bidder overpays so often that economists call the accompanying feeling of regret the “winner’s curse.”

# A man always has two reasons for the things he does—a good one and the real one. —J. P. MORGAN

# In short, as part of your preparation, you must become an advocate for your goals using the most persuasive standards you can find. Which standards might those be? As my opening quotation from Samuel Coleridge suggests, the arguments the other party accepts as legitimate or has used to his or her own advantage in the past are usually the most effective.

# An old piece of wisdom from the American South applies here: “Pigs get fat, but hogs get eaten.”

# Normative leverage is the application of general norms or the other party's standards and norms to advance one's own arguments for one's own good.

# If you treat people right, they will treat you right—at least 90 percent of the time. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

# Leave a good name in case you return. —KENYAN FOLK SAYING

# If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own. —HENRY FORD

# Every reason that the other side wants or needs an agreement is my leverage—provided that I know those reasons. —BOB WOOLF

# You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. —ATTRIBUTED TO AMERICAN GANGSTER AL CAPONE

# Potential losses loom larger in the human mind than do equivalent gains. But a word of warning is in order: Making even subtle threats is like dealing with explosives. 

# Everything looks impossible until it's done. - Nelson Mandela

# "What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly."

# If the concession rule for haggling is “Start high and concede slowly,” the rule of thumb for integrative bargaining is to make big moves on your “little” (less important) issues and little moves on your “big” (most important) issues.

# Make every bargain clear and plain. That none may afterwards complain. —ENGLISH RHYME

# The master is not he who begins but he who finishes. —SLOVAKIAN FOLK SAYING

# No deal is better than a bad deal, after all. 

# The worst impasses are the products of emotional escalation that builds on itself: My anger makes you angry, and your response makes me even angrier.

# The market is a place set apart where people may deceive each other. —ANACHARSIS (600 B.C.)

# Most people I play cards with I trust, but I still want to cut the cards. —JOHN K. O’LOUGHLIN, ALLSTATE INSURANCE COMPANY

# Lies regarding intention even have a special name in the law: promissory fraud.

# Once you join them in the gutter (of telling lies), you forfeit your moral and legal advantage.

# Do not be so sweet that people will eat you up, nor so bitter that they will spit you out. —PASHTO FOLK SAYING

# Everyone lives by selling something. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

# Low avoiders can fight hard against their bargaining counterpart all day and share drinks and stories with the same person in the evening. 

# Research shows that most of us believe that other people are like ourselves. As one old saying puts it, “The thief thinks everybody steals.”