International Negotiations

Final thoughts

I’ve never thought of myself as a great negotiator. I remember two separate occasions when 

I was teaching negotiation skills in one-to-one classes to senior executives who were not 

professional negotiators. When it came to the role plays, on both occasions, the executive 

completely dominated the negotiation and left me feeling humiliated and beaten.

Since those days, I’ve learned three important lessons about negotiating. Firstly, that 

humiliating and beating your opponent is actually a very shallow victory. If you want to build 

lasting business relationships, it’s much better to leave your opponent feeling good about the 

negotiation. Whenever I have trained professional negotiators, they have always stressed the 

importance of relationship-building as a vital and difficult skill in a negotiation. So perhaps I’m 

actually a better negotiator than I thought.

Secondly, negotiation techniques can be learned. Two of my favourite books are Influence: 

Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini, and Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William 

Ury. Both books have a prominent place in this book – the former in Module 8B, the latter 

in Module 6A. If you are serious about training negotiators, I recommend that you read the 

books in full, together with Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion, by Noah Goldstein, 

Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini.

Finally, there are important differences between negotiating with people who speak your 

own language and negotiating with speakers of other languages. I remember once trying to 

explain to a group of Polish negotiators the subtle difference between What if we double 

the price? and What if we doubled the price? One of my trainees pointed out to me that 

this type of distinction is meaningless in real life: he’d interpret both questions as We’re 

considering doubling the price. In other words, you can include all sorts of subtlety in what 

you say, but the only really important thing is what the other person hears.

There’s a lot more to negotiating than correct use of conditionals – as you’ll discover as you 

work through International Negotiations. Good luck!