Product Description

Jim Camp, the world’s #1 negotiating coach, shows how to release the emotional pressure that’s part of any negotiation by using his proven system of safe, decision-based negotiation that enables you to meet all your objectives without needless, wasted compromises or giveaways.

• Out of the blue your best customer demands a huge discount—or else he takes his business elsewhere.
• You think you finally have a buyer for your home, but then at the last minute she demands that you pay for new landscaping of the yard—or no deal. There are plenty of other properties for sale, and she says she’ll walk.
• Your son is having trouble in school, and you have to think about how to deal with his “my way or the highway” teacher.

When confronted with these—and innumerable other—day-to-day negotiating challenges at work and in your personal life, most people start to guess about how much they should give up in compromise to make the other side happy (“I’ll just meet them halfway, and we can put this problem to bed”).

Jim Camp has a better way for you to negotiate:

NO.

Saying “no” is not about being hard-nosed or intransigent. Rather, it stops everyone in their tracks, clears the air, and allows you to get at what the real issues are. It is a proven and an amazingly effective system that avoids unwarranted assumptions, needless compromises, and wild guesses, showing:

• How to stop being needy, banishing emotional responses such as “I must keep this customer’s business” or “I have to sell this house now,” and start focusing on what you can control—yourself
• Why in a negotiation the two worst things to hear are “yes” and “maybe”
• How to get to the heart of the issue through the art and science of asking great questions
• How to find out who the real “decider” is and stop negotiating with the unqualified

We live in a compromise- and assumption-based world, but Jim Camp flips conventional wisdom on its head and in the process makes you a more effective negotiator with clients, customers, spouses, kids, neighbors, and coworkers. Through Camp’s system you’ll find that “no” is just the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. With it, you’ll get everything you want and you’ll build solid relationships with those you negotiate with.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25361 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-06-19
• Released on: 2007-06-19
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Negotiating expert Jim Camp teaches his readers how to be less emotional and close more deals—whether job interviews or sales—in this useful, occasionally hyperbolic guide. "The 'No' system is not just contrarian," he promises in the introduction. "It creates an entirely new paradigm for negotiation—one that makes common sense, then intellectual sense, then practical sense in your life and work." He also warns against popular compromise-based negotiating: "If you're a devotee of required compromise and endless assumption, there are many businesspeople—I'm one of them—who have you for lunch every day." Instead, he introduces a 12-chapter program on how to avoid neediness in a negotiation, how to develop a mission for your deal and vision for your overall business, how to find the real decision maker and use practical techniques like repeating the crux of your negotiation three times. He's most insightful about not letting desire get the best of you and the power of silence; the mission and vision sections are more familiar. Sometimes negotiation slips into manipulation, as when the author steers his wife toward buying a boat by convincing her that the purchase was her idea. Still, many of his tactics clearly work. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Jim Camp is an internationally sought after negotiation coach and trainer, developer of the Coach2100™ technology, a proprietary, patient pending negotiation project management and training system, and author of NO: The Only Negotiating Strategy You Need for Work and Home (Crown), the revised and updated version of his previous critically acclaimed business book, Start with No.

As president and founder of The Jim Camp Group, a negotiation training and management firm, Camp has coached individuals, companies, and governments worldwide through hundreds of negotiations that total more than 100 billion dollars per year.

Camp is involved in hundreds of negotiations a year by means of his proprietary technology called Coach2100.com, a fully secure, interactive, virtual environment where Camp-trained coaches evaluate, train, communicate with, and coach clients, and where they manage their negotiations in real time. Camp and his team are currently coaching more than 37 billion dollars in negotiations. This technology enables Camp’s clients to conduct negotiations anywhere in the world, fully supported by Camp-trained coaches, and achieve the kind of dramatic results that no other negotiator has duplicated.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1

Stop the Roller Coaster, I Want to Get Off

Controlling the Commotion of Emotion

Before you make a decision, your emotions rage all over the place. Then when you make a decision, you set about rationalizing it. When you watch yourself and other people carefully, you can actually see the transition from one emotional state to the next—from the emotional state to the decision state. Every day, every hour, even every minute, under some circumstances, you flip back and forth, back and forth. I want to change my career. I just do, even though I’m doing well right here. My dad says I shouldn’t. I know I probably shouldn’t. But I want to. We’ve all had such experiences. I want to buy this car. I know I shouldn’t. Yeah, I will. Back and forth, on issues big and small. Sometimes this dynamic is plain for all to see. Sometimes it’s almost all underground. Regardless, it is always there.

Successful negotiation of any sort requires that you understand this fact and use it. As I have already emphasized in the introduction, your overriding task as a negotiator—in the office or in the home, with your family, or anywhere at all— is to replace compromise- and fear-based negotiating with decision-based negotiating. You must learn to progress from raw, unexamined emotions, which never produce good agreements, to the careful decisions that eventually do. Most negotiators remain mired in their own emotions. Nor do they ever get past the emotions that are bogging the other side down. You must see the emotions on both sides for what they are and work with them, not against them. When you do, you’re way ahead of the game and way ahead of 99 percent of your fellow men and women. But it’s hard not to get trapped in the emotional realm, especially because of one particular emotion that dominates all others in negotiations: neediness.

Exhibit No. 1: Neediness

Why are the eyes of so many beasts like the big cats, grizzly bears, polar bears, and wolverines set in the front of the head, facing forward? Because these animals are predators always looking ahead for prey. They have no need to look back or even much to the side. They have their eyes on the prize, because this is how they make their living. Now, why are our own eyes also set in the front of the head, facing forward? Because we are predators as well. Watching children in a playground is delightful, but it is also cautionary, as every parent knows, because along with the friendships and the kindnesses we also see some king-of-the-hill, one-upmanship, bullying instincts emerge at an early age. For many, these instincts last a lifetime, as anyone who has spent much time in a nursing home knows. They accompany some of us right to the grave. (You’ve probably seen the ad on TV with the two sets of grandparents sending pictures of their grandchildren back and forth, trying to one-up each other. The scene is played for laughs, but it also says a lot about human nature.)

Our “one-upping,” predatory nature is a harsh truth and not always a welcome one. But it is a vitally necessary point for you to understand. Like it or not, we are predators by nature, and the first instinct of predators is to take advantage of the fear-racked, the distressed, the vulnerable—in one word, the needy. We humans, at least, are also capable of wonderful altruism, but we don’t see much altruism in the world of business and negotiation, despite all the sweet talk of cagey practitioners.

In a negotiation, you may be dealing with some serious predators who are looking for the slightest sign of distress and neediness. “Dog-eat-dog” may not do justice to the aggression you will encounter, and good negotiators pounce on the slightest appearance of weakness. Every time you leave a long-winded message on an answering machine providing all kinds of information, you put yourself at a disadvantage. How? You’re too anxious and therefore seem needy. Each time you answer a question with much more information than is really called for, you are showing neediness and putting yourself at risk. Every time you set a price and then lower it, you are showing need and putting yourself in a weaker position. By cutting your price without being asked to and then explaining why you felt it important to cut the price, you are showing neediness and reinforcing a bad habit.

Many business negotiators are expert in creating neediness by feeding the hopes and expectations of the other side. They paint rosy, exaggerated scenarios for year-making commissions and career-making deals—all for the purpose of building neediness on the part of the other side for this bonanza. Then, when the neediness is well established, they lower the boom with changes, exceptions, and a host of other demands. And why not? They have the upper hand.

These are not profound observations about neediness. They are common sense, when you stop to think about them. The problem is that all too often we do not stop to think about neediness. Many trained negotiators schooled at our finest institutions have never heard a discussion of the subject, let alone considered how to deal with neediness. I know this because I’ve lectured at these institutions. The students understand what I’m talking about immediately—who wouldn’t?—but they have no sense of how neediness plays out over the course of a negotiation. Certainly most people don’t watch out for neediness during the negotiations encountered in their daily lives. But you must. When you slip and allow yourself to appear needy you are in danger and your negotiation is in big trouble.

You do not need this deal

Today, in our wealthy society, most of us have no good reason to need much of anything, but somehow we fool ourselves and program our minds and make statements like “I need this leather jacket.” Or “I need this Maserati.” Or “I need to make this call.” Or “I need to talk to you.” Or “I need this opportunity.” Or “I need this deal.” Or “I need to see her.” We use the word “need” much too casually.

You’re negotiating for a new home? You love this one house so much you need it? It’s perfect—perfect neighborhood, school district, size, color, fixtures, garage, game room, everything? You have to have it? You’ve decided for sure? In the first place, do you really need it? It’s not your family or your career. It is, bottom line, a shelter with four walls (probably more) and a roof. There are others. In the second place, who says the seller is not the one with some real neediness to make this deal? Control your own neediness. If, after all the looking at houses, you decide to pay a $100,000 premium, at least you’ve clearly understood what you’re doing, and why. (Clearly, auctions are expressly designed to build and manipulate dueling buyers’ respective neediness. Beware.)

You do truly need the basics of physical survival—air, water, food, clothing, and shelter—and everyone reading this book already has these. You also need the basics of intellectual and emotional well-being for a well-lived life of love, family, friendship, satisfying work, hobbies, and faith—each reader has his or her own list here. But it’s a short list, and it does not—or should not—include the $500 jacket or the $100,000 car, because there are other jackets and other cars. Nor should the list include this particular job, deal, or agreement, because there are other jobs, deals, and agreements.

You do not need this agreement. Nevertheless, neediness is everywhere. Sometimes it is blatant and easy to spot, but just as often it is subtle and insidious.

Test Drive Take ten minutes at the end of the day and assess your actions and your conversations, looking for signs of neediness. No one knows better than you when it’s sneaking into the picture. Honest appraisal will uncover it. Did you talk too much or too fast in a conversation, negotiation, or interview, maybe to make just the right impression? Jot this neediness down.

•Did you leave long-winded messages? Jot it down.

•Did you make the direct statement “I need this or that”? Jot it down.

•Did you get excited and start looking ahead at the thought of some success, great or small? Jot it down.

•When you’re finished making your list, think carefully about the real motivation behind each item—not the apparent motivation or the rationalized motivation, but the real one. See if you can identify the neediness.

The list of our needs is endless. Our passion for the perfect house? It includes just a wee bit of neediness to demonstrate to the world our financial success, doesn’t it? The dueling grandparents sending pictures of the grandkids in the TV ad? There’s some neediness in that scenario, too: the neediness to be seen as winning grandparents with successful children who are in turn rearing these incredible grandchildren.

This is the way we are—and in our everyday lives, so what? But in negotiation it’s a different story. In negotiation, neediness is a killer. People who understand this—who see the big ways and little ways people express neediness—use this understanding to great advantage.

Test Drive After you have identified your own signs of neediness on a given day, look around your world and find the signs in others: the people who talked too much in an effort to please you, who needed to be right all the time, who needed to win at all costs, who needed to be the center of attention. If you look, you’ll find the neediness.

It is very easy to slip into such a state of neediness, often without even being aware of it. Think about something as simple as a greeting.

Hi, I’m Betty Jones.

Hello, Ms. Jones.

Such subtle subservience could put yo...

Customer Reviews

No, You should buy this book
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Seriously now, this book opens in Chapter 1 with a phenomenal concept that I've never seen fleshed out so well in a negotiations book. That concept is "neediness". More importantly, understanding that neediness is a state of longing for or desiring something that you don't actually need in most cases and then rooting this out of your thinking in relation to the negotiation process. When you don't feel needy, it's easier to say no.

Also, the book points out how the other party's neediness can be played to your advantage. Watch for signs of this like not wanting to end the discussion, giving more information than is needed when answering questions, being overly enthusiastic, etc.

From here the book moves on to typical concepts covered in negotiation books and differs little from the rest of the pool. However, the first chapter and a few nuggets throughout the book make it well work the reading if you are involved in negotiations of any kind.

NO helps you step into action
How many precious hours have you spent reading about _becoming_ a better negotiator? And after all of that, how confident are you that you are on the track to _being_ a better negotiator? Jim Camp's "No" puts that track clearly in front of you with an accessible presentation of Camp's "Systematic Decision-Based Negotiation."

Where others tell good stories and leave the reader at a loss for how to replicate success, Jim Camp provides a few honest principles and has developed low-risk excercises for how to implement those principles in your life. Make no mistake - The effort and discipline required to work through Camp's excercises and to turn his principles into habits are significant.

What reward could possibly be worth the effort? Every book on negotiation tells you how important it is to prepare. Camp helps you learn HOW to prepare so you can feel in control in every negotiation. Imagine that... And imagine using these skills to continually improve relations in all aspects of your life.

For those who read Camp's "Start With No," this new volume represents a maturation of the earlier work. You will find clear prose, helpful exercises for stepping into Camp's System, new case studies, and that many rules have been further distilled into core principles.

Thank you for setting me free Jim
I just ordered "No: The Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home" after seeing ads and reviews and Camp's StartWithNo.com web site.

The web site offered a "10 Tips" download which I promptly downloaded because I like to study contrarian approaches. All ten were useful, but it's the first one that validated why I know I'm going to love reading "No: The Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home"

-- Never begin by asking them to say yes and agree. --

Wow. I've been struggling for years with advice from other gurus suggesting that I change my style this from this. It just is so natural to me. Next time I negotiate, I'm going to be a lot more at ease knowing I've got Jim Camp's advice on my side.

If you're tired of doing the reasonable thing (Another excellent book.. "Be Unreasonable" by Paul Lemberg), look for unconventional thinkers like Jim Camp, Tim Ferris(4 Hour Work Week), Ben Mack(Think Two Products Ahead).

There are still some new tricks us for us old dogs to learn.