BazermanMoore

The Tools of Value Creation 163
The advice to give away information often surprises people because they assume
that if they give away information, they are giving away their power. In fact, only giving
away information about your reservation price gives away your power. Both parties
benefit as the parties learn about differing levels of concern across issues.
One benefit of strategically disclosing information is that it can enable you and the
other side to expand the pie of outcomes. If they are smart, they will build off of your
information to help create mutually beneficial trades. An additional benefit is that behaviors
in negotiation are often reciprocated. When you scream at people, they tend to
scream back. When you apologize for a mistake or offense, they may do the same. And
when you give them some information about your position, they may return some information
of their own. This reciprocity can create the information sharing necessary to
create mutually beneficial agreements.
Negotiate Multiple Issues Simultaneously
Executives often ask us, ‘‘What issue should we discuss first in a negotiation?’’ Some
believe it is critical to get the most important issue resolved in the beginning, arguing
that ‘‘any other strategy is simply procrastinating.’’ Other negotiators believe that it’s
best to start with the easy issues, as this allows them time to build trust and gather
momentum toward more difficult issues.
We disagree with both of these views. Instead, we strongly advocate negotiating
multiple issues simultaneously. Consider what happens when you reach agreement on
an issue before you know how the other issues are going to work out. If you have
pushed hard and gotten what you wanted on one issue, you might leave the other side
so little benefit that they become inflexible on all of the other issues and the entire deal
falls apart. By contrast, when people negotiate issues simultaneously, they can find favorable,
value-creating trades across issues. While the buyer and seller may be in conflict
on each issue, they are not equally passionate about each issue. The relative
importance of each issue to each party only becomes apparent when the issues are discussed
simultaneously.
How do you do this, given that it is usually not possible to talk about everything at
once? When you negotiate, insist that nothing is settled until everything is settled. You
can talk about different issues one at a time, and even discuss tentative possible deals.
But when it comes time to talk about real outcomes, you should be considering packages
of issues—deals that cover all the issues in the negotiation and that communicate
your preferred outcome across all of the issues. Package offers help the other party
isolate aspects of the offer that are particularly problematic and propose counteroffers
that signal flexibility on some issues while making demands on others.
Our MBA students often ask us what they should say when a prospective employer
asks them to specify a minimum salary requirement. Our advice is to tell the truth: that
the answer to that question depends on lots of things, including the signing bonus, the
yearly bonus, the job’s benefits package, the job assignment, the job title, the promotion
prospects, and more. It is impossible to specify a minimum acceptable salary without
knowing the offer’s other details. For the same reasons, it is a mistake to negotiate an
agreement on the issue of salary before you move on to discussing other issues about