Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around).

namely, we trust people more when we view them as being similar or familiar. People trust those who are in their in-group. Belonging is a primal instinct. And if you can trigger that instinct, that sense that, “Oh, we see the world the same way,” then you immediately gain influence. When our counterpart displays attitudes, beliefs, ideas—even modes

Normative leverage is using the other party’s norms and standards to advance your position. If you can show inconsistencies between their beliefs and their actions, you have normative leverage. No one likes to look like a hypocrite.

potential losses loom larger in the human mind than do similar gains.

Positive leverage is quite simply your ability as a negotiator to provide—or withhold—things that your counterpart wants. Whenever the other side says, “I want . . .” as in, “I want to buy your car,” you have positive leverage.

Negative leverage is what most civilians picture when they hear the word “leverage.” It’s a negotiator’s ability to make his counterpart suffer. And it is based on threats: you have negative leverage if you can tell your counterpart, “If you don’t fulfill your commitment/pay your bill/etc., I will destroy your reputation.”

To get leverage, you have to persuade your counterpart that they have something real to lose if the deal falls through.

I should note that leverage isn’t the same thing as power. Donald Trump has tons of power, but if he’s stranded in a desert and the owner of the only store for miles has the water he wants, the vendor has the leverage.

leverage is the ability to inflict loss and withhold gain. Where does your counterpart want to gain and what do they fear losing?