Works
- The Manager as Negotiator: Bargaining for Cooperation and Competitive Gain, 1986
- 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals, 2006
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Creating and claiming value. Negotiation combines cooperation to create value, enlarging what is available through joint gains, and competition to claim value, securing a share of it. The two are linked and in tension: sharing information helps create value but exposes a party to having value claimed from it, which Lax and Sebenius call the negotiator's dilemma.
Setup moves: right parties, interests, and no-deal options. Beyond tactics at the table and the design of the deal, Lax and Sebenius describe a third dimension, setup: arranging before talks begin that the right parties are involved, in the right sequence, with the right interests and the right no-deal alternatives in play. Changing who is at the table, or what each side faces if there is no deal, can change the agreement that is possible.
Backward mapping. Start from the agreement you want and the party whose consent is hardest to get, then work backward: map the parties and their interests, judge how costly each is to bring on board, identify patterns of influence and deference, and decide which earlier agreements would make the final yes most likely. This yields the order in which to approach people.
What it explains
Lax explains why many decisions are won before anyone sits down: by choosing who takes part, in what order they are approached, and what each faces if there is no agreement. His work with Sebenius also explains why openness that creates value can be exploited, which is why sequencing and setup matter.