Works
- The Manager as Negotiator: Bargaining for Cooperation and Competitive Gain, 1986
- Sequencing to Build Coalitions: With Whom Should I Talk First?, chapter in Wise Choices: Decisions, Games, and Negotiations, edited by Richard J. Zeckhauser, Ralph L. Keeney, and James K. Sebenius, 1996
- A Better Way to Negotiate: Backward, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 2004
- 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.
Sequencing to build coalitions. The order in which parties are approached can decide whether a coalition forms. Sebenius advises studying who influences the hardest party and to whom that party defers, and securing the agreements that make its yes more likely; in his examples, an early endorsement from a respected party raised the value of later approaches.
What it explains
Sebenius explains why the sequence of conversations, more than any single argument, often decides a contested proposal: early, respected endorsements make later ones easier, and approaching the wrong party first can close doors. Boards and committees respond to the same logic.