The Best Negotiation Ever
A Hard Negotiation
CRUUUNNNCCHH.. Hearing this sound from under my car, I slammed my brakes, just in time to see a portion of a bicycle go under the radar of my windshield. I was about to make a right turn coming out of a grocery store, and had looked right, and then left, and had started to turn. In the few split seconds between looking right and looking left, a teenage bicyclist had shot through the sidewalk, going in the wrong direction, without stopping. I got out of the car to take stock. Thankfully, the boy was unhurt. But his bike was a different story, with a wheel that was twisted out of shape. I chided him for bicycling on the sidewalk, which was illegal, and also for not wearing a helmet. It could have been much worse. After exchanging our phone numbers, I noticed that my car’s license plate had fallen off. Picking it up, I announced to my father, who was also with me, “Alright, we need to make a stop at a repair shop.” Little did he know what was to come next.
I took him to the most incredible repair shop that I’ve ever been to. We drove in to Nine Minute Oil and Lube. This place is setup as a highly efficient oil change shop. There are two tracks and cars are guided on to one or the other. As we wait in our cars, multiple staff members assist in doing a quick oil change by draining the oil underneath the car, checking the tire pressure, the engine fluids and anything else that seems out of the ordinary. An LCD screen next to each changing station shows the driver exactly what is happening underneath their car through a camera.
On this day, I pulled in to the left track, and as I rolled to a stop, the proprietor, a Korean immigrant, Sam, walked up to me with a big smile. I told him, “Sam, I am not here for an oil change. We were driving and a bicyclist came in front of the car. My license plate dropped off. Can your people help put it back on?” Sam replied, “Of course!” Then, he asked who was sitting next to me. I said, “My dad.” He then started talking to my father. The first thing he said was, “You should be very proud of your son.” I had no idea why he said that. But you can tell what a broad smile both of us had sitting in the car. After some more conversation, we were informed that the plate was back on. I asked Sam how much it’d be. And he replied, “Oh nothing. Don’t worry about it.” I insisted, “No, no. You’ve got to stop doing freebies for me. I want to pay.” He fought back, “No, I won’t charge you.” I said, “But your people have put in their labor. I want to compensate them.” He slowly relented, “Alright, you can tip them.” And then he said firmly, “No more than five dollars please. Otherwise it will spoil the culture.” I nodded, and handed a five dollar bill to the mechanic who had put the plate back on.
As we drove off, my father was speechless. He couldn’t believe what had just transpired. A customer and a mechanic had just negotiated. The customer wanted to pay, and the mechanic did not want payment! He did not know what to make of it. He was visiting from India, and his experiences there had been the opposite, where mechanics tended to use every visit as an excuse to fleece the customer. I had to tell him that it wasn’t that different in the United States. Sam’s shop happened to be an exception, which is why I would never think twice about getting any repairs done here.
There have been times when other reputed repair shops, even national chains, have tried to scare me by saying, “Oh, if you don’t get your car repaired right now, we cannot guarantee that you can safely get home. We refuse to accept responsibility.” It is another matter that unless I hire the repair shop in the first place, it is not their responsibility. Nevertheless, a warning like this is quite chilling. After being fleeced a few times, I have found myself falling back on Nine Minute Oil & Lube to have the mechanics tell me honestly what’s really wrong, and also tell me if they think the repair can wait, or if I can ignore the problem. Most of the time, the issues have been nowhere near the exaggerations that have been made by other shops.
Out of this trust is borne a very interesting kind of negotiation. A reverse-negotiation. Every time these guys do something for me, they try to cut the rates to make it more affordable. And every time they do that, I feel terrible, and want to pay more. The game is quite predictable — they always end up being more generous than me. These are folks who one might call blue-collar workers. People who work outdoors, in cold and hot weather, from morning till night. It just does not sound right. So I find myself thinking of ways to tag them, sometimes buying them a cake, or chocolate.
It isn’t just me who’s had these experiences. When I look at Yelp, this shop has a 5-star rating out of 650 reviews, with reviewers making comments like, “If I could give 10 stars, I would!” “Reason for the 5 stars, OUTSTANDING customer service!” “Seriously guys, you deserve 10 stars! I moved to the East Bay (Nine minute is located in the South bay, an hour away) but still bring both my cars to you.” One customer notes that because he had to wait, they gave him a gift card for the Starbucks next door so he could be comfortable! Most of the customers are thrilled that these guys don’t try to sell anything to them and tell the truth when asked for assessments.
The Three Schools of Negotiation
This is not just a story of a simple and humble car repair shop in Palo Alto. It is a great arbiter in stands taken by three schools of negotiation. Let’s call the first school A. In school A’s teachings, we should be clear about what we want, understand what the other side wants, convert the negotiation into a collaborative problem solving opportunity and be clear about when to walk away. The focus is primarily on getting honest with oneself, figuring out what counts as a “win” and to develop the discipline to walk away when the win does not happen. A renowned professor from this school of thinking suggests that you try this in places where you don’t have deep relationships and there is room for you to “experiment.” In this school, research is cited to show that honesty is not always the best policy for good negotiation outcomes. A lot of this is intelligent advice in a world that we believe is setup to exploit us, either intentionally or subconsciously, and strategies developed in this mindset can go a long way in protecting us from being exploited.
The second school, which we shall call School B, is a lot more explicit about relationships than School A. Every negotiation starts with a focus on grounding our intention on building good relationships with the parties involved. This implies that the negotiation we are entering is the start of a long and good relationship of working together, and must be viewed as such. The rest of the intellectual framework is quite similar to School A, but there is a second point of departure — School B has an explicit directive to never lie.
The third school is the Stanford school of negotiation. This school makes an altogether different leap, helping us go from “good” to “deep.” The directive in the Stanford school is to tell the whole truth in the spirit of trusteeship with the intent of deepening our relationship with the other. Each time, every time. Even when it is not convenient. In the Stanford school’s view, there is no need to negotiate when you are deeply concerned about the other and when the whole truth is your tool of choice.
School A strikes me as a good start that can help people realize that they have decision-making power, but I would be exhausted to live in a world of continuous negotiations where there wasn’t an intent at developing deep relationships. In School B’s world, finding a mutually beneficial solution is important. Knowing one’s Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) is important, so we don’t lose our mind and do something stupid. But where School B differs from the Stanford school is in its emphasis of “Do not lie,” as opposed to the Stanford school’s emphasis of “Tell the whole truth.”
In the School B model of negotiation, if someone entered your shop to buy a particular hammer, and it was clear to you that they shouldn’t be wanting to buy that hammer, or anything else in your shop, you are not obliged to reveal that, unless you are asked directly about the sensibility of the purchase. In the Stanford model of negotiation, you are obliged to not profit from the customer’s ignorance, and educate them on what is in their best interest. And here is the kicker. When you tell the whole truth to people who deal with you, there is really nothing to negotiate about! You are actually taking on the role of being a trustee of all those you deal with, whether they are your customers, vendors, colleagues, employees, or partners. This involves truly being invested in the well-being of others. Prof. Ronald Howard, my PhD advisor and the creator of the Stanford approach, would explain:
Telling the whole truth is easy. It is finding the whole truth that is hard.
We need to dig within ourselves to find out who we are and that part of our nature that we wish to express with our action. But if that hard work is done, small miracles can and do happen.
The Pashmina Trader
The Stanford approach may appear naive at first glance, but I have had the most interesting experiences with this approach. On a trip to India, our family invited a traveling pashmina scarf and shawl trader from Kashmir, Bashir, to visit our home. He arrived with a big trunk full of his goodies. We offered him tea, and the women of the house picked a couple of exquisite shawls. Once the selection was done, my wife declared to me, “Alright, now you have to handle the negotiation.” Knowing that they would be aghast with what I was going to do next, I agreed to negotiate on the condition that everyone except for Bashir would leave the room. My family agreed, and it was now time to “negotiate.”
I knew that he knew that a negotiation was coming — this was his daily work. I looked him in the eye, and told him, “Your goods are so exquisite that I refuse to insult you and the people behind this beautiful work by negotiating with you. Here is the entire money that we can afford today. Please give only whatever allows for a good profit for all the workers involved.”
The man melted. He was a Kashmiri, and people from this land are known for their warm-heartedness and their generosity. He not only lowered his prices, but he also gave an expensive Pashmina shawl as a gift, saying, “This is the first time you are buying from me. It is our tradition to gift the first time.” I felt really bad. The man had left his family and had come far to earn his bread so he could support them. It was not an easy life. I sighed and went in to tell my wife what had happened. We exchanged glances, and she knew what was on my mind. She smiled and nodded, and I went back to the man saying, “This is not a fair deal. Here is some more money that we think you should be taking from us.” He was shocked, and protested, “No, this is not right at all. I won’t take it.” I said, “You have to.” Then, he looked in his bag, and picked another exquisite shawl, and added it to our pile, saying, “Alright, then you have to accept this one.” The shawl was really gorgeous, and so I sighed, and went in to talk to my family to give some more compensation.
By now, we felt really connected to each other, and started talking about Kashmir. That land happens to be a hotbed of political dissent and violence, and the common folk have had their life deeply affected by military presence, terrorism and exploitative politics. I felt really bad for all that the common people there had to go through, and shared, “I’d love to visit and do something for children, related to education, around decision-making and values.” Bashir was so happy to hear it that he announced, “If you come, I will personally take the time to escort you from village to village to our schools.” We ended with more gifting — I found some of my old science books for his children who were in school.
Can you imagine an experience like this emerging from a negotiation? This is the power of the idea that the Stanford School holds out for us — to tell the whole truth, and at a deeper level, to “be” the whole truth. As a strategy, I can see that it is smart to say, “I really want this and cannot afford it. Can you help me?” But what happened with the Kashmiri trader was different. It was not my strategy to get him to melt. I truly felt honored to be interacting with him and was trying to find a way to get my extrinsic actions and the systemic ideals that guide them to be consistent with the depth of my intrinsic values. Like the great paradoxes that we have seen so far with values, the deeper we dig within ourselves to find our whole truth, the more we find ourselves interested in the welfare of others, and the more we go in that direction, strangely, our needs also seem to be taken care of.
But surely, if you are in business, won’t you sometimes have to economize on the truth? Actually, no. First, Nine Minute is not a charity, it is a business. Their systems are seemingly set to get you in and out of their shop as quickly as possible at an affordable price. Somehow, with their culture, they have been able to express their noble purpose while staying within the confines of their system, by not looking at the customer as a statistic. The Kashmiri trader was also not running a non-profit and had mouths to feed. But what about more mainstream businesses?
The Value of the Whole Truth
When Apple launched its mobile operating system iOS 6 in September 2012, it was a major fiasco. Apple had decided to ditch Google as its Maps provider. Maps, however, was not ready for primetime and eventually, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook would end up apologizing and asking customers to stick to Google Maps in their browser. It was before the apology happened that I walked into the Apple Store in Palo Alto, California. The Maps app looked pretty nice with 3D vector graphics, and I was seriously considering upgrading my iPhone 4 to use iOS 6. An apple customer service rep walked over to me, and I asked him, “I am thinking of upgrading, especially for Maps. What do you suggest?” He looked uncomfortable, and then said, “Don’t do it. I find it unusable. Stick to Google Maps for now.” That piece of advice saved me unnecessary headaches. But it also made me trust going to the Apple store, and I have kept my loyalty to Apple’s brand as have many other customers.
A much more striking story from the world of enterprise business software came from my friend, Shankar Hemmady, who was in a business development role in a large organization. His colleagues would push hard to sell their systems, making all sorts of tall claims. The harder they pushed, the harder it was to get their clients to believe them. My friend, on the other hand, seemed to be having an easy time getting and retaining clients. They asked him, “What do you do differently?” He replied, “It is simple. I decided a while back not to listen to the sales tutorials on spinning the truth to bag deals without revealing where our weaknesses lay. I tell my prospective clients the whole truth. That our system has flaws. There are many parts that are really crappy and they may have to live with it until we fix the flaws.” Horrified, his colleagues asked, “How can that possibly work?” He replied, “Well, I was also initially surprised that the more I told them the truth, the more they’d give me their business. I was telling the truth on principle, and not to manipulate them. It turns out that our clients know that the problem we are tackling is very hard, and anyone who claims to be able to solve it without difficulty is either clueless or dishonest. Our system, in spite of all its limitations, is the best alternative they have. My honesty helps them have respect for our company’s integrity and expertise, and trust that we will not take them for a ride.”
The philosophy of telling the whole truth is certainly not a novel idea that was invented at Stanford. It is perhaps as old as civilization itself, finding support in every wisdom tradition of the world. To see one expression of it, we shall travel back to an unknown time, where a young boy is having a conversation with his mother.
The Single Mom’s Whole Truth
“Mother, I want to go to school,” the young Satyakaam implored his single-mom, Jabala. The young lad had found out about a great teacher-sage named Gautam setting up a school nearby. This teacher would only accept students who were the children of the warrior (kshatriya) and educator (brahmin) classes of society. Satyakaam really wanted to get in but the odds were not in his favor. Jabala mulled it over for a bit, and then, coached her son in a way that would leave a big mark in the trajectory of the Indian wisdom tradition. She prepared her son for the most important negotiation of his life. Her son, with full trust in his mother’s coaching, headed to Gautam’s school to try his luck. The sage Gautam, as was customary in those days, asked the young lad about his parentage. Satyakaam replied, “I do not know who my father is, and only know my mother Jabala. She told me to tell you that she has been in the service of many people and does not quite know who my father is.” One can imagine a scene like this where other children, coming from an orthodox context, would have burst out laughing at this boy and his mother for revealing such a secret.
The sage Gautam was stunned. When he finally spoke, he laid down one of the greatest reminders of what was the driving value behind the Indian social system, while at the same time rebelling against its ossification, “Only a brahmin (the educator class) has the courage to tell the whole truth even when it hurts. Your mother has publicly revealed a damaging truth that no child should have to hear. A woman of such courage can only be a brahmin; therefore, you are of brahmin parentage, and I accept you as my student.”
Gautam did not stop there. He proceeded to take another counterculture action, and said, “From now on, you will be known by your mother’s name, as Satyakaam Jabala.” Legend has it that the city of Jabalpur in central India was named after this brave woman who had the courage to tell the whole truth. Her son would go on to become a great sage in his own right, making his mark in the ancient Upanishads, the chronicles of India’s wisdom tradition. The name, Satyakaam, coincidentally, translates to “desirous of truth,” and this story is one of the most beloved in the Upanishads.
From Negotiation to Trusteeship
How would this style of negotiation play out in our workplace? Should we be gifting things to our clients instead of charging them? Anyone who has tried doing that will know the tug that inauthentic gifting makes on our hearts. We know we can’t afford it, and yet we are trying to live up to some artificial standard of generosity. It is actually much easier to just tell the whole truth. Such as, “What I am offering is not free. It took a lot of blood and sweat, and many people have their livelihoods connected with this. The price I charge is not the value of our offering, which comes from a deep space within us that is priceless; the price is what we feel we need at this time to sustain ourselves and our work.” It is far more important to be true to ourselves than to any ideology of generosity.
I have found that when we are rooted to the spirit behind the words above, it becomes much easier to talk about price and at the same time, uphold our belief that our work is truly a gift, on which we cannot put a price tag. The price we charge is only to allow others to support us in continuing to serve them.
There are those who take the idea of trusteeship to another level by making themselves entirely dependent on the generosity of others. Nipun Mehta, founder of ServiceSpace, is a pioneer of gift ecology, encouraging people to experiment letting go of their expectations, to work at the edge of their comfort zone, going the extra mile to gift their best and trusting the universe. In a gift ecology, the emphasis is on depth over breadth. Nipun has a wonderful test on whether we truly own something. “You know that you actually own something when you are able to give it away to someone else.” In the trusteeship mindset, “Service doesn’t start when you have something to give; it blossoms naturally when you have nothing left to take.”
The gift ecology is not an ideology that we beat ourselves with for falling short; rather, it is an invitation to experiment. For me, this was about transforming my interactions in one area of negotiation where I am the most uncomfortable — salary negotiations. In my view, work is a context where I get to offer my best gifts, and compensation is bound to come if I do that — I don’t need to obsess about it. That has been my attitude throughout my professional life, and I see no reason to change it. And yet, sometimes, people have offered less than what I felt I could survive on at the time. That has been a very uncomfortable situation to be in, but every single time, the principle of telling the whole truth helped me through it. Once, I had just been offered an internship position with a consulting firm. I was so grateful that the money did not matter, even though it was low, and I did not want to negotiate. After accepting, I realized that as an international student, I would have to pay a fee to do the internship, due to US immigration rules that I hadn’t realized at the time of accepting the offer. Effectively, this meant I’d not be able to afford my rent. I told my prospective employers the whole truth, that I was grateful for the offer, but due to the fees I didn’t know about, I would not get by on what they wanted to give. By telling the whole truth, the employer realized that I wasn’t trying to exploit them and increased my pay to cover the internship fees!
After graduating, I had decided to work independently for a year, and instead of rushing to interview, I went off to clear my head in a meditation retreat. After returning, I had a call waiting from a senior executive in a big non-profit foundation who had found out about my work with values. I met the executive, and instantly liked his energy and the foundation’s work. When it came time to “negotiate,” I told him of my intention, “The opportunity to work on values is a huge gift for me, and I want to offer my service in that spirit. I won’t negotiate — you decide what’s fair, and I will agree.” I felt deeply connected to him upon saying this, and the next thing out of his mouth was, “You are like my younger brother, and I will make sure we treat you fairly.” He kept his promise, and the time I spent working with him was a grand experience for me. I have since kept my relationship with him and feel that I gained an elder brother.
The Native American Perspective
A big inspiration in salary negotiations for me has come from Native American philosophy, which I read about in Howard Zinn’s book The People’s History of the United States. Although that is a particularly left-leaning book which can tend to rub many people the wrong way, what I picked up from that book is the Native American custom of treating property not in an individual way but as belonging to the community. At different times, people have different needs, and they would take based on their needs. One finds an echo of this philosophy in Johnny Depp’s Native American character Tonto in the film The Lone Ranger, where Tonto explains why he takes the belongings of a dead man — the dead man does not need it anymore, and Tonto takes only what he needs, and no more. This came to the fore once when a boss was upset with another employee and wanted to lower that employee’s salary and pay me more. I was mortified at the proposition — and the Native American principle helped me. I requested my boss to look at the situation from the Native American perspective — that the other employee had a family at the time while I was single. Therefore, my needs were lower and it would be wrong on everyone’s part to take away from someone who needed more, and give to someone who needed less. Thankfully, my boss agreed.
One time, I found myself on the other end, where I needed a raise in order to be able to afford my rent. Instead of making a market-driven argument, “I am worth this much,” I focused on my needs, first trying to simplify my life, and only when all else had failed, I brought it up. A great guiding principle for me is whether my compensation is sufficient so that I can focus on my work instead of worrying about survival. If at any time survival becomes an issue, my work quality will get affected and that is when I have a responsibility to bring it up to those who determine my compensation. I have found that without making threats, or pompous claims of self-worth, by simply focusing on the whole truth of the situation, and being open to my request being declined, the communities I’ve been in have always responded to my needs. By the same token, I have found myself naturally inclined to respond to the needs of those I supervise when they don’t make claims of self-worth but instead focus on their need. If their life situation is such that it interferes with their work quality, then I have a responsibility to be of service by engaging in a conversation that is rooted in the whole truth of the situation.
Deepening Relationships
It is sometimes tempting to misunderstand the teaching of telling the whole truth, and mistake it to be about being hurtful. For instance, if I were to ask my wife, “Am I looking fat in this shirt,” she might really be wanting to tell me, “Oh, it is not the shirt, it is you. You look fat in every shirt that you wear!” But she might actually say, “Darling, you look wonderful!” Is the Stanford school asking her to say the former, and not the latter?
We used to have several discussions on this topic with Prof. Ron Howard and his colleague Prof. Ross Shachter. Applying Howard’s principle, “The hard work is not so much in telling the truth as it is in finding it,” I have found that finding my truth is incredibly hard work. One can find a very shallow truth. Or one can dig deeper. In the example above, in a conversation with Prof. Shachter, he suggested an ingenious response. My wife could tell me, “People often ask this question to know if they are still loved. If this was your way of asking, do you love me, then the answer is yes. Now, are you really interested in knowing about how you look in this shirt?” An answer like that refuses to accept the question that had been initially posed and changes the game. Makes it much deeper. That is a freedom we all have. In every interaction.
Another time, Prof. Howard was asked about the limits of telling the whole truth in a student organized panel. He considered the question, “How do I look?” and the temptation to say, “You look beautiful!” and pointed out that the truth is that our bodies are all going to get ugly and then die. Now are we going to keep our conversations shallow in denial of this truth? Or can we get to a level that is deeper? Surely this level of acknowledgment of the truth is not what we would dare to access on our first date with someone. But what if we did?
Creating an Ethical Code
Dating is perhaps the ultimate negotiation we enter into in our lives. Clues are processed at blazing speed and each player in this two-player game is attempting to determine whether a life long commitment is in order. Tomes are written on how to play this game effectively and find the partner of one’s dreams. If you come from the strange part of this planet called India, then you are likely aware of an “arranged” approach to marriage. While it was the case that in the past, families would get together and make the decision for their wards, in the current age, arranged marriages have transformed into arranged dating. The families have checked each other out, and if their wards date and like each other and consent, they will proceed to marry with the full support of their families.
I found myself in this situation where I was to meet this girl I did not know, to figure out if we were “compatible.” After being exposed to decision analysis, I had come to the conclusion that love was a decision, and I had full confidence in my ability to love the person I married. But being exposed to the Stanford school of negotiation required me to step it up. On my first date, I shared my personal ethical code. This is a code we develop in class to guide our action, and is incredibly useful for it lays down the principles that will protect us from getting into ethical dilemmas. Prof. Mary Gentile from Babson College uses a similar approach in her program titled “Giving Voice to Values,” where students learn to practice taking action that is consistent with their ethical code.
I shared with the woman I was dating, Geetanjali, those things that were very important to me. I would not steal other people’s work, and that meant no downloading of music or films without paying for it, and it was important that my partner share this principle. I had several other “I will not” clauses, and perhaps the most important was the one on abortion. After several discussions in class, I had come to the conclusion that while I did not oppose abortion for abortion’s sake, it was important that a decision like that be a team decision and not a position that went like, “It’s my body and you can’t tell me what to do.” For me, marriage was about turning from an individual into a team, and important personal decisions had to be team decisions, rooted in trusteeship and not ideology. If my future partner was of the view that I should not have any voice in such a major decision, then it would be better not to proceed further.
Of course, Geetanjali thought I was crazy! She hadn’t anticipated such a conversation on her first date and didn’t know what to make of it. We decided to stop dating formally after a week of intense conversations. The next week, I proposed that we should date secretly without family pressure so we could get to know each other better. To my surprise, she agreed. Ten days later, we got engaged, and a year later, we tied the knot. Almost ten years since that meeting, we both have deep respect for each other’s values, and we try to live by the ethical principles that matter to us. It may have been luck, but sharing my deepest ethical principles in one of the most important conversations in my life did not turn out so badly for me. In our relationship, I have found that going with the whole truth in every situation has deepened and strengthened our bonds.
The surprising part about ethical codes are that they are a set of rules, at the level of systemic values (see Hartman’s dimensions of values). They are extremely black-and-white, which they have to be, in order to drive clear action of a practical nature. And yet, that action can get us to deepen ourselves toward that which cannot be named, or measured, but is of intrinsic value to us. Truth simplifies our interactions with each other and gives a practical yardstick for decision-making.
Carrying Food to a Theater
I have always been surprised by the outcomes of trying this simple philosophy. I was once at an AMC theater (a chain of multiplex theaters in the United States) to watch a film with my wife. This theater, like most others, did not allow patrons to bring their own food. At the same time, the food here was not inclusive — it was largely designed for non-vegetarians, and the vegetarian options were quite greasy and limited. As we were watching a movie over lunch, I decided to get a vegetarian wrap from a restaurant next door, and took it in covered with my jacket. Once inside, my wife bought a beverage and as we were checking out, my sense of discomfort at deceiving AMC increased profoundly. I was weakening my ethical muscle with this action, which was not good for the long-term. By generating so much guilt, I was also going to ruin my enjoyment of the film, which was not good for the short term. Mustering my courage, I decided to negotiate with the cashier by coming clean with the whole truth. I said, “I have a confession to make. Since your vegetarian options suck, I have brought food from outside.” The cashier said, “Oh, we do have some vegetarian options.” I said, “I know, but they are too low quality to count as food.” I was prepared for a lengthy argument, which could have ended with me leaving the theater, but the cashier surprised me with, “Oh, we understand. As long as you don’t show it to us, it’s ok.” A huge boulder was lifted from my heart. I could enjoy chomping on my wrap without feeling guilty. The staff knew that the food they served did not actually meet the needs of at least some of their guests. What is remarkable about this story is that this cashier understood the rules of the organization she worked in, but she also knew when those rules would detract from the organization’s deeper intention to serve their guests. She chose to uphold something more intrinsic, and she did it brilliantly, within the confines of the system that AMC had laid down for practical reasons. We had a little chat about telling corporate to make their menu more inclusive, and I was able to enjoy the movie without trading my integrity.
The Pharma Company’s Truth
In the professional context, staying rooted in truth is an important cornerstone of strategy. In a strategic consulting engagement with a Pharmaceutical company, I was shocked to hear a member of our client’s team ask, “What if clinical studies show that our treatment is not as effective as we had thought? Can we market it in words that are legal to get as much mileage as possible?” His suggestion alarmed me — he was trying to negotiate his way out of a tough situation with an unethical shortcut. The head of the organization had been engaged — but silent till now. He now spoke slowly and decisively: “This company was founded on a core idea. Anything we do must pass three tests — it must be legal, it must be based on solid science, and it must help our patients. If it fails any of these tests, it’s not an option.” The team did not bring that alternative up ever again. Profitability is important, but only when placed in service of the organization’s core values, which, if the company has done its homework, tend to be an expression of trusteeship. When strategy loses touch with core values, beyond-profit leaders restore that connection with simple principles (like the three tests in this example) that look like the systemic values. The Pharmaceutical company’s leader in this case pressed the brakes on negotiating language between the marketing, science and legal departments for business advantage, and instead, turned the wheel back toward trusteeship.
Whenever negotiation moves us away from trusteeship, it may be time to press the brakes and turn the wheel back toward trusteeship.
Generative Value, not Ideology
No conversation on negotiation and ethics is complete without the Indian challenge to it. We have the theoretical axe-wielding murderer chasing an innocent victim, who has now escaped and I am the only one who has seen where he has gone. The murderer comes to me and says, “tell me where he went.” What choices do I have? Should I lie, and send him off somewhere else? An ideological commitment to truth would get us to participate in cruel outcomes. In class, when this scenario would come up, Prof. Howard would remind us, “You always have the option to say, ‘I am not in the business of doing dirty work for murderers. You will have to do this work of finding your victim yourself.’” Well — what if the murderer’s ire falls on us? There is no guarantee that it wouldn’t if we were to lie — so if the outcome is pretty much going to be our demise, we might as well not make it any easier for the murderer to find his victim. (You can tell the Decision Analyst’s mind is at work here!)
That’s a pretty convincing answer for me, but let’s make it more interesting with the Indian philosopher’s challenge. Let’s say now that the theoretical hapless victim has chosen to take refuge in my home, and the murderer is knocking at my door saying, “O truthful one, have you seen this guy?” And I know that if I send him off, off he will go because of my reputation. What should I do? This very scenario comes up in the Mahabharata and the story goes that the truthful individual, desirous of heavenly rewards, gives up the innocent victim. Krishna, the teacher of this story, makes it clear that the individual went to hell for not valuing life over ideology. He makes the recommendation even more challenging — “A thousand lies are better than one truth that cannot save a life.” My father is a lawyer and a terrific logician and he threw this challenge at me. So, one day, I invited Prof. Howard home when my father was visiting and had the two of them discuss this. Prof. Howard’s response was, “the individual could say, ‘There’s nobody here who should not be here.’” My father’s was, “Oh, if you try sophistry like that, the murderer would get suspicious and immediately search that individual’s home.”
This interaction opened my eyes to a big insight about the principle of the whole truth. The Stanford School of Negotiation offers the principle of the whole truth as a generative value — as in, if you root yourself in this, you will find yourself coming up with creative alternatives that you hadn’t thought of earlier. This is quite different from ideologically binding yourself, which the individual who had given up the victim felt he had to do. It is not that there is a clever answer for every scenario — however, the principle gives us the permission to brainstorm and create alternatives that were previously not on the table, and we never know what we might find. For the first time, in a field that has been previously touchy-feely, we have a normative approach to guide our thinking, where specific rules in our ethical code (created by each individual, for that individual) drive productive action toward a state of being that we value.
From Descriptive to Normative
The big breakthrough that the Stanford school of negotiation has achieved is that it has taken descriptive wisdom (as in, what’s actually so) around how we feel when we lie to, steal from or hurt others, and turned it into a normative code (as in, this is how I ‘should’ behave, according to me). This is a perspective that is unique to engineers who are not content with leaving the world as it is, but want to leave it better than they found it. Indeed, this is a hallmark of the Decision Analysis approach pioneered by Prof. Ronald Howard at Stanford, and it is not surprising that this approach has entered the field of ethics. I would be remiss if I did not mention how this school of negotiation came to be — that story is rooted in the unbelievable story of Prof. Howard going “crazy.”
In summary, the Stanford school of negotiation invites us into a perspective where the best negotiation ever is no negotiation at all, but a deepening of relationships rooted in the whole truth.
Resources
- “Ethics for the Real World,” by Ronald Howard and Clint Korver.
- Giving voice to Values
- Sam Harris’ essay, The Straight Path
Questions for Reflection
- What does telling the whole truth in your relationships, both personal and professional, mean to you?
- What happens to your negotiation when you use the whole truth as your primary instrument?
