Secrets of Power Negotiating

Secrets of power negotiating is a very interesting book, which tackles a pretty interesting subject that is negotiating. This book teaches how to reduce prices of things you’re buying, increment the price of objects you are selling and how to spot negotiating techniques that can be used on you.

The book is divided into three parts, the first one which tells you “gambits” as he calls them or techniques that will help you be more comfortable when talking to customers, or trying to sell your product. On this part, he first describes day to day examples for his gambits, with car salesman, real estate etc. My personal favourites are the Good Guy/Bad Guy and the Higher Authority gambits. Firstly you may think that the Good Guy/Bad Guy gambit may not work as in that stuff from the movies, however, you can use this when the buyer is not really comfortable with you so he may not be agreeing with your schedule. In this case, you will have to act as if your superiors were some kind of dictator and if he talks to them it will be much worse for him. The Higher Authority gambit can work when things are getting complicated on your side so you act as if there was some higher authority you have to talk to so this way you can take more time to think about it. 

On the second part, he teaches you unethical gambits, this consists of techniques where you need to get something from the other side. My favourite is the Red Herring, which consists of distracting the other side from the thing that you want creating a problem, and then asking for a concession as a favor, although that concession will be your problem in the first place, but he will realise this months later. I do not consider these to be “unethical” gambits, I believe these are smarter ways of having the negotiation headed your way.

Lastly, he talks about the differences between american negotiators and foreign negotiators, which he explains that foreign ones are more flexible since americans are very hard headed and they think either my way or the highway. He explains that he thinks this happens because of the patriotisms that Americans have and they think that the american way is the best and perfect way to do it.

All in all, i really liked this book because i think it is very useful and you can use it in your everyday life, therefore i recommend everybody to read it.