Sample frameDay 111·Negotiation · Prepare

Good morning. You know the number you'd refuse. Now say the number you intend to get.

Negotiation.

Goals Beat Bottom Lines

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The question

What are you actually going for in the negotiation you have coming — a figure you could defend, in a sentence, to a stranger who owes you nothing? What usually arrives instead is a range, a feeling, or the phrase 'as much as I can get'. The distance between that and a defended number is what the other side collects, and they don't have to be skilful to do it.

The idea

G. Richard Shell teaches negotiation at Wharton, where he is professor of legal studies, business ethics and management and academic director of the Executive Negotiation Workshop. Bargaining for Advantage (1999) opens where most preparation stops: at the difference between a bottom line and a goal. Your bottom line is the point below which no deal beats your alternative. It's defensive, it's derived, and its single function is to tell you when to stand up. Your goal is what you're trying to achieve, and Shell's case is that the goal, not the floor, is what moves the result. He draws on Sidney Siegel and Lawrence Fouraker's bargaining experiments of 1960, which found that what a negotiator ends up with tracks the level they aspired to. Shell's standard for setting one is a number that is optimistic and justifiable at the same time. The trouble is that a floor is easy to write and a target is exposing. So the floor gets written, and the meeting is spent negotiating towards it.

The framework

01
Whichever number you set down first becomes the reference.
Sequence does real work here. A preparation session that opens with the walk-away point produces a target that turns out, under inspection, to be the floor with a margin added for dignity. Start instead with what a genuinely good outcome looks like, argued from the value at stake rather than from what you would tolerate, and only then work out the point below which no deal beats your alternative. Both numbers matter and they do entirely different jobs. Written in the wrong order, the smaller one becomes the reference, and you'll spend the meeting defending it.
02
Could a reasonable person on their side see why you hold it?
A target with no argument behind it collapses the first time it is questioned, which is usually inside a minute. A goal is a number plus its case: the comparable deal, the value you can quantify, the cost of the alternative they would have to take, the precedent they set themselves last year. Shell's test is whether a reasonable person on the other side could hear the argument and see why you might hold it, which is a lower bar than agreement. If your only support is that you'd like the money, you've written a wish, and wishes go under the mildest pressure.
03
Say the number out loud to one named person, days before the first session.
Day 92 gave you the mechanism; here it does one narrow job. A target held only in your head can be revised at the exact moment it was built to hold, and nobody will ever know it moved. Write it down, then tell one person who'll ask you afterwards how it went — a colleague, a co-founder, whoever you would be embarrassed to fudge in front of. Shell's own preparation step is to make the goal vivid and commit to it while you are still calm. Call that stubbornness if you like. It's really a defence against the negotiation you hold with yourself, silently, while the other side is still talking.
04
In the room, notice which of your two numbers you're defending.
The floor pulls hard once a conversation turns uncomfortable, and it announces itself in your own language well before it shows up in any formal concession. You stop arguing why your target is right and start explaining why a lower number would be acceptable. That sentence is the tell. When you hear yourself say it, stop and go back to the argument you wrote, because the target was set while you were calm and the revision is being proposed by a version of you who wants the meeting to be over. Keep the floor sealed on the page. It's there to make one decision, and it makes it once.

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