Today's Reading
PREFACE
In a previous book I authored, I focused on successful cases of negotiation. Many readers gave me wonderful feedback about the book, but one person stopped me in my tracks with what they had to say. The woman I was speaking with told me how much she'd enjoyed the book and its real-world applicability, but then she asked me a question that rattled around in my brain for quite some time: Why did I focus on successes? As she explained, "When I look back at my negotiations, I remember the successes fondly. However, the real lessons that I have learned throughout my career from a negotiation point of view have come from my failures." Then she asked, "Have you considered another book focused on failure and what we can really learn from those processes to help us grow and become better negotiators?" In the moment I blurted out, "No, but I will consider it!" After contemplating the question for some time, and running the idea by other people in the field of negotiation, I decided it would indeed be a worthwhile endeavor...hence this book.
To be perfectly frank with you, my own life has been riddled with failure. I was not a great student as a child, in high school, or at university (I finally figured it all out in graduate school). I was a decent but not outstanding athlete, despite putting in a lot of time and effort and a desire to be great. I was a slightly better than average violinist as a child, but I didn't practice the way I needed to in order to excel because I didn't have the passion for it. In other words, at an early age, and indeed through my early twenties, I failed at many things. Interestingly, over time, those failures turned out to have been more of a blessing than a curse. You see, when you fail and you survive to talk about it, you learn valuable lessons about what to do the next time, and why. Further, from a psychological point of view, if you understand that failure is part of life, the pressure falls away, because you know it will happen. You don't strive to fail, of course, but you do accept it as part of the overall journey of life.
The same is true when it comes to negotiation. Failure is, simply put, part of the landscape. While that may be daunting for some, it may come as a relief to others. As an example of what I mean, while I was working on this book I shared with one of my students that I was writing a book on failure in negotiation and how to learn from it. She looked at me and said, "Oh, thank God!" Curious, I replied, "Why do you say that?" She elaborated further, "I feel as though all we read and hear about in the program are the negotiation successes. As a student of negotiation, this view makes me feel as though I have to be perfect and always succeed. If I'm not always doing really well, I must be doing something very wrong. I'm glad that's not the case!"
It certainly is not the case, and I hope that some candor from me will set the record straight for that student and others in the field. We have to humanize the process for everyone and help negotiators understand that failure is something they will encounter and have to grapple with as part of becoming more effective. The question ultimately is, what do you do with that failure when it transpires?
Consider the world of startup businesses. Before you read the next sentence, pause and ask yourself: What would I guess is the success rate of this type of company? The answer is 10%, which means that 90% of startups fail. And yet, many thousands of startups attempt to get off the ground worldwide every year. Now, while I certainly don't believe the success rate is nearly that low in negotiation, failure is definitely part of the equation. When it happens for startup entrepreneurs, they have to cope with it, learn from it, be resilient, and get back to the drawing board with a new idea that just might take hold—having learned some valuable lessons from their last failed endeavor. The same is true in negotiation.
This book is about that process. The aim of focusing on failure is not to apportion blame or second-guess what could have, or should have, been done. In fact, as I will explain later, that way of thinking is one of the most significant blocks to truly learning from our failures. And that's the real goal—to learn from those failures and to come back to the table wiser and a better negotiator than before. To that end, I have developed a framework that I believe negotiators will be able to systematically follow to do just that.
My plea to you is this: Embrace your failures, cope with the losses associated with them, understand why they happened so you can genuinely learn from them, get back to the table, and continue on your pursuit to be the best negotiator you can be.
—JOSHUA N. WEISS
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