Negotiation with Sun Tzu — Give Your Enemy Control

As my first blog post in “East Meets West Negotiation”, I hope to share some insights on why I started this blog. Browsing through the internet, I am amazed by the lack of analysis on various negotiation styles around the world, in particular, the markedly different negotiation styles between Eastern and Western negotiators. As a negotiation expert myself who has started 2 successful businesses with a strong psychology and HR background, I decided to start this blog to share my knowledge, having negotiated with umpteen Eastern and Western people alike.

Sun Tzu

I’ll start off my first blog with my admiration for Sun Tzu, the author of the Art of War, an incredibly written Ancient Chinese book full of war tactics. I would recommend anybody to read at least a chapter from this book to learn about how ancient war tactics can be applied to modern day negotiation settings.

Based on my experience and business dealings, although most Easterners can speak English, communication barriers with the West are still as high as before. That is because Easterners think different, and as a result, negotiate differently. Most of modern day negotiation literature and academic studies come from the west, with Harvard-inspired MBA and EMBA programs all trying to decipher the best negotiation techniques and tactics. The problem is however, as I mentioned, 99% of these courses are teaching negotiation from a western perspective – that is a BIG problem.

Show your Weaknesses

Before I dive deeper into negotiation differences between the East and the West in my upcoming blogs, I’d like to focus on one of the many key ideas put forward by Sun Tzu – embrace your own weaknesses and Don’t be afraid to show them. That seems a bit counterintuitive does it not?

It actually makes a lot of sense. Sun Tzu says – don’t be afraid to show your weaknesses early, so that you can wear off your weaknesses gradually and you can focus fully on your strengths latter in the battle. Basically, Sun Tzu suggests that getting your weaknesses out of the way quick is better than waiting them till last – if your weaknesses are bound to be noticed by your opponent, why not let your opponent know ASAP?

Illusion of Control

There are several benefits when employing this tactic in a negotiation. Firstly, by showing your weaknesses, you give your opponent an illusionary sense of control. As humans, we strive to be in control of everything, whether consciously or unconsciously. We hate it when we don’t have control. In negotiation settings, I often find that people hate to negotiate when they have no control. The worst thing that can happen when you are looking to land a big deal with a big company is to not even been given a chance to negotiate properly. By showing a calculated weakness on the onset, your opponent will feel like he is in control and as a result, is more likely to feel at ease when negotiating with you in the middle and latter stages of a negotiation. When your opponent feels at ease, that is when he is at his peril – he may loosen up and not be as demanding. This gives you more of an opportunity to secure concessions from your opponent or concede less than you originally expect to from the onset.

A second benefit is that you give yourself more a chance to take the upper hand in the closing stages of the negotiation. That is because by nature and by definition, when your weaknesses have been discussed, only your strengths are yet to be discussed. In sports, it is often said that closing a match well is much more important than the start. Similarly, ending a negotiation well is more important than how well you start. You don’t want to keep making concessions in the end of a negotiation, especially in situations where there is a time limit on when you have to make a decision to strike a deal or not.

Handling Your Weaknesses

To sum up, your weaknesses is not the be all and end all. They can often be turned into something that benefits you in negotiations through a bit of creativity and skill. Negotiations are not always as straightforward as you first think and the worst sin one can commit is to only evaluate everything based on its appearance.