Successful negotiation is not about getting to ‘yes’; it’s about mastering ‘no’ and understanding what the path to an agreement is.
Christopher Voss
Successful negotiation
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Yes. The ability to understand that sometimes it’s better to have no deal than a disadvantageous deal is a necessary one.
I really like Voss’s book on negotiating, Never Split the Difference. He offers some useful techniques for moving the negotiation in your favor much of the time.
Some of the hardest no’s are in job interviews — should I accept the offer or not?
I always applied the smell test — some stinks you can detect ahead of time, and no amount of money is worth the disasters that ensue. Some jobs I turned down resulted in people finding and contacting me a decade later via a quietly rotting website to see if I knew any way to contact the fellow whose offer I turned down. (There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a bullet dodged.)
It’s easier to say No to a six-figure deal when saying Yes wouldn’t change your life dramatically.