When it comes to negotiating, Americans have a biiiiig problem. How big? Let’s take a quick spin around the planet and see how Americans measure up, bargaining-wise, to the rest of the world.*
Japan, home to the finest negotiators on Earth, is the perfect place to start. You’d be hard-pressed to find much of anything wrong in the way the Japanese negotiate. Their skill at bargaining comes from two fundamental Japanese social imperatives: saving face, and maintaining the wa, or harmony, of the group. Here’s the formula: If a deal is unfair, someone will lose face; and if someone loses face, the wa of the whole group will be undermined.
If anybody gets hosed, everybody’s hosed.
You can see the importance ...
Get Negotiate to Win now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
