77. The Law of Four
There are four main issues to be decided upon in any negotiation; everything else is dependent on these.
There may be dozens of details to be ironed out in a complex agreement, but the success or failure of the negotiation will turn on no more than four issues. I have spent two and three days in negotiating sessions with teams of skilled businesspeople on both sides of the table, discussing fifty pages of small and large details, only to have everything boil down to four key issues at the end.
The first corollary of the Law of Four is Eighty percent or more of the content of the negotiation will revolve around these four issues.
This Law of Four and this factor of 80 percent turn out to be true in almost every case. No ...
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