Section Three

Negotiating Pressure Points

Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong used to tell this story about his early days as a musician: “One night this big, bad-ass hood crashes my dressing room in Chicago and instructs me that I will open in such-and-such a club in New York the next night. I tell him I got this Chicago engagement and don’t plan no traveling, and I turn my back on him to show I’m so cool. Then I hear this sound: SNAP! CLICK! I turn around, and he has pulled this vast revolver on me and cocked it. Jesus, it looks like a cannon and sounds like death! So I look down at that steel and say, Well, maybe I do open in New York tomorrow.’” As Al Capone once said, “You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

Pulling a gun on someone during a negotiation is the crudest pressure point of them all. I imagine that it’s remarkably effective, but there’s never a need for you to do it. In this section I’ll teach you some pressure points that you can use that are just as effective and far more acceptable. Many of them you could use with the brutality of pulling a gun on someone, but usually you’re better off being subtler. If you have the power, you don’t have to flaunt it.