Chapter 65

The Organizational Drive

You may find yourself in a situation where the other negotiator seems to have a fine Solutional Drive. She really wants to find the best solution but the problem is that it has to be a solution that she can sell to her organization. This happens a great deal in congress where the senator or congressperson is eager for a sensible compromise but knows that he would get pilloried by the voters in his state or district. In close votes, you’ll see this all the time.

On both sides of the house, the politicians who have the support of their voters will commit quickly. Those who will be in trouble back home may want to support their party but are reluctant to toe the line. So, the party leadership counts noses to see how many votes they need to win by one vote. Then they let their members who would be most hurt by voting for the bill, vote no. The ones who would be least hurt are led, like lambs to slaughter it always seems to me, and made to vote for the bill.

It’s hard for me to believe that any intelligent senator would oppose a ban of assault weapons on our streets, but many of them were forced by their more radical voters to oppose a gun control bill.

When you’re negotiating with someone who must please an organization, they may be reluctant to lay out their problem for you because it would seem too much like collusion. You need to be thinking, “Who could be giving them heartburn over this one?” Is it their stockholders, their legal department, or perhaps government regulations, that they would have to circumvent to implement the best solution? If you understand their problem, you may be able to do things to make the solution more palatable to their organization. For example, you might take a more radical position in public than you do at the negotiating table. In this way, your compromise gives the appearance of making major concessions.

A company hired me once to help them when their assembly worker’s union went on strike. The union negotiators felt that the solution they had negotiated was reasonable, but they couldn’t sell it to their members, who were out for blood. We developed a solution in which the local newspaper interviewed the president of the company. During the interview, he expressed sincere regrets that he was caught in a difficult situation.

The union couldn’t sell the plan to its members and the president couldn’t sell anything better to his board of directors and stockholders. It appeared that the strike would soon force him to move production from that factory to their assembly plant in Mexico. The next day, the worker’s spouses opened the newspaper to read headlines that said, “Plant to close—jobs going south.”

By the afternoon of that day, the spouses had put enough pressure on the workers that they clamored to accept the deal that they had previously turned down. If you’re dealing with someone who has to sell the plan to his or her organization, you should always be looking for ways to make it easier to do that.