Your best alternative determines the cost of walking away.
Negotiation strategy field guide
Negotiation Genius
A practical interpretation of Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman's method: prepare your alternatives and limits, discover hidden interests, create value, claim value, and negotiate when power seems uneven.
Understand whether a zone of possible agreement may exist.
Different priorities, forecasts, and timing can create joint value.
When behavior seems irrational, search for missing interests or constraints.
The preparation triangle
Create value and claim your fair share.
Excellent negotiators understand their alternatives, the other side's likely limits, and the information needed to improve both.
Best alternative
Improve what happens if no agreement is reached.
Reservation value
Set the point where accepting becomes worse than walking away.
Ambitious target
Use researched goals to avoid settling too quickly.
Possible agreement
Estimate the overlap without treating your guess as fact.
What lies beneath positions
Ask why each side wants what it says it wants.
Differences create trades
Use timing, risk, priorities, forecasts, and capabilities.
Strategic moves
Stay analytical under pressure.
Negotiate the process
Clarify agenda, authority, timing, and how decisions will be made.
Ask diagnostic questions
Search for interests, constraints, priorities, and hidden stakeholders.
Use multiple offers
Present equivalent packages to discover preferences.
Use objective standards
Anchor proposals in legitimate comparisons and principles.
Do not reward threats
Name the tactic, return to interests, and protect your alternative.
Negotiation canvas
Prepare before the conversation.
Answers save on this device.
At the table
Prepare, listen, trade, document.
Improve your BATNA
Power begins away from the table.
Set aspiration
Use research, not hope.
Ask before offering
Learn what shapes the deal.
Offer packages
Trade across differences.
Protect relationships
Be firm on substance, respectful with people.
Confirm in writing
Remove ambiguity from commitments.
Seven day negotiation sprint
Build leverage before pressure.
This independent guide summarizes Negotiation Genius in original language and is not a substitute for the book.