Practical Insights from the Great Negotiators: Zoom Out/Zoom In*
Apart from my academic research and advisory work helping companies with their toughest negotiations, I seek to distill practical lessons by carefully studying many of the world’s greatest negotiators. In this blog, I’ll highlight one cross-cutting insight from this work: how remarkable negotiators make a practice of going back and forth between “zooming out” to a broader strategy and zooming in to the specific individual with whom they are negotiating. More on how to apply this insight below. But first, a brief sketch of the process by which I’ve sought to extract such lessons.
Since 2001, I’ve chaired the annual Great Negotiator Award program that honors men and women from around the world who have overcome significant barriers to reaching agreements that have achieved worthy purposes. A few of our many honorees thus far are George Mitchell for his work in Northern Ireland; Bruce Wasserstein for remarkable financial negotiations; James Baker, III, for his role in reunifying Germany in NATO and forging the international coalition to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait; and Colombian President Juan Santos for negotiating a peace deal to end a 50-year war with the FARC guerrillas. The Great Negotiator initiative is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation--an active consortium of Harvard, MIT, and Tufts—and Harvard’s Program on the Future of Diplomacy. Negotiation-oriented faculty from these universities do substantial advance research and casewriting, bring each year’s honoree to campus for at least a day of intensive, videotaped interviews on his or her most challenging negotiations, then extract their most valuable lessons in books, articles, course materials, and interactive video presentations. With two colleagues, I’ve co-chaired an analogous American Secretaries of State program, that to date has employed much the same process as the Great Negotiators to distill practical lessons from the toughest negotiations faced by seven former Secretaries of State from Henry Kissinger and George Shultz through Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton (with John Kerry and Rex Tillerson soon to be interviewed).
Nick Burns, Bob Mnookin and I learned much about negotiation from our lengthy discussions with Henry Kissinger—leading to a co-authored book. (For an overview, see my blog post “Why Read Kissinger the Negotiator?”) Yet one distinctive and valuable characteristic crystallized from our time with Kissinger—that I realized was common to many highly effective negotiators. Before and during key negotiations, Kissinger would both "zoom out" to his broader strategy and "zoom in" to his individual counterpart, seeking to bring the strategic and interpersonal together to advance his core interests. These dual perspectives provided complementary insights and tactical guidance. For Kissinger, this was not a two-step approach—that is, first zoom out to a strategy, then zoom in to execute it—but an iterative process.
In different book chapters, we described in detail how Kissinger employed this method in his negotiations over the opening to China after decades of mutual hostility with the United States; over détente and the first nuclear arms control treaty with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War; in the Paris peace treaty with the North Vietnamese after years of bitter conflict (though it collapsed after two years); in working out enduring Egyptian and Syrian disengagement accords with Israel following their 1973 war; as well as in putting together a largely forgotten agreement by Rhodesia’s Ian Smith to accept black majority rule many years before the end of apartheid in South Africa.
In retrospect, I realized that many other outstanding negotiators with whom I’d worked or studied also zoom out and in, though rarely to the extent I observed in Kissinger’s dealmaking, and often placing greater emphasis on either the macro or the micro.
Zooming Out. Many negotiators certainly zoom out to the bigger picture and the broader strategy within which a given deal is situated. Ensuring that a well-thought-through strategy guides one’s negotiations is a real strength. Kissinger is best known for this kind of strategic insight, and is viewed as a kind of geopolitical grandmaster moving pieces on a global chessboard. Yet some excellent big-picture negotiators lack interpersonal effectiveness. It might seem unimportant to them relative to strategy or they simply may not possess good people skills.
Zooming In. Other negotiators mainly zoom in to their counterparts, focusing on communication, trust, relationships, and culture. I was surprised at the extent to which Kissinger emphasized rapport with his counterparts—from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to Anatoly Dobrynin and Leonid Brezhnev and to Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat. This focus greatly added to his effectiveness. Some people-oriented negotiators, however, lack a strong strategic or analytic sense. It may seem unimportant to them, they may think of “negotiation” in purely interpersonal terms, or they may simply not possess good analytic and strategic skills.
Zooming Out and In, Iteratively. Consistently zooming out and zooming in clearly underpinned Kissinger’s success. During the process of writing this book, I have found this to be a valuable negotiating mindset that can be consciously developed in both MBA students and senior executives. (Note: I first encountered a version of the zooming in/out concept from my HBS colleague Rosabeth Kanter in her writings on organizational leadership.)
Diplomatic Examples: Among the recipients of the annual Harvard-MIT-Tufts “Great Negotiator” award are several distinguished diplomats, who, in retrospect we realized to have effectively employed this zooming out/zooming in approach. These include Richard Holbrooke negotiating to end the war in Bosnia, James A. Baker, III, negotiating the unification of Germany within NATO after the Berlin Wall fell as well as putting together the international coalition that ejected Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and Singapore’s Tommy Koh as chief negotiator of the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement.
Business Examples: Bruce Wasserstein at Lazard, Rupert Murdoch Wresting NFL Rights from CBS for Fox, and Microsoft Negotiating with AOL. I often see excellent business negotiators adopt these dual perspectives, while less successful dealmakers fail to do so effectively. For example, when investment banking firm Lazard dropped alarmingly in the league tables of M&A transactions in the early 2000s, its then chairman, Michel David-Weill, decided that Bruce Wasserstein should be brought as head to revive the firm. In what could have been viewed as simply an employment contract negotiation between Michel and Bruce, both men clearly “zoomed out” to understand the broader strategic stakes. Michel wanted Lazard, a private partnership since its 19th century inception, to be revitalized but kept private. By contrast, Bruce wanted to take Lazard public. Yet arguably, Michel failed to zoom in to understand Bruce’s real interests, believing that extremely lucrative annual compensation would induce Wasserstein to keep the firm private. Instead, building on the powers he consciously obtained in his original contract, Wasserstein undertook a series of negotiations with David-Weill over the next few years that progressively set the stage for Lazard’s successful 2005 public offering.
As I detail in another recent blog entry, barely a quarter-century ago, in December 1993, a remarkable negotiation tectonically rocked the world of American football with aftershocks that directly shaped today’s polarized politics. The fledgling Fox network, led by Rupert Murdoch and his team, managed to wrest the most valuable NFL package from CBS, the incumbent since 1956 and NFL’s strong preference to continue. This was the negotiation that vaulted Fox from its status at the time as a minor player, far behind the then-Big Three—CBS, NBC, and ABC—to the hugely influential role it now plays. In the words of a jubilant Rupert Murdoch, immediately after winning prime rights to broadcast games from the National Football League (NFL), “We're a network now. Like no other sport will do, the NFL will make us into a real network. In the future there will be 400 or 500 channels on cable, and ratings will be fragmented. But football on Sunday will have the same ratings, regardless of the number of channels. Football will not fragment." In a nutshell, Murdoch zoomed out to a strategic conception of the potential role of the NFL in building a new network compared to Larry Tisch of CBS who saw this as only a financial rights deal. And Murdoch not only outbid the competition but zoomed in to enhance his relationships with key NFL owners, assure the NFL that his Australian team had tremendous new creative ideas to enhance the football broadcast experience, and would immediately expand Fox’s limited number of affiliated TV stations. See here for details.
In another example from the early internet era, a fledgling Netscape, which possessed clearly superior browser technology, vied with Microsoft in customer contract negotiations with AOL. At issue was which firm’s internet browser would be chosen by AOL for its five million online customers, then a huge number. Netscape, which had recently gone public, was widely favored to win the deal despite Microsoft’s size and market dominance. Yet the strategic stakes in these talks went well beyond whether Netscape or Microsoft would capture AOL as a customer. While Netscape missed the strategic significance of what it merely treated as a large sale, Bill Gates zoomed out to understand that if it lost the competition for AOL, its core assets were at risk. During the negotiations, Microsoft deployed what many saw as disproportionate resources toward winning the contract. Its success, many analysts believe was a key factor in dooming Netscape.
In my own advisory work, when a client persistently asks about the best tactics for, say, dealing with a particular Kuwaiti counterpart, it is often productive to gently press for the client to articulate its larger strategy to which this negotiation is intended to contribute. Or I may hear a lot about, say, the economic logic of a proposed roll-up strategy and why the negotiations would make economic sense to the smaller targets. Yet it is often imperative to move from the abstract analysis to the flesh-and-blood individuals with whom the negotiations will take place: to carefully assess their personalities, histories, families, idiosyncratic motivations, sources of information, hot buttons, and so on—along with the proposed deal economics.
*This post is based on a significantly edited section of an interview of me conducted by Sean Silverthorne, entitled “Henry Kissinger’s Lessons for Business Negotiators,” published in HBS’s “Working Knowledge” on July 5, 2018. See the much longer interview here along with a book excerpt. Note: I adapted the concept of zooming out/zooming in from work on leadership by my HBS colleague, Rosabeth Kanter.
