Summary: Bargaining with the Devil

The GIST

Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight by Robert Mnookin takes on the hardest question in negotiation: what should you do when the person across the table is someone you distrust, despise or believe to be evil? Mnookin wrote it as the Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, chair of the Program on Negotiation and director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. He is also a working mediator and arbitrator, and several of the cases come from his own practice. Simon & Schuster published the book in February 2010.

The book has a striking origin. Two months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mnookin took part in a public debate at Harvard with Roger Fisher, co-author of Getting to Yes, over whether the United States should have accepted a Taliban offer to negotiate. Fisher said yes. Mnookin, one of the world's leading teachers of negotiation, said no. This book is his long reflection on that answer, and its conclusion is more careful than a slogan. "There is no easy, categorical answer," he writes. "Sometimes you should bargain with the Devil, and other times you should refuse." Through eight true stories at three scales, the world, the company and the family, he shows how to tell which is which.

The Big Ideas

The question, and the traps that answer it for you

Mnookin starts by defining his terms. To bargain means trying to resolve a conflict by making a deal, as opposed to fighting it out or resisting. A devil is an adversary who has intentionally harmed you in the past or seems willing to harm you in the future. Much depends on one word that reviewers picked out: a devil is anyone you perceive as a harmful adversary. The other side may be wicked, or may only look that way to you, and the perception itself is the danger, because it bends your judgment.

National leaders face the question constantly. Should a government talk to the Taliban, to Iran, to North Korea, to terrorists holding hostages? But Mnookin insists that ordinary people meet devils of their own. A business partner betrays you and then wants to renegotiate. A divorcing spouse makes demands that feel like extortion. A competitor steals your intellectual property. A sister fights you over an inheritance. You are furious, and your gut tells you to see them in court.

That gut reaction is the subject of the opening chapter, "Avoiding Common Traps." Mnookin identifies emotional, strategic and political traps that push people into a decision before they have thought about it. When we feel wronged we are pulled toward a fight, and seeing the other side as a demon makes that pull stronger. The first discipline he teaches is to notice that you are being pushed.

Weighing the deal against the fight

The second chapter gives the alternative to going with your gut: a sober comparison of what negotiating would get you against what fighting would get you. Its title, "Bargaining and Its Alternatives: Costs, Benefits, and Beyond," names the method. Central to it is your BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, meaning what will actually happen to you if no deal is made. A lawsuit, a strike or a war is not a way of escaping a hard choice. It is one of the choices, with costs and odds of its own, and it has to be compared honestly with what a deal could deliver and with whether such a deal would actually hold.

Then comes the word "Beyond," and the third chapter, "Recognition, Legitimacy, and Morality." Here Mnookin takes seriously the objections that no spreadsheet captures. Sitting down with an evil party may grant it recognition and legitimacy. It may reward bad behavior and invite more. And it may simply feel wrong. A reviewer in the Negotiation Journal summed up the tension that runs through the whole book as pragmatism versus principle and identity versus interests: a deal can serve your interests and still feel like a betrayal of who you are. Mnookin does not dismiss that feeling. He asks that it be weighed in the open, and not obeyed by reflex.

Global devils: Kasztner, Churchill and Mandela

The heart of the book is three historical cases in which the devil was real.

Rudolf Kasztner was a Hungarian Jewish leader who negotiated with Nazi officials in 1944 in a frantic effort to save Jewish lives. It is the most painful case in the book, because the man who bargained with murderers was later accused of having sold out to them. Mnookin's judgment is mixed and humane. Kasztner's desperate efforts showed he was not a great negotiator, he concludes, yet he deserves credit in the end. "Did Kasztner sell his soul to the Devil?" Mnookin asks. "Absolutely not. But he may have been outsmarted."

Winston Churchill in May 1940 is the book's great example of a justified refusal. The war was going so badly that the American ambassador expected Britain to be overrun. Churchill always proudly maintained that his government never even considered talking to Hitler. Mnookin shows that the truth was different: for three days Churchill and his War Cabinet secretly debated whether to pursue peace negotiations, and powerful arguments were made for doing so. The matter was settled when Churchill spoke to his wider group of ministers and they responded with open enthusiasm. As Churchill later described it, "Quite a few seemed to jump up from the table and came running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back." The war would go on without negotiations. For Mnookin the lesson is not that refusing is heroic. It is that even this refusal was reached through argument among serious people, not by one man's instinct alone.

Nelson Mandela is the counterweight. He chose to open negotiations with the white South African government that had imprisoned him. Mnookin regards the result as one of the best negotiations of all time and awards Mandela "the title of the greatest negotiator of the twentieth century." To sharpen the point he sets Mandela beside the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, who, also in prison, refused to bargain with the KGB for his freedom. Two prisoners of oppressive regimes made opposite choices, and Mnookin finds both defensible. What differed was what each man wanted, who he was, and what a deal would have cost him.

Business devils: IBM versus Fujitsu, and a symphony at war

The next two cases move from history to commerce, and Mnookin was personally involved in both.

The first, "Giant Software Wars," began when IBM discovered that its largest competitor, Fujitsu, had copied its software. Each side had reason to see the other as a thief or a bully, and cultural differences between the American and the Japanese company deepened the mistrust. Mnookin served as a neutral, and the process he helped build blended mediation with arbitration, so that the two companies could shape the outcome through guided discussion and not leave everything to an endless adversarial court battle. Readers single out this chapter for the creativity of the solution. Its lesson is that when two parties must go on dealing with each other, communication, flexibility and some mutual understanding are worth more than a courtroom victory.

The second, "Disharmony in the Symphony," concerns the poisoned relationship between musicians and management at the San Francisco Symphony. Nobody here is evil. These are two groups who, after years of mistrust, have come to see each other as devils. It is the clearest illustration of Mnookin's opening point that a devil is often made by perception, and that demonizing the other side can be mutual.

Family devils: divorce and sibling warfare

The final cases come home. "A Devilish Divorce" draws on Mnookin's long work on divorce and custody, which includes his earlier co-authored study Dividing the Child. It shows how the hurt and anger of a marriage ending drive people toward litigation that costs far more, in money and in damage, than the dispute seems to warrant. "Sibling Warfare" follows a family fight of the kind suggested by the inheritance example, where old history and old wounds stand in the way of any sensible settlement.

Readers often find these the most relatable chapters, and with good reason. Few of us will ever face a Hitler, but most of us will one day feel certain that a former partner or a relative is acting in pure bad faith. The traps of the first chapter are easiest to see at this scale, and they are the same traps.

Lessons learned: four guidelines

Mnookin ends by drawing his cases into advice. Publishers Weekly summarized it as four guidelines.

First, compare systematically. Set the costs and benefits of negotiating beside the costs and benefits of fighting, and do it deliberately, on paper if need be.

Second, get advice from others. Your feelings about a devil warp your judgment, so do not decide alone. Churchill's three days of cabinet debate are the model.

Third, tip the scales toward negotiation. Mnookin holds that, when facing a devil, it often makes more sense to negotiate than to fight, so the case for fighting has to be the one that proves itself.

Fourth, do not let moral intuition override pragmatic assessment. Moral concerns count, and Churchill shows they can carry the day, but they should be examined and weighed, not acted on in a flash of righteous anger.

Putting It to Work

• Name your devil, then question the label. Ask whether this person truly intends you harm or whether you have come to see them that way. The symphony case shows how easily both sides can demonize each other.
• Slow the first reaction. Fury says fight. Treat that impulse as information about your state of mind, not as a plan.
• Know your real alternative. Before refusing to talk, work out honestly what happens if there is no deal: the legal bills, the lost years, the chance of losing.
• Ask whether a deal would hold. An agreement the other side will not keep is not worth making.
• Put the moral question on the table. If talking would legitimize something you find abhorrent, say so and weigh it. Sharansky refused and Mandela engaged, and both were right for themselves.
• Bring in other minds. Find advisers who do not share your anger and let them argue with you.
• Start with a lean toward talking. Make fighting earn its place as the better option.

Who Should Read It

This book suits anyone caught in a bitter business dispute, divorce or family quarrel who wants a clearer head, along with managers, lawyers and mediators who handle conflict for a living. History readers will be drawn to the Churchill, Mandela and Kasztner chapters, which stand on their own as storytelling. Mnookin writes in an informal, conversational style, and the audiobook, which he reads himself, has been praised for it. Be aware that this is a book about judgment and not a manual of tactics: one reader came away wishing for more technique. What it offers instead is a way of thinking for the moments when thinking is hardest.

This has been a summary of Bargaining with the Devil by Robert Mnookin, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.