KeAnZu

As I walk through the valley where I harvest my grain
I take a look at my wife and realise she’s very plain

There’s no time for sin and vice
livin’ in an Amish paradise

On my knees day and night
scoring points for the afterlife

Smart boss + smart employee = profit

Smart boss + dumb employee = production

Dumb boss + smart employee = promotion

Dumb boss + dumb employee = overtime

The pavement cracks when I fall down
I’ve got more chins than China town

When I walk out to get my mail
it measures on the Richter scale

My shadow weighs a 42 pounds

Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, “You’re next.” They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

This fucker’s acting up like a troubled child on crack! (0:06)

This fucking operating system is as unstable as Charles Manson (0:37)

Foamy by Jonathan Ian Mathers

The exact lesson format will be different at each resort but you can expect to learn the following skills:

Skating or Scooting - Put your front foot into the bindings and push yourself along with the back foot. Keep your weight on the snowboard and allow it to glide. Learns what it feels like to have a big piece of wood strapped to your foot. Important skill for later when you start using lifts.
Straight Running - On a very gentle slope strap in both feet and slowly glide down the slope. The goal here is to learn the basic stance which is used for all advanced techniques. You should watch where you are going, hands slightly away from your body, knees bent, upper body facing same direction as front foot, weight distributed evenly and stay relaxed. Try bending down and standing up while gliding.
Standing up on the slope, heelside - Make sure the board is across the slope, you should be sitting facing down the slope with the heelside of the board in the snow. Put one hand on the snow close to your body to push off from, put your other hand out over the board and roll forwards to stand up. Make sure not to overextend and keep the heelside of the board dug in to prevent slipping.
Side slipping, heelside - Stand up facing down the slope with the board across the slope and the heelside of the board firmly dug into the snow. Slowly push down on your toes to flatten the board to the snow and get it moving down the fall line. Smoothly roll back onto your heels to slow the board or onto your toes to speed the board up. Relax and stay smooth!
Side slipping, toeside - Stand up facing up the slope with the board across the slope and the toeside of the board firmly dug into the snow. Slowly push down on your heels to flatten the board to the snow and get it moving down the fall line. Smoothly roll back onto your toes to slow the board or onto your heels to speed the board up. Relax and stay smooth!
Falling leaf, heelside - Start doing a normal heelside descent and then put pressure on the toes of one foot to cause that end of the snowboard to turn down the slope, let the board run a little and then roll the same foot back onto the heel to stop the slide. Try the other foot. Alternate feet crossing back and forth the slope in a falling leaf pattern.
Falling leaf, toeside - Start doing a normal toeside descent and then put pressure on the heel of one foot to cause that end of the snowboard to turn down the slope, let the board run a little and then roll the same foot back onto the toes to stop the slide. Try the other foot. Alternate feet crossing back and forth the slope in a falling leaf pattern.
Garland, heelside - Same as falling leaf heelside, press down on the toes of one foot to turn the board but this time allow the board to turn until it is pointing directly down the slope before rolling back on the heel of the same foot to flatten out. Also known as J-turns.
Garland, toeside - Same as falling leaf toeside, press down on the heel of one foot to turn the board but this time allow the board to turn until it is pointing directly down the slope before rolling back on the toes of the same foot to flatten out. Also known as J-turns.
Linked turns - Same as the garland but instead of recovering and turning back keep the turn going right around. Start out heelside - end up toeside. Start from both heelside and toeside.
Leg turning - On heelside turns turn the front leg into the slope to turn better and on the toeside rotate the front leg away from the slope.
Flat-Basing - This is where the board is flat on the snow. Whilst flat-basing it is possible to ‘catch an edge’ which will usually put the rider off balance. The primary cause of this is attempting to flat-base where flat-basing is not suitable e.g. a transitioned piste. It is the fastest position snowboarder can assume as there are no forces actually against the snow (as with carving) just a little friction on the bottom of the board.
Carving - Aggressively pitch the board hard over onto its edge to carve, keep transitions short and as you pick up speed start your transitions earlier and earlier. In carving the board is always either on one edge or the other and carves a track in the snow.
Powder - Snowboards were designed for this, powder is easier on a snowboard than on skis but keep your speed up, keep the nose of the board up by putting more weight on the back foot than normal and don’t edge over too hard.

Top 8 Tips for the beginner snowboarder

• Keep your knees bent, especially when slowing down, to absorb the bumps.
• Snowboarding is mostly done on either the heelside or toeside edge of the snowboard. You have little control when the snowboard is flat.
• Turn the board by pressing down with either your heel or toes, don’t throw your upper body around. Try boarding with your hands on your hips to force you to use your feet to turn.
• Keep your head and shoulders facing downhill with your center of gravity over the center of the board.
• Relax and stay smooth! Nervous, jerky movements will result in frequent falls.
• When not strapped to your feet keep the snowboard bindings side DOWN in the snow to prevent the snowboard from sliding down the mountain without you.
• Keep the snowboard perpendicular to the slope when sitting or getting up to prevent it moving.
• Keep your hands over the ends of the board for balance (”tip and tail”).
• If you remember nothing else, remember this: Knees bent, relax!

1. Never Outshine the Master
• Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite - inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.
2. Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies
• Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.
3. Conceal your Intentions
• Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelope them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.
4. Always Say Less than Necessary
• When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinx-like. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.
5. So Much Depends on Reputation - Guard it with your Life
• Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once you slip, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.
6. Court Attention at all Cost
• Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious, than the bland and timid masses.
7. Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit
• Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.
8. Make other People come to you - use Bait if Necessary
• When you force the other person to act, you are the one in control. It is always better to make your opponent come to you, abandoning his own plans in the process. Lure him with fabulous gains - then attack. You hold the cards.
9. Win through your Actions, Never through Argument
• Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.
10. Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky
• You can die from someone else’s misery - emotional states are as infectious as disease. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.
11. Learn to Keep People Dependent on You
• To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted. The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have. Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear. Never teach them enough so that they can do without you.
12. Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim
• One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. A timely gift - a Trojan horse - will serve the same purpose.
13. When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude
• If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. He will find a way to ignore you. Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself.
14. Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy
• Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.
15. Crush your Enemy Totally
• All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely. (Sometimes they have learned this the hard way.) If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation: The enemy will recover, and will seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.
16. Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor
• Too much circulation makes the price go down: The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Create value through scarcity.
17. Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability
• Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.
18. Do Not Build Fortresses to Protect Yourself - Isolation is Dangerous
• The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere - everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from - it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.
19. Know Who You’re Dealing with - Do Not Offend the Wrong Person
• There are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way. Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge. They are wolves in lambs’ clothing. Choose your victims and opponents carefully, then - never offend or deceive the wrong person.
20. Do Not Commit to Anyone
• It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others - playing people against one another, making them pursue you.
21. Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker - Seem Dumber than your Mark
• No one likes feeling stupider than the next person. The trick, then, is to make your victims feel smart - and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.
22. Use the Surrender Tactic: Transform Weakness into Power
• When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane. Do not give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you - surrender first. By turning the other check you infuriate and unsettle him. Make surrender a tool of power.
23. Concentrate Your Forces
• Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point. You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another - intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come.
24. Play the Perfect Courtier
• The perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the mot oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.
25. Re-Create Yourself
• Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions - your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.
26. Keep Your Hands Clean
• You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency: Your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds. Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cat’s-paws to disguise your involvement.
27. Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cult-like Following
• People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.
28. Enter Action with Boldness
• If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.
29. Plan All the Way to the End
• The ending is everything. Plan all the way to it, taking into account all the possible consequences, obstacles, and twists of fortune that might reverse your hard work and give the glory to others. By planning to the end you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.
30. Make your Accomplishments Seem Effortless
• Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed. When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more. Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work - it only raises questions. Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.
31. Control the Options: Get Others to Play with the Cards you Deal
• The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice: Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets. Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose. Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose. Put them on the horns of a dilemma: They are gored wherever they turn.
32. Play to People’s Fantasies
• The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
33. Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew
• Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usually an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.
34. Be Royal in your Own Fashion: Act like a King to be treated like one
• The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated; In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.
35. Master the Art of Timing
• Never seem to be in a hurry - hurrying betrays a lack of control over yourself, and over time. Always seem patient, as if you know that everything will come to you eventually. Become a detective of the right moment; sniff out the spirit of the times, the trends that will carry you to power. Learn to stand back when the time is not yet ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition.
36. Disdain Things you cannot have: Ignoring them is the best Revenge
• By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.
37. Create Compelling Spectacles
• Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power - everyone responds to them. Stage spectacles for those around you, then full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence. Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.
38. Think as you like but Behave like others
• If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them. They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.
39. Stir up Waters to Catch Fish
• Anger and emotion are strategically counterproductive. You must always stay calm and objective. But if you can make your enemies angry while staying calm yourself, you gain a decided advantage. Put your enemies off-balance: Find the chink in their vanity through which you can rattle them and you hold the strings.
40. Despise the Free Lunch
• What is offered for free is dangerous - it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is also often wise to pay the full price - there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.
41. Avoid Stepping into a Great Man’s Shoes
• What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. Do not get lost in their shadow, or stuck in a past not of your own making: Establish your own name and identity by changing course. Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way.
42. Strike the Shepherd and the Sheep will Scatter
• Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual - the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoned of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them - they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.
43. Work on the Hearts and Minds of Others
• Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you.
44. Disarm and Infuriate with the Mirror Effect
• The mirror reflects reality, but it is also the perfect tool for deception: When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy. The Mirror Effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact. By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson. Few can resist the power of Mirror Effect.
45. Preach the Need for Change, but Never Reform too much at Once
• Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.
46. Never appear too Perfect
• Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.
47. Do not go Past the Mark you Aimed for; In Victory, Learn when to Stop
• The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.
48. Assume Formlessness
• By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack. Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move. Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.

The 48 Laws of Poweramazon.com

Robert Greene

ISBN 0-140-28019-7

In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict [WK82].

A broken window.

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment - a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

The “Broken Window Theory” has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.

The Pragmatic Programmeramazon.com

Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

ISBN 0-201-61622-X



Chapter 1 : A Pragmatic Philosophy

pp 4-5

Communication is a two-way street that involves not just getting, but giving as well. Affording your counterpart the chance to obtain information complies with the norm of reciprocity, and can affect their attitude, trust level, and, most of all, expectations. Hence, care must be take early on to send consistent, coherent, and timely messages that are in accordance with your ultimate bargaining objects.

So, what is said and done - or not said and left undone - prior to the bargaining event will have an enormous impact on the final outcome.

This is especially significant when you recognize that the person or group you’ll be trying to influence has erroneous assumptions and unrealistic expectations. As soon as you realize this, you must give them reality-based information in order to alter their thinking. Otherwise, proposed changes when introduced during the formal strategic interaction will be seen as unexpected and unreasonable. Predictably, they will react by saying “no”.

Reminder: It takes a while to digest and get comfortable with anything that’s different. This is the principle of acceptance time, that people need the opportunity to get used to a new idea, concept, or approach.

To illustrate, let’s look at a simple scenario:

Three years ago, you gave a valuable employee a 7 percent salary increase. The next year, this increment was repeated. Again, last year, this person got the same raise in pay.

Since then, however, your business has had reverses and cash flow problems. Let us further stipulate, as lawyers would say, that you cannot increase expenses in the coming fiscal period and that the employee is unaware of these circumstances.

If this is the case, what does he or she expect when the two meet to discuss compensation?

Definitely 7 percent. Truly, this person may be counting on these funds to pay for an expenditure that was already made. If you, in a magnanimious gesture, offered a 5 percent raise out of your own pocket, I suspect the employee would still feel short-changed by 2 percent.

The way to avoid such a dilemma is to share this negative information with the employee as early as possible, months before the formal compensation get-together. Of course, these relevations will cause him to conform to the new reality. More significantly, if you get people involved at the outset by soliciting their input, they tend to be more understanding and supportive of the outcomes.

Consider another example of how lead time can be used to affect expectations and change behaivor.

When I last lived in an apartment building, a neighbor approached me in the elevator and asked, “Does all that racket and merrymaking in 11E keep you up at night?”

“Actually, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Remember, I live in apartment 11B at the other end of the hall.”

“Well, unfortunately, I’m in 11F, right next door to 11E,” he said. “These thirty-year-old kids party and play that rock ‘n’ roll music till 2:00 A.M. I’ve banged on the wall, rung on the phone, and complained but nothing helps.”

From all indications, he was upset or, as kids would say, “ticked to the max.”

Trying to lighten things up, I said, “Maybe you should try to relax and relate to the hullabaloo. It’s rather unique you know, it’s the only music where the melody is played by the drummer.”

He didn’t appreciate my attempt at humor, but I was saved when the elevator doors opened at the lobby.

A month later, at the same place I met him again.

“I’ve got good news and very bad news,” he said. “The thirty-year-olds moved out, but they are being replaced by an even younger and wilder-looking couple.”

“The new ones are musicians. I watched them move in. They have amplifiers and the biggest stereo and speakers I’ve ever seen.”

Feeling compassion for his situation, I decided to give him some unsolicited advice: “Obviously, your past strategy of wall banging and phoning in the midst of a party didn’t work. So why don’t you try something different?”

“If I were you, I would use the current lead time to try to influence their behavior, instead of reacting during the event when you’re upset and emotional.”

“What I would do is buy or bake a pie for the new neighbors. Delivering it in person, I’m sure you’ll get invited into their residence. Once inside, you’ll be able to answer all their questions about local restaurants, shops, transportation, and so on.”

“Then, you might discreetly tell them how happy you are to have them as neighbors, because their predecessors played their music so loud.”

Actually, this counsel comes from my own experience, which has shown me that if desired behaivors are communicated early in the developmental stages of a relationship they have a good chance of taking hold.

Two months later, I received a visit from the beaming occupants of 11E. They indicated that my plan had worked. Not only were they friends of the people next door, but they had attended two of their parties.

Most surprising of all was that they had become big fans of Bruce Springsteen and had tickets for his next concert. As Linda Ellerbee has said, “And so it goes.”

Negotiate This! By Caring, But Not T-H-A-T Muchamazon.com

Herb Cohen

ISBN 0-446-52973-7



Chapter VIII : Information

pp 207-210

I believe it’s always advisable to begin every negotiating encounter in a cooperative fashion. More precisely, that means in an amiable manner with a congenial low-key pose of calculated incompetance.

Although my intention throughout this book is not to be authoritative, experience tells me this is the best way to open. Here’s why:

First of all, if you start cooperative, there’s a good chance the other side will respond in kind. The reason is that in most civilized cultures there is a strong norm of reciprocity. What we call “tit for tat.” Consider if you will what your mother and my mom told us as children, “If you’ll be nice to people, they’ll be nice to you.” A platitude perhaps, but it works about 85 percent of the time.

As for the remaining 15 percent, who are Soviet style win-lose (”rat for tat”) operators, they are most likely to behold your decency as weakness and lick their chops. This minority tends to observe a soft style and easygoing attitude as a bull notices a red cape. What usually happens with these dog-eat-dog types is that they charge, trying to wrap things up quickly. Often they become hostile and confrontational and use all sorts of tactical ploys. but as you know, the countermeasures for any adversarial gambit are to slow down and not to react the way they expect you to. Even if a threat is made, smile and nod your head up and down as if you’re acknowledging a compliment.

As an aside, let me say that the toughest individual to negotiate with is a crazy person. The second most difficult is someone who is irrational. And the third is the “toilsome dummy” who can’t even comprehend when he or she is being threatened. So, should the other party become hostile and hard-nosed, a tincture of insanity, a dash of irrationality, and a dose of dumb make for a countering receipe.

The implication of what I’m saying is that when cornered by an offensive bully, don’t go with your first two options: fight or freeze. But there is a third option that I recommend, which is to flow. By this, I mean lighten up and say to yourself, “This is a game. hey it’s showtime … I’m in the World of Illooshin.” In my own case, when someone has tried to intidiate or manipulate me with a stratagem from “good guy - bad guy” to a last-minute nibble, my usual response is, “Hey I love the way you did that, could you do that again - only a bit slower?” Remember, this is show biz!

While all of these games are being played out, time is passing and the other party is investing in this relationship. And once they invest, it’s hard for them to divest. Indeed, rats and human beings have this in common: The more energy expended in pursuit of a particular goal, the more desirable that goal becomes. Once faced with the reality that their competitive approach will not work and confronted with the prospect of having to start all over again with another mark or target, they often modify their behaivour. Remarkably, they then say to you, “Hey, I was just playing the game. You can’t blame me for trying.”

The second reason you should be cooperative at the outset is, as I said formerly, it’s virtually benign to move from collaborative to conflictive, whereas to reverse the process is exacting, to say the least.

Remember when the Almighty sent Aaron and Moses to negotiate with Pharoh, they did not start with plague ten or plague eight, but opened with a request for a favor on behalf of the Lord. It was only when this was turned down that the negotiation moved from cooperative, gradually increasing the negative consequences with each rejection.

To exemplify this concept, imagine opening a discussion by saying, “Look, I’m going to give it to you straight. If I don’t get A, B, and C right now, I’ll have your job and ruin your damn life.” Can you see going from that to, “Perhaps I came on a bit strong? Would you be good enough, at your leisure, of course, to consider…?” Put it this way: you can’t reverse yourself in this manner and maintain any semblance of credibility.

…

For you are not really selling products or proposals, but you’re selling yourself. The conclusion is inescapable: Your style will supersede the substance of any transaction.

Negotiate This! By Caring, But Not T-H-A-T Muchamazon.com

Herb Cohen

ISBN 0-446-52973-7



Chapter III : Playing the Game

pp 88-90, 97