Just One More Rice Cake

Just One More Rice Cake

- On Herb Cohen's You Can Negotiate Anything

At first, I really did just want one more rice cake. There was no grand purpose. I did not want to change the world, and I had no thought of building a huge business. I simply wanted the rice cake in front of me, so I asked, “Could I have just one more?” — and that was the beginning. The interesting thing is that some questions do not end the moment you get an answer. The harder you dig for the answer, the more the question itself changes size. At the moment I asked for one more rice cake, the object of the problem was one rice cake. But once I started thinking about why I should receive it, why the other person would not give it, who actually holds the decision, what giving me one more rice cake means to them, what alternatives I have, whether they know how badly I want it, and whose side time is on — the problem was no longer a problem about one rice cake.

This is also why Herb Cohen's You Can Negotiate Anything is such an interesting read. Cohen does not confine negotiation to a specialized act performed by special people in special places. He expands the territory of negotiation to cover the everyday situations in which we interact with other people to get what we want. And the core elements he returns to again and again are Power, Time, and Information. Depending on who has more options, who has more information, and who is under time pressure, the balance of power in the very same deal can shift. Negotiating power, then, is not a fixed attribute determined by how strong a person I am. It is a relative condition that depends on where I stand within a particular relationship and situation.

But if you keep reading Cohen's book and arrive at the acknowledgments, you meet a strange scene. He lists by name the people he believes influenced his development, and the list is not made up of ordinary negotiation experts. Robert E. Alberts, Saul D. Alinsky, Renee Blumenthal, Harlan Cleveland, Michael Di Nunzio, Viktor E. Frankl, Jay Haley, Eric Hoffer, Eugene E. Jennings, George F. Kennan, Marya Mannes, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Rosen, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Sabath, Francis Albert Sinatra, Esther Greenspun, and others appear. Cohen thanks them for leaving traces on his development, but he does not push the responsibility for the claims in his book onto them. So reading this list as “Cohen's theory was built by stitching these people's theories together” is an over-interpretation. It is more accurate to read the list as evidence of how many different fields of people and thought Cohen had been exposed to in the course of learning to look at human beings.

Read that way, the problem of one rice cake suddenly becomes interesting. Think of Bertrand Russell, and the first question is no longer “How do I get the rice cake?” but “Who can decide what?” Russell was interested not only in philosophy and logic but in the problems of power and society, and in Power: A New Social Analysis he analyzed power as the central force that moves human beings and societies. From this angle, even the simple scene of a person who has rice cakes and will not give one away already contains a power relation. I want the rice cake, the other person has it, and if they will not give it, I am dependent on them. But whether that person's rice cake is the only one in the world, whether I can get one elsewhere, whether they need me as a continuing customer, whether I have other options — all of this changes the power in the relationship. In the end, the rice cake itself has no power. The relations of dependence around the rice cake create the power.

Pass through Saul Alinsky, and the relation expands from a problem between individuals to a problem of organized power. In social movements and community organizing, Alinsky cared less about the power an individual holds alone than about the power created when people are organized. His Rules for Radicals deals with the fact that power is not decided simply by the quantity of resources one physically holds, but also by how people perceive and use it. Then even the person asking for one more rice cake can see their own position differently. Alone, they are merely a customer who has to plead with the owner of the rice-cake shop. But if the people who share the same problem move together, the situation can change. What matters here is not the amount of rice cake but the structure of options. The other side believing that I cannot leave, and my actually having other options, are two different problems — and how the other side perceives me in a negotiation can also change real-world behavior.

Pass through Viktor Frankl, and this time what comes into view is not the physical value of the rice cake but the meaning a human being assigns to it. Frankl did not treat human experience as merely the product of external circumstances. He took seriously the meaning a person gives to their situation and the attitude they choose toward it. If so, the very same rice cake can hold a different value for each person. To someone hungry, the rice cake may be food; to a small child, a reward; to one person, a symbol that confirms they are being treated fairly; to another, a question of confirming that they are not being ignored. That is why, in negotiation, reading only the surface demand is not enough. Depending on whether “one more rice cake, please” actually asks for a rice cake, for recognition, for fairness, for respect, or for confirmation of a relationship, the solution to the same words can be completely different.

From Jay Haley's perspective, even a person's inner world is no longer enough. You have to look at what kind of relationship the two people are in, and what behavior keeps repeating within it. If I demand and the other refuses, I demand more strongly and the other defends more strongly, and that defense makes me demand more strongly again, then the problem no longer lies only in one side's character or intentions. The pattern of interaction itself — each person's behavior producing the other's next move — becomes a system. If so, what matters in negotiation is not only persuading the other side logically, but discovering which pattern we have fallen into and changing that pattern.

Look at Eric Hoffer, and explaining human behavior by economic interest alone also becomes insufficient. People act not only for material gain but for belonging, identity, belief, self-respect, and meaning. So the other side may refuse to the very end to give one more rice cake, even when doing so costs them almost nothing economically. What matters to them may not be the price of the rice cake but a principle. Conversely, the reason I want one more rice cake may not be real need but a desire to be recognized. From this angle, the core question of negotiation moves from “How much will I give?” to “What is valuable to this person?”

Reach George Kennan, and the gaze moves beyond individual psychology and relationships to structure and long-term strategy. Kennan was the diplomatic strategist who played a key role in shaping early Cold War American strategy toward the Soviet Union and the policy of containment, and his thinking shows that confronting the other side's every move head-on is not the only form of strategy. Understand the environment and conditions within which the other side moves, change that environment itself, and the range of actions the other side can choose from changes as well. Apply this to the rice cake, and the question shifts from “How do I persuade them to give me one more?” to “How do I create a situation in which giving me one is also in their interest?” Go further, to “Why must I keep receiving rice cakes from this person at all?”, and negotiation stops being a transaction and becomes a problem of structural design.

In Harlan Cleveland's world, what matters is the fact that real decisions are not made by one person's will alone. In complex organizations, whether governments or corporations, the formal decision-maker and the person who actually exerts influence can be different, and a single outcome can be produced through the interaction of many institutions and stakeholders. Then, when you fail to get a rice cake at the shop, there is no reason to look only at the person in front of you. You need to know whether that person is really the decision-maker, or someone following a rule set above them, or someone moving because of another party's interests. The moment I choose the wrong counterpart to negotiate with, no amount of negotiating skill changes the result.

Add Eugene E. Jennings' interest in leadership and organizations, and the difference between formal authority and real influence becomes even sharper. In organizations, the person with the title appears to decide everything, but the person who actually changes people's behavior may sit somewhere else. Power, then, cannot be measured by the title printed on a business card. You have to look at who gets people moving, who holds the information, and who shapes other people's judgments. It is worth considering that this kind of gaze may lie behind Cohen's ability to expand negotiation from simple price haggling into a problem of human relationships.

And into all of these layers walks Frank Sinatra. When you first find this name, you laugh. Why does the Frank Sinatra of “My Way” suddenly appear between Bertrand Russell and George Kennan? But if you see Sinatra's name only as the name of a singer, you miss something. Sinatra was a person who turned his own name and image into an enormous social asset. Before he said anything, people already held information about the name “Frank Sinatra.” His fame could function as a negotiating resource that began working the moment he entered a room. Of course, there is no basis for asserting that Cohen learned any specific negotiating technique from Sinatra. But the fact that Sinatra sits in Cohen's list of thanks alongside figures like Russell, Frankl, Alinsky, and Kennan makes you think that, at the very least, Cohen did not see human influence purely in terms of logic or economic resources. People exert influence not only through what they actually possess, but through how others perceive them.

Now return to the rice cake we started with, and the problem of one rice cake looks completely different. At first the goal was simply to get more rice cake. But think about power, and you have to know who holds the decision. Think about organization, and you have to think about how to build a force larger than yourself alone. Think about psychology, and you have to know what the other side actually wants. Think about relationships, and you have to know which pattern of interaction you are inside. Think about strategy, and you have to consider whether, instead of persuading the other side every time, you can change their environment of choice itself. Think about information and time, and you have to look not only at what you know but at what the other side knows, and at who is in more of a hurry. Then one rice cake is no longer one rice cake. It becomes a tiny intersection where power and information, time and relationships, psychology and organization, and strategy all meet.

Here Cohen's three words — Power, Time, Information — become important again. Increasing the power I hold in a negotiation does not necessarily mean becoming a stronger person. Expanding my alternatives, securing the information I need, reducing the information only the other side has, escaping time pressure, creating the perception that I am irreplaceable to the other side — or, conversely, showing that I do not depend on them — any of these alone can change the terms of the negotiation. In other words, negotiating power is not an ability fixed inside me. It is constructed through relationships and environment.

Think that way, and the original question grows stranger and stranger. “How do I get one more rice cake?” looks too small. The more precise question becomes: “Why must I accept the present conditions as they are in order to get what I want?” Working out how to plead with the person who has the rice cake, and building an alternative way to obtain rice cakes, are problems at different levels. Winning a single deal is different from building a favorable position across repeated deals. And changing the structure so that the deal is no longer necessary at all is different again.

That is why, at the end of this story, the rice-cake factory appears.

I did not want to buy a rice-cake factory from the start. Buying a factory is, in all likelihood, far too large and expensive a choice as a realistic way to eat one rice cake. But what matters in this metaphor is not actually buying the factory; it is the thinking that changes the unit of the problem. You can begin at the stage of persuading someone every time you want one more rice cake, rise to the stage of securing options that let you obtain rice cakes reliably, and rise further to the stage of changing the structure in which rice cakes are produced — and the position you occupy within that structure.

Here, negotiation goes beyond mere persuasion. It stops being a technique for taking something away from the other side, and becomes the ability to understand the conditions under which the result I want gets produced, and to change those conditions. Sometimes the answer is to say something better. Sometimes the answer is to hold more information. Sometimes the answer is to wait, and sometimes it is to build an alternative that lets me walk away. And very far down the road, the answer may be, instead of continuing to ask the other side for something, to occupy a different position inside the structure where that something gets made.

In the end, what matters is not whether you acquire the rice-cake factory. What matters is how deeply you can analyze the very small desire to eat one more rice cake. Stop at the surface, and it is a transaction. Go one level deeper, and you see psychology. Go deeper again, and you see relationships. Beneath that you see power, information, and time. Deeper still, you see organizations, markets, and the structure of production. Then a desire that was simple at first becomes a lens for looking at the world.

Perhaps strategic thinking is not the ability to think about enormous things from the start. It may be closer to the ability to discover the structure hidden behind a very small problem, once you have thought that problem through seriously to the end. From the wish for a slightly bigger paycheck, you can come to see the structure of the labor market. From the wish to land one good contract, you can come to see the relations of dependence between firms. From the wish to be given one more chance by someone, you can come to see the structure of relationships and power. And from the wish to eat one more rice cake, the same thing can happen.

At first it was one rice cake. But as you ask question after question to understand why you cannot get that one rice cake, you end up looking at people; looking at people, you come to see relationships; looking at relationships, you come to see power; looking at power, you come to see information and time; and following those, you come to see the structure of organizations, markets, and production. And at the very end, the original question disappears and a new question remains.

“Why must I keep asking the person who has the rice cakes in order to get one?”

From the moment that question arises, the game changes.

The person who asks for one more rice cake is inside a transaction. The person who builds options for obtaining rice cakes reliably is looking at the terms of the transaction. And the person who looks all the way to the structure in which rice cakes are made begins to ask which game they have been struggling to get rice cakes inside of.

So the rice-cake factory is not a conclusion. The rice-cake factory is merely one possibility that appears before your eyes once the question has grown large enough.

The original motive stayed small to the very end.

I just wanted one more rice cake.

But trying to solve that small desire properly, I came to see the relationships among the people who give and take rice cakes, the power that moves those relationships, the information and time that make up that power, and the organizations and markets behind them.

And finally, you come to understand.

I never wanted a rice-cake factory from the start.

I just wanted one more rice cake.

It is only that, thinking all the way through how to get that one rice cake, at some point I found myself looking not at one rice cake, but at the entire world in which rice cakes are made.