Herbie Cohen: negotiation as a philosophy for life

Executive overview

Most people treat negotiation as a high-stakes confrontation. Herbie Cohen treated it as the natural fabric of all human interaction — something you've been doing since childhood and just haven't named.

His core method: understand what the other side has at stake, and move them from there. Not tricks, not pressure — just leverage through empathy and detachment.

The person who cares less — but stays engaged — wins.

Growing up in Brooklyn: the early lessons

• Power is based on perception. A nine-year-old in an orange sash can stop traffic if he acts like he owns the intersection.
• "Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are" — a principle Herbie discovered independently; Nolan Bushnell gave the same advice to a young Steve Jobs.
• Life is a game, and other people are playing it too. Focus on their stakes, not yours.
• To escape punishment at school, Herbie told his principal: if you expel us, there's a mandatory board hearing — and you'll be asked why you declared a student dead based on a disconnected phone line. Principal backed down.
• Moral: if you understand someone's predicament, you can move them from no to yes.
• Loyalty matters. Problems inside the family stay inside the family.

The philosophy: Jewish Buddhism

• Engaged detachment — care, but not that much. Don't fixate on a single outcome.
• Always be willing to walk away. Once you see life as a game, you become a more effective player.
• Dismiss setbacks as "a walnut in the batter of life, a blip on the radar screen of eternity."
• Key aphorisms: "We see things not as they are, but as we are." "The key to walking on water is knowing where the stones are."
• Favorite passage, from Viktor Frankl: the last human freedom is choosing one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
• At his core, all his lessons were about empowerment: you're never out of options, there's always something to be done.

Career: from claims adjuster to global consultant

• Started at Allstate Insurance as a claims adjuster — a post-grad course in negotiation.
• Key insight there: settle quickly, overpay a little rather than fight and overpay a lot in court.
• Promoted four times in five years; eventually Sears was lending him out to other companies as a negotiation consultant.
• Cut out the middleman, went independent, and never worked in a single office again.
• Advised Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis; advised Reagan during Gorbachev summits; helped settle the NFL players' strike; helped set up the FBI's behavioral science unit.

Counterintuitive negotiation principles

• Seed power to gain power. The most powerful position is not expertise — it's curiosity.
• The most powerful words in a negotiation: "Who?" "Huh?" "What?" "I don't understand — help me."
• Acting less informed produces curiosity, humility, and openness. Dumb is sometimes smarter than smart.
• Win-win is not about being a good person — it's about being effective. If the other side walks away feeling cheated, the deal falls apart.
• Rule of three: if someone sees your name three times, they feel you're everywhere. Repetition creates perceived fame, and perceived fame becomes real fame.

Writing and selling the book

• Spent eight months in a basement — nothing but lettuce, bread, and coffee — writing You Can Negotiate Anything start to finish.
• Before publication, drove his family across the country and read the entire manuscript aloud in the car, needing his kids captive to hear it.
• Collected 18 rejections before a small publisher said yes.
• Sold the book by hand: loaded boxes into a station wagon, drove city to city, cold-called every TV show, radio station, newspaper, and magazine in each market.
• Walked into bookstores, moved his book to the front of the display, and signed every copy — inscribing each: "Congratulations — merely by picking up this book you have demonstrated your intelligence."
• The book sold over a million copies and went through 19 printings.
• "Life is 97% marketing. You're better off with a mediocre product and a great salesman than a masterpiece and an idiot to sell it."

On ambiguity and strategy

• From his time investigating crime in the Korean War army: "Those who can live with ambiguity and still function do the best. Those who can't stand uncertainty get their certainty but pay for it."
• Ambiguity is the constant companion of the entrepreneur — learning to operate inside it is the skill.
• On coaching a basketball team in Berlin: you can't build a team around an ideal strategy. Devise your strategy for the talent you actually have. Don't complain — play the cards you're dealt.
• Take notes everywhere, always. It lets you learn from the past, keeps a record, signals to the other side that a record is being kept, and occasionally lets you "hang them with their own words."

On success, absence, and the cost of ambition

• After the book exploded, Herbie gave up to 250 speeches a year, traveling most of the time when his youngest son Rich was in school.
• His other children Sharon and Steven were already near-adults; Rich grew up largely without him present.
• His drive to achieve caused a quiet depression in later life — a feeling he hadn't reached the goals he'd set for himself.
• After near-fatal open heart surgery: "All I've ever done is what I think my father would have done." Rich's response: "But maybe that's all anyone has ever done."
• Even Herbie faltered: after his brush with death, he had an affair, depleted his savings trying to prevent exposure, and was told on anyway.
• "Even our heroes falter."

On falling back and commitment

• When Rich said he wanted to be a writer, Herbie advised law school as a fallback.
• Rich refused: "I did not want something to fall back on, because people who have something to fall back on usually end up falling back on it."
• Jeff Bezos made the same point: plan B should be to make plan A work.

The meaning of life (according to Herbie)

• Asked directly in old age: "The meaning of life is that there is no meaning of life — none that we can know."
• "Your business is to be a decent person, raise nice kids, and keep going as long as you can."
• "The meaning of life is more life."