Herb Cohen
For more than three decades, Herb Cohen has been a practicing negotiator, intimately enmeshed in some of the world’s headline dramas from hostile takeovers to hostage negotiations. His clients have included business executives, entrepreneurs, sports and theatrical agents plus large corporations - as well as governmental agencies, such as the Department of State, FBI, CIA, The US Conference of Mayors and US Department of Justice.
Unlike some theorists, he was actively involved in the negotiations that settled the NFL players’ strike and the General Motors Chevy mobile litigation and also participated in the START Arms Control Negotiations with the Soviet Union.
He started formally teaching the subject of negotiations during a two week course for attorneys in 1963 sponsored by Allstate Insurance Company. It was then he first used the terms “Win-Win. Win-Lose, Lose-Lose”.
Herb Cohen’s analysis, insights and humorous view of many of these high-level happenings have appeared in many international publications, and he himself has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, People, The Economist, The New Yorker, Esquire, Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and even Playboy Magazine.
He is the author of You Can Negotiate Anything which was on the New York Times best-seller list for almost one year and has been translated into thirty languages. His latest book, Negotiate This! By Caring But Not T-H-A-T Much was published in mid-September 2003.
During the Cold War, Herb Cohen served with the U.S. Army, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment on the East-West Border in Bad Kissingen, Germany.
While attending university and law school he worked in many business and governmental organizations and ultimately became a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Business. Since then he has lectured at many educational institutions and enterprises such as The Harvard Negotiating Project, Yale Law School, The Kellogg School, Wharton, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California-San Diego, McGill University, UBC and the Columbia and Chicago University School of Business.
“You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
“No' is a reaction, not a position. The people who react negatively to your proposal simply need time to evaluate it and adjust their thinking. With the passage of sufficient time and repeated efforts on your part, almost every 'no' can be transformed into a 'maybe' and eventually a 'yes'.”
“Most of us, in our civilized society, rely too heavily on reasoning capacity to make things happen. We've been raised to believe that logic will prevail. Logic, in and of itself, will rarely influence people. Most often logic doesn't work.”