 the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back, everybody. Professor Deepak Malhotra is here. He's with the Harvard Business School and author of Negotiating the Impossible, How to Break Deadlocks and Resolve, Ugly Conflicts, Parenthetical Without Money or Muscle and Parenthetical. Deepak, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks for having me here. Happy to be here. So what are you doing here? Well, among the other things that I do with my time, I happen to be on the board of advisors for Nutanix and I've been working with Nutanix for the last, a little over two years on various aspects of negotiation, deal making, training, et cetera. And so I attend a few of their conferences, a few of the sessions. I talk at a few of the conferences as well, so that's what brings me here. So it's somewhat odd to have a negotiations expert come and talk to customers about negotiations, but I guess the angle would be, if you're stuck in sort of a legacy world, you need to negotiate your way out, is that- Well, there's a couple things going on there, right? So on the one hand, I think it shows a little bit about Nutanix's perspective, that it isn't a zero sum game. It's not we're going to train the Nutanix people so they can get an advantage over customers. I think the company really is focused on creating as much value as possible for the end user. And when you take that mindset, it actually makes sense to be inclusive and bring everybody in the ecosystem into the room. So it's not just, hey, Professor Mahlutra, can you train our salespeople? It's, you know, we want to share your ideas with everybody. And I think that's really a good sign when a company's willing to do that. The second thing is, as you just alluded to, a lot of the folks that are coming here and a lot of the people that are customers who are thinking about moving in the direction of Nutanix or have bought into the idea, they still may need to sell it internally. They still may need to negotiate internally, how do we change our organization, or how do we move our organization from what it's been doing to what it wants to be doing or it should be doing. And they're also, many of the same skills can be useful. So why not educate them about some of the things that they might not have thought about yet? So let's talk about your book a little bit, The Premise. I guess I told you I haven't read it yet, but I do have it. In the book, you talked about a 3,000 year old treaty of Kadesh. And things that we can learn from 3,000 years ago. Give us the basics and the premise. So the book starts out with this story of the Treaty of Kadesh, which I don't think is something that many business books start out talking about. Certainly I hadn't seen it before, I started researching it. And one of the interesting thing that happens is that there's a lesson embedded in the story of the Treaty of Kadesh that I think is as relevant today in negotiations of just about every kind in the business world and outside, that that's worth telling. And the basic story goes as follows. The Treaty of Kadesh is the most ancient peace treaty known to mankind. As far as we know, it's as old a peace treaty as we have evidence of. And it was between the Egyptians and the Hittites. And these two parties were at war. And at some point they must have decided, enough of this, we need to put an end to this. There's too many costs internally and externally, too many other threats. We need to find a way to resolve this conflict. What often happens in these situations is that nobody wants to look weak. Nobody wants to be the one asking for peace because that might just embolden the other side. So what ends up happening is that somehow they overcome these hesitations, they reach this agreement. Now what's interesting is that we actually have access to both languages, version of the treaty. So we have the Akkadian and the hieroglyphics. The hieroglyphics being the Egyptian version and the Akkadian being the one from the Hittites. And if you were to read both of these, or if you were to first learn how to read these and then to read both of these, what you find is, as you'd expect, they have a lot of the kinds of things that you would normally expect in a peace treaty. You know, exchanging prisoners of war and mutual assistance packs and things like this. And they're basically identical, as they should be because they're the same peace treaty. But there is one difference. When you compare the two peace treaties, the one difference that sort of stands out is that in the Egyptian version, it says it's the Hittites who came asking for peace. And in the Hittite version, it says it's the Egyptians who came asking for peace. And what it goes to show, I think, is that no matter how far back you go, this need for every side to declare victory at the end of a negotiation, at the end of a conflict, that need for every side to declare victory is as old as human beings themselves. When you understand that, I think it actually changes the way in which you try and negotiate these deals. How you think about what stands in the way of getting the deal done. Sometimes it's not the substance of the deal. You're already proposing something that's good enough. You already have something on the table that's rich enough, valuable enough, they should say yes. But there might be other reasons they can't say yes. For example, they might lose face, or they may look bad. And when you recognize that, I think you come at it a different way. So, looking at your research, one of the things you focus on is trust. And one of the challenges we have in technology is people are entrenched with the way they do things. They're not likely to be first or go there. We've now got thousands of people using Nutanix. But how does Nutanix or others that are new get a proper seat at the table and be able to be part of a discussion that when you've got big incumbents in there and the old ways of doing things? The way I see it, you have to get the economics right and you have to get the psychology right. The economics is you have to have a good product. It needs to be priced appropriately. You need to be bringing value to the table and repricing based on that value proposition. So that's sort of basic business stuff. The problem is, as I mentioned earlier, you may have the right product. You may have something that people quote should be using. It is better than the alternative. But there might be these psychological hurdles that you need to get over. A prominent one being what you just alluded to, which is when nobody else is doing it, nobody feels the urgency to do it. If you get the sense that there's not a mass of folks running after your product, they sort of feel like, well, maybe that means something. Maybe it means it's not a big deal. Maybe it means it's not so urgent. Maybe it's not that good of a product. So the early hurdles that companies like this face are really big ones. You don't have a long list of customers that you can use to prove to other people that this is the way you should be going. There are, there's always a risk that somebody's going to take a bet on this and if something goes wrong, you know, it's sort of the old nobody lost their job buying IBM kind of a mentality. And so as a negotiator and as a company that's starting out as an early stage company, especially in technology where you're doing something disruptive, you need to start thinking a little bit about how do we get them over that? How do we get them to start understanding that you know what, here is a list of customers that are using it and then here's the testimonials, et cetera. You think about the pricing. The most common thing that happens when you walk into the room with a new disruptive technology is that the person on the other side says, are you crazy? You're charging 10 times what your competitor is charging. You know, you're sitting here telling me to pay X. You know, if I do nothing, I have to pay zero. All right, nobody pays this kind of money for this kind of thing. That is a very common response salespeople get when they are in an environment like this. And one of the things I advise people to do in that situation is to make sure they don't make the worst mistake a salesperson can make in a moment where somebody says, your price is 10 X, what everybody else is charging, nobody pays this much. The worst mistake a salesperson can make is to apologize for the price being too high. Now they don't always do it by saying, oh my God, I'm so sorry, but they seem apologetic. You know, they're very quick to say, oh yeah, you know, I know it's high, but you know, I'm sure we can work something out. But yeah, you know, I know it's a lot of money. The moment you go in that direction, what you're basically doing is you're giving the other side a license to haggle with you. Cause what you're telling them is that even you don't think the price is appropriate. A better response in a situation like this is for the salesperson to say, listen, I think the question you're asking me is, how is it that despite our price being 10 X what some other people are charging, we have a long list of people wanting to buy our product, what kind of value must we be bringing to the table for so many people wanting to buy this product? Now I'm happy to talk about that value because at the end of the day, we all know nobody's going to pay more for something than it's worth. Nobody would do that. You're not going to do that. So why don't we figure out what it's worth? And then you can make the right decision. And what you're doing there is you're shifting the conversation from price to value. You're shifting the frame of this conversation from how much am I having to pay and what's the cost to me to what is the value proposition? Stu's laughing. I mean, your price is too high as the best sales objection ever. You love to hear that as a salesperson. Much better than your product sucks. Now the answer to this question is probably it depends, but when you advise your clients and your friends, when I go into a negotiation, am I trying to get the best deal or am I trying to find common ground and get a win-win? Actually, I don't think it depends. I think, well, I would articulate the question slightly differently because in my experience, it is possible to get a great deal and a great relationship. It's also possible to get neither. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to optimize on both. What's interesting is that very often we assume that it's a zero-sum game enough that the only way for me to get a good deal is for me to sacrifice a relationship in some way. That's not how it works in most sort of richer contexts, more complicated deal scenarios. Because what people evaluate when they walk away from the table isn't just did I get a quote good economic deal. When people think back and say, do I want to work with this person again? Do I like this person? Did I get a good deal? Often what they're thinking about is not so much of the substance of what they got, what's in the agreement, but the process they went through. For example, did the negotiations go as long as it should have or did it drag on too long or end too abruptly? Was my voice heard? Did both sides move away from their opening positions? Did the person haggle with me on every little thing even though they knew and I knew it's not a big deal to them and it was a big deal to me? Those sorts of process elements, if you navigate the process more effectively, you can often get to a point where you get the deal that you think is right for you and you get a relationship that both sides can walk away feeling good about. And from my perspective, what does depend on the situation is what kind of feeling you want them to have walking away. You don't always need to have them love you, but at the very least they should respect you. And I think it's perfectly fair, even in a very contentious negotiation, to keep as one of your objectives. When the deal ends, I want them to be able to walk away saying, you know what, I maybe didn't agree with this person. It didn't go exactly the way I would have wanted to go, but I can respect this person for the way they handle the situation. And if I were them, I hope I would do it the same way. So I wonder if I look at just society as a whole, it seems that we've kind of retreated to our sides and I find lots of people aren't open for debate. They're intractable in what's going on. How do I get beyond that? How do we change society? Is that the question? Yeah, I mean, is it only 10% of the people that are intractable or are most people unreasonable? So I think what happens is there's a few interesting dynamics and I wouldn't have the precise numbers. What I can say is that it is certainly the case that even a minority of people being in those entrenched positions, they get a lot more of the media, they get a lot more of the attention, they tend to be louder, et cetera. And they can often drive our sense of what's actually happening and it can drive the narrative. Now that doesn't mean there aren't real differences, like strong differences. You know, what's interesting is if you take people that are not on the extremes, you take the moderates, sometimes the way in which we engage with people on the other side of the argument pushes them to be more extreme. See, when we ourselves show up, thinking of ourselves as relatively moderate and lightened people who have a set of point of view, but you know what, I'm very open to other people's perspective. But then we get into the conversation and we end up challenging people in a way that they don't find particularly useful. We start poking holes, we start making it, it's about a winning and a losing and a debate and there's gonna be, you know, at the end of the day, points scored based on who wins the argument, then people end up getting more and more entrenched, even in ways that they otherwise wouldn't be. So the question is, can we get to a point where at least those people on each side, and I find on any political issue, I can find people on both sides that I think are trying to do the right thing and have, you know, perhaps limited information, but they're trying to do the best they can with that information, they have good intentions, and they're recently smart people. In my experience, you don't need two people, one of whom is either evil or crazy or irrational, to have conflict. You just need two people. You see good, smart, reasonably well-intentioned people getting into conflict all the time, which then becomes the question of this book, which is how do we manage those situations? How do we get people to back away from these entrenched positions? How do we overcome deadlock in a way that allows both sides to walk away feeling a little bit better about the situation? So examples are instructive, so let's talk about some great negotiators. Who are they? Let's start with sports. Scott Boris, right? You think of him as an agent to me. Grinding the teams, the general managers. Is he a good negotiator? So I don't follow many of the sports deal-making and negotiations enough to be able to, you know, really elaborate on who would be a good negotiator in sports, but I can say this, that, you know, in a context where it's really just about things like price, just about the money, and, you know, a sports agent often is, it's not really all about that, but it is the most salient issue, you know, it is the most salient issue. You know, you're going to go out of a certain way. And it would be similar to a negotiation in the business world where, you know, all you care about is price. You're buying or selling a house, you're buying or selling a car. And from my perspective, there are people who are very good at haggling. There's people who can, you know, hold their cars to the chest, and they can be aggressive when they need to be, and they can be persuasive in certain things. But when you look at negotiation as a whole, I think of haggling as a very, very thin slice of what negotiation is about. That's sort of the easy stuff. You may not be naturally good at it, but what it takes to become good at it is not so hard. We teach that on sort of day one of class. You know, day one of class is, you know, the price haggle. It's the, you know, there's two sides, and you want opposite things, and how do you frame it in the right way, and what kind of concession rate should you make or not make, how do you justify your proposals, et cetera. We cover that on day one, and the problem is there's, in our owner-president program where I teach, there's 15 more days left. In our MBA program, there's like 27 more days left. And there the question becomes, how do we get past just being a good haggler? Somebody who can just, you know, fist to the table and say, take it or leave it, all that kind of stuff, which will work in certain defined contexts, but will not carry over to more important deals. You're right, that is a narrow context in sports because the agent has all the leverage of the players, you know, performed. How about Donald Trump? You know, he's negotiating, isn't he? When he says Mexico's going to build the wall, I mean, is he wrote the book? The Art of the Deal? He did write that book. He co-authored that book, actually. Yes. So is he negotiating when he says that? In the broader sense of the word negotiation, which is basically, you know, how do we interact with other human beings who see things differently than we do, he absolutely is negotiating. If the question then becomes, is he doing it effectively? You know, my view would be that he is not. And I think if you actually were to, you know, look at the evidence and then stack it up, I think you would find that he's, he's not a very effective negotiator. We don't have to go there, that's good. That's okay, I don't mind, we'll leave it there. How about like, Siddharth and Vagan, right? I mean, you had like an epic negotiation to bring those together. Is that an example? I mean, even though it ended in tragedy in both sides, is that an example of a successful negotiation? So it's an example of a very, it is an example of a successful negotiation. And I think even more instructively, it's an example of one of the biggest barriers in conflicts like this. The hardest part is often to bring your own side with you. And that is a challenge for leadership. It's not just in the bubble of negotiation. This is about leadership generally. To be able to have someone who can not only personally be willing to do the kinds of things and make the kinds of sacrifices, but to be able to move a group of folks who for years, sometimes decades or centuries have been thinking differently. And to your point, what often happens with these peacemakers is, you know, the risk is you do one of these things and you're going to get killed. And usually you get killed by your own side. And you know, exactly in the context you're talking about, that's usually what happens. And so here what we see is not only an impressive set of events that led to the negotiation and the negotiation itself, but you see a certain amount of courage that leaders don't often enough show. And again, some leaders just aren't placed well. They don't have the support going in or they just don't have the ability to do it. But even those that do, the question is, are you willing to expend the social and political capital necessary and put yourself on the line to be able to do something that you think is worth doing? I said I wasn't going to ask you, but I am going to ask you because your answer was so good. The Iran deal, good deal, not a good deal. You see to your point about getting killed by your own side. So I was not involved with the Iran deal. I do work with sometimes governments negotiating difficult conflicts and such, but I was not in any way involved with the Iran deal. What I can say is based on the folks I've talked to leading up to the Iran deal and then after the Iran deal, it is my sense, looking at what was accomplished, that it is actually a pretty phenomenal deal for when it was done. Could a better deal have been done 10 years earlier? Yes. One of the hardest things to negotiate against in the real world is the status quo. It's a lot easier to negotiate, don't create centrifuges when there are none than it is to negotiate, remove the centrifuges you have already created. So if you could go back in time, which I have not met anybody yet who's able to do, effectively, it would be possible to get a better deal. Where things were last year and the year before, I can say that pretty much everybody you talked to before the deal was announced, on either side of the political spectrum, Republicans, Democrats, left, right, hawkish, dovish, you name it, nobody would have expected a deal, this good for the American side, at the time. Now, you may still not like it, you may be against any deal, and that's okay, you can certainly have that perspective, but if you're gonna get a deal in this environment and what was being said leading up to this, I think both sides were pretty surprised and I would even say impressed. Until it came time to start talking about it publicly, at which point, of course, you know, you have to go back to your narrative. So, you know, again, I had nothing to do with it, but when you look at it, it surprised most people in terms of what it came out to be. So what are you working on, next projects, things that are exciting in these days? So I have sort of three areas where my attention is going. One is on ethnic conflict and armed conflict, as I was alluding to earlier, I do some work with governments that are dealing with insurgencies and conflict and looking at what we know and what we not know about resolving these kinds of things and how we can maybe push forward in that direction. So that's an area of advisory work, but also research that I'm doing. Second area is I'm working with doctors, thinking about how they can be more effective in prescribing a course of action to patients, how they can have more effective conversations when a patient comes in and has a strong set of beliefs about what they should and shouldn't do, or they're resistant to change, or they're unwilling to do things, how can you be more effective in the time you spend with patients? And I do work on gun violence, and we've been looking at mass shootings, and we just had some research that got a lot of coverage, unfortunately, because of the tragedy that took place in Orlando not so long ago, looking at whether mass shootings really have any impact on gun laws, and we find some interesting results there. So in a sense, I'm sort of looking at insurgencies and dealing with cancer patients, and then gun violence. So all of the darkest stuff we can find. Tragic, but timely, and then there's another sequence there of do gun laws have an impact on mass shooting? And that's basically the next set of projects. Excellent, well thank you very much. Nice chatting with both of you today, Stu. It was great. Fantastic, absolutely. All right, keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship production from dot next in Vegas. Right back.