The best negotiating advice I can give you is to follow former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference. Following Chris led me to the terms “ELF” and “HALF,” created by his friend Joe Polish to describe two types of customers:
ELF stands for easy, lucrative, and fun. Dealing with ELFs is the key to your personal and business health.
HALF stands for hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. Even if the ‘L’ is lucrative, dealing with HALFs will still suck the life out of you and take your business down.
On a recent webcast with Jason McCarthy, Chris mentioned that he’s thinking about changing the ‘E’ in ELF from “easy” to “ethical.” He and Jason agreed that you should never refuse to do work just because it might be hard to do. They argued that life’s most meaningful work is usually not easy.
And I agree. But the “easy” in ELF and the “hard” in HALF aren’t about the work—they’re about the relationship. An ELF is someone who is easy to work with, just as a HALF is someone who is hard to work with.
A few years ago, I survived a situation that was so tough, I thought I might never solve it. The terms ELF and HALF hadn’t been invented yet, but my situation was a HALF problem.
My first breakthrough was to realize that the problems in my growing mass-of-problems fell into two clearly distinct categories, and that the problems in one category were never going to relent to the tools and techniques that we were accustomed to using on problems in the other category.
As good analysts do, my team and I agreed that we’d give these two problem types two distinct names:
- We restricted the word problem to refer to the puzzles we solve every day. Some problems are easy, some are hard. Some are fun, some aren’t. But solving problems is a normal, natural, healthy, happy part of our job. We’ll have new problems every day, because solving problems is what we do.
- Then there are troubles. Troubles are dysfunction. They prevent you from solving problems. Troubles are easy to spot, once you know what to look for. Symptoms include dread and fear and anguish, which have no place in a quality life.
Fixing troubles is different from solving problems. Once we understood this, we started gaining traction. Our hardest problems were actually troubles, and the root of our particular troubles was a HALF.
The solution we chose was to cut the HALF out of our life. It took courage, but we wouldn’t have survived if we hadn’t. Cutting a HALF might mean firing an employee. It might mean firing a customer. It might even mean firing your boss.
With ELFs, I think ‘E’ for “easy” is the perfect word for the job, just like ‘H’ for “hard” is the right word for HALFs. Give me a customer (or a team) who’s easy to work with—who keeps the troubles away—and we’ll solve your hard problems just fine.
If you want to learn more about what it’s like to work with an ELF, read chapters 62, 64, and 103 of my book, How to Make Things Faster.
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