How the Other Man Thinks
The manager of the hotel on the market square was getting ready to leave us for a laundry that charged a third less. I prepared a speech. About starch, about sheets without yellow stains, about the double payment for every one we lost. The Don listened to it in the car and said, “Good speech. For me.”
He asked the manager just one thing: “Who rings you when the linen is late?” The owner, the man said. The owner walks the floors every morning at eight. If the chambermaids are standing around without sheets, the manager gets a short conversation. The cheap lot delivered by ten; we delivered by seven. The Don didn’t say a word about starch. He said, “We’ll deliver by half past six. You’ll have an hour and a half before the owner.” The manager stayed. We didn’t knock a cent off the price.
I talked about what mattered to me. He was thinking about the man who would come at eight.
The Tune and the Tapping
In 1990 Elizabeth Newton, a graduate student at Stanford, ran a simple experiment. Some people tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song on a table with a finger; others guessed what the song was. The tappers expected about half to be guessed. Fewer than three in a hundred were. The person tapping has the tune playing in his head. The listener hears tapping.
Arguments are the same. Your own advantage, your own morals, your own starch you hear with a full orchestra. The other man hears you drumming on the table.
Speaking Their Language
Pistone once had to wreck a heist without blowing his cover. The crew he’d joined under a false name was planning to rob a garment factory. Twenty-five women workers, nearly all of them Italian, handcuffs, a twelve-metre trailer at the loading bay. The agent couldn’t take part: it would have ended in violence. He couldn’t refuse either: when the crew got picked up, the first one they’d suspect was the man who hadn’t gone along.
He didn’t say a word about the law. He started with “not a bad plan” and asked how long the loading would take. Two hours. And the shift ends at five. The husband comes home, and there’s no wife and no dinner. What does he think? That his wife is fooling around. Where does he go? To the factory. They’d all come barging right into the factory, Pistone pointed out. Loading the goods in front of a crowd of jealous husbands? One of the guys blew up. The man in charge scrapped the plan: the factory was too close to home.
To a robber, morality is no argument. The argument is his own risk, worked out with his own arithmetic. Pistone didn’t argue with the goal. He showed where it broke down.
Who Gets Through to Him
Later, in San Diego, Pistone spent several evenings taking Lefty round places the FBI was watching. Lefty chatted with the managers about nothing much: nice little place, been open long, any trouble with suppliers? And all the while he was watching. At one table sat a man who ate nothing. People came up to him one at a time, said something and went away. The waitress put on a show for him. In another place like it Lefty recognised a couple of guys and concluded that, by the look of it, some serious people were behind them.
A man keeps quiet about himself. But other people never stop talking about him: who comes up to him, who tries hard in front of him, who gets up first. Pistone later admitted that from Lefty he learned to think like a mafioso and not just play his part. Think, not play.
Calm Is Catching
Once a cook burst in on the Don over a torn tablecloth. He shouted for about ten minutes. The Don didn’t interrupt or make excuses. He nodded and answered in a low voice. Without noticing it, the cook started talking more quietly. He sat down and drank a coffee. Then the Don asked, “Show me the tablecloth.” It had been torn in the cook’s own kitchen. He apologised.
In 1994 the psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson described what the Don knew without books. People involuntarily pick up someone else’s face, voice and posture, and after them the mood. Shouting is catching, but so is calm. The Don chose calm.
The books for salesmen explain this with “three brains,” one of which we inherited from the lizard. The scheme was dreamed up in the sixties by a physician, Paul MacLean, and neuroscientists buried it long ago. The trick works. The lizard has nothing to do with it.
The Bait
The knack of thinking for the other man has a dark side too. Pistone shows it without embarrassment.
He needed to get Lefty to Milwaukee, to the agent Conte. He didn’t lay out a proposal. In his own words, he prepared the ground: started an easy conversation, touched on the subject he wanted in passing and closed it again at once. While they were talking about California, he let drop that he’d run into an old pal from Baltimore who was looking into vending machines. Lefty’s answer amounted to a shrug: well, good luck to him. Pistone didn’t even say where the pal lived. The idea, as he put it, was to let Lefty swallow the first bait and digest it.
A few weeks later Lefty’s son was arrested, and Lefty urgently needed money. That was when Donnie remembered the pal from Baltimore: maybe give him a call? Lefty nodded his go-ahead.
The idea was planted in advance, and then they waited for trouble. When trouble came, the idea was already lying to hand and felt like his own.
The Bottom Line
Before you speak, find out who stands behind the other man and what he’s afraid of. Talk about his eight in the morning, not about your starch. You don’t need to lie for that. You need to translate.
And if on a hard day a rather too convenient thought comes into your head, remember where you heard it. If somebody dropped it in front of you in passing and changed the subject straight away, and more than once, that’s no coincidence. That’s planting, and he’ll be the one bringing in the harvest.