Twenty years ago, as a sinking sun was bathing the hills near Sonora, Calif., in a golden glow, Jim Camp happened to find himself shooting the breeze on the porch before dinner with a neighbor, a developer with a lot on his mind. The contrast between the two men couldn't have been more marked. Having recently sold his fundraising business, Camp was upbeat and content, enjoying life as we waited to see where inspiration and an entrepreneurial instinct would lead him next.

His friend had problems -- and big ones. There was an ongoing dispute with local authorities, he explained, a wrangle that had stalled his plans to begin work on a housing project in which he had invested a wealth of time and money. Try as he might, the neighbor lamented, he just couldn't get officials to see things his way.

Camp, who counts "farm-boy common sense" among his greatest blessings, offered a few off-the-cuff suggestions. Perhaps, at the next round of negotiations, his friend might like to try this approach -- and if that didn't work, well, here's another idea.

The friend took the advice, and as Camp still notes with satisfaction, won permission to begin work pretty much on the terms he had been seeking all along. "You know," his buddy told him later, "we ought to start a study group here amongst three or four of my buddies who own businesses." Camp didn't realize it, but that remark opened both a new chapter in his life and new career.

Today, he coaches students -- including many from some of Corporate America's biggest names -- in the art of negotiating. What makes him stand out from the pack is a vehement belief that "win/win negotiations" -- the school of thought that sees compromise as the key to success -- is dangerous nonsense. Camp, 57, whose book Start With No (Crown, $22.95) lays out the approach, recently explained his "contrarian" approach to BusinessWeek Online's Roger Franklin. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

A: You're a great critic of the so-called win/win school of negotiating. What's wrong with that concept? Why shouldn't two parties sit down, settle their issues, and each emerge a winner?
Q: I reject it absolutely. To understand what's wrong with that concept, look back to the start of the last century and think about the rise of the labor movement and how that led to laws being passed that required collective bargaining, that required compromise, and legislated compulsory give and take.

What happened was that business educators grabbed upon this popular notion, collective bargaining, gave it that name -- win/win -- and pretty well convinced everybody that compromise is required in every negotiation. Now, people are taught that they have to compromise, and that's just not true.

When industry goes out into the field -- or an individual, for that matter -- thinking, "I have to compromise, I have to give in, I have to surrender something," they lose a tremendous amount of profit margin, they lose a tremendous amount of opportunity. It just all goes down the drain for no reason.

Q: So you are saying that before negotiating with, say, a business supplier, the cardinal sin would be to go into that meeting with a mental list of concessions you're prepared to make?
A: No, I'm saying that, instead of thinking in terms of what we have to give up, which is required by win/win, we should be thinking, what's our long-term aim here? What are the challenges this customer faces? What are the challenges facing this organization we're negotiating with, and what is it that we do to solve them? In other words, what is it we're bringing to these negotiations that they really want?

Think about it this way, and let's use this book of mine as an example of what you should never do. So, I come to see you, and you say, "You know, I have some interest in your book." Well, I reply, "I've thought about this a great deal, and if you'll take 10 of my books, I'll give you a discount of 20%."

Big mistake! You didn't ask me for that discount. You may even have been prepared to buy 1,000 books at full price. But instead of waiting to see what your offer would be, I sat at home before the meeting, trying to guess and assume what I would have to give up to get this deal.

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