Most people get ready for a negotiation by studying their own case. The best negotiators study the person who has to say yes.
Those are not the same thing. Your case is what you find persuasive. The deal gets made, or doesn't, based on what they find persuasive.
Sun Tzu, the Chinese general whose work The Art of War has been required reading for strategists for about 2,500 years, understood this. I've changed a few words to turn his line into what I call the negotiator's creed: If you know your negotiating partner and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred negotiations. If you know yourself but not your negotiating partner, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat.
Most of us fall into that second category. We know our numbers cold. We know almost nothing about how the other side makes decisions.
Jensen Huang doesn't have that problem.
Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the chipmaker whose processors power much of the world's artificial intelligence. He turned a company that started in a Denny's booth into a $4 trillion enterprise. And in 2025, he was staring at a market he valued at roughly $15 billion: China.
The obstacle was Washington. Since 2022, the U.S. Commerce Department had blocked sales of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China over national security concerns. So Huang had his engineers design the H20, a deliberately scaled-down chip built to fall under the government's performance limits. Even that chip still needed a green light from the administration. Which meant the person across the table was President Trump.
Huang didn't walk in with a spec sheet. He walked in with a read on his counterpart.
Three things are well known about how Trump negotiates. He is entirely transactional. He responds strongly to praise. And he sees the world in winners and losers. Huang built his approach around all three.
Transactional. In April 2025, Huang attended a $1-million-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago and put a promise on the table to invest up to half a trillion dollars in American AI infrastructure. He anchored before he was asked. Later, when Trump demanded 20 percent of Nvidia's China chip sales in exchange for export licenses, Huang countered at 15. Trump took it.
Praise. At one meeting, Huang drew the President a diagram showing why tariffs would undercut his own goal of more U.S. chip production. Then he autographed it. At a Washington AI summit that July, Huang told the room, "America's unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump."
Winners and losers. At a White House meeting on July 10, Huang made the case that tight restrictions would simply hand the AI race to Huawei, the Chinese tech giant. Then he asked a question: did the President really want to let China take the spoils and turn American champions like Nvidia into losers?
Shortly after, the administration reversed course and cleared the H20 for sale. (The full account comes from a terrific August 11, 2025 Wall Street Journal piece by Lingling Wei, Raffaele Huang and Amrith Ramkumar.)
Notice what didn't change. Huang's core argument, that keeping China hooked on American technology beat forcing it to build its own, stayed the same the whole way through. What changed was the packaging.
Arguments don't move people. Arguments shaped to how they decide do.
In your day to day life, you're probably not lobbying the White House. But you are walking into rooms where one person's yes matters. A CFO holding your budget. A client deciding on a renewal. A boss weighing your promotion. Before that conversation, it's worth asking:
- What does this person need to get out of this, personally and not just organizationally?
- What do they need to feel, or be seen as, when it's over?
- What does winning look like to them, and what does losing look like?
A transactional CFO wants the payback period, not the vision. A client who's nervous about their own boss wants cover, not a discount. You're making the same proposal, just through a different door.
Now, a caution. Knowing how someone decides is not the same as agreeing to play by their rules.
Some of what Huang did raises real questions, and I don't let him off the hook in the episode where I talk about this.
There's a lot more in that episode: why making the first offer was the right call against an aggressive counterpart, and why Huang likely would have lost Trump's respect if he hadn't countered that 20 percent. How Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick nearly blew up the whole deal with a single comment on CNBC, and what that teaches about message discipline. And the part I think matters most: the West Point framework for doing "the harder right," and how to decide what moral price you're willing to pay for a deal.
But here's one question to carry into your next negotiation. Do you know the person across the table well enough to predict what will move them?
And once you do, how far are you willing to go?
Remember: negotiation is life.
– Gene
