Author: briangunia

  • Setting your sights in a negotiation: The stars or the floor?

    In any given negotiation, a negotiator must at least implicitly answer two questions. The first comes at the beginning: What’s my goal? The second arises near the end: Am I satisfied? Answering each question requires a metric—a standard of comparison. But I’m here to tell you that many negotiators adopt the wrong metrics—indeed, precisely the…

  • Meetings devouring your life? Contingency contracts to the rescue

    It’s a common organizational problem—probably one of the MOST common: the proliferation of long meetings and inability to get anything else done. Here as in other areas, however, negotiation research can help. Indeed, I suspect a negotiation concept called contingency contracts might actually make many meetings—and thus much of organizational life—more negotiable. There are really…

  • What should we expect from a negotiation?

    What type of outcomes should we expect from a negotiation? Since decades of research suggest our answer dictates both the behaviors we’ll display and the deals we’ll reach, it’s critical to answer carefully. In particular, I’d argue that calibrating our expectations appropriately is one of the most important waystations on the road to more negotiable…