Blog: Life’s Negotiable

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  • Give negotiation a chance

    The Capitol insurrection on January 6th was effectively a rejection of negotiation. The most extreme adherents of the President, self-proclaimed artist of the deal, visibly revealed their rejection of negotiation as a workable method of conflict resolution. Instead, they chose violence. Joe Biden’s inauguration speech on Wednesday was effectively a call to give negotiation one…

  • Negotiating your way through homeschooling and virtual learning

    As the school year approaches and COVID-19 drags on, many of us find ourselves faced with two potentially challenging options for educating our children: homeschooling or supervising their virtual learning (with the latter potentially resembling the former). Since neither permits a focal parent to do much else, both are likely to prove difficult. Since renegotiating…

  • Negotiating your way through upheaval

    We live in an age of upheaval—political, social, and viral. So, I thought it might be useful to ponder the possibility that times of great upheaval call for great negotiation skills. Indeed, in unsettling times like these, negotiation is often the only way to make life negotiable. Consider the following five reasons why upheaval and…

  • Negotiating the suboptimal scheduling of virtual meetings

    With virtual meetings omnipresent, many of us find their scheduling suboptimal for our productivity. “That mid-morning meeting just severed my chain of thought!” “That 30-minute break wasn’t even long enough to clean up my inbox!” While many of us perceive the productivity loss associated with the suboptimal scheduling of virtual meetings, however, fewer of us…

  • Why the best negotiators bask in bad feelings

    Most of us have had no shortage of bad feelings lately. So, many of us might be interested to learn of an important situation—negotiation—in which bad feelings are actually quite good. Put differently, bad feelings represent a necessary and useful component of many productive negotiations. So, the most effective negotiators tend to not only tolerate…

  • How big companies negotiate—in aggregate

    Many of us find now ourselves negotiating with big companies—to extend our promotional rates, cancel our service before the contract ends, miss a payment or two. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Given that reality, I wanted to share a consideration—discouraging at first but encouraging upon consideration—that can make such conversations negotiable: Many (though not…

  • Ok, so you want to barter—but how?

    My last post sought convince you that now—in the midst of the COVID crisis—is precisely the time to barter. In brief, the point was that many people now have little choice but to barter, that barter is a better way of negotiating with family and friends, and that barter can help us both deal with…

  • Is now the time to barter?

    The crazy COVID situation has taught us many important lessons about negotiation—lessons that should make life negotiable whenever it returns to normal. But COVID also holds at least one negotiation lesson that can make life negotiable now—one that, taken seriously and implemented immediately, could help us navigate this increasingly trying time: the power of bartering…

  • Negotiation lessons from COVID-19

    Long before the virus abates, we can all see society reverting to its old ways. Be it in the increasingly strident commentary on cable news or the accelerating efforts to pin blame for a still-unfolding crisis, signs of a collective retreat into our polarized camps are apparent, as is the resurgence of the faulty assumption…

  • COVID-19: Life’s still negotiable

    In moments like these, when the world’s out of control, little seems negotiable. But I’m here to tell you that negotiation is needed now more than ever. Indeed, if we don’t at least try to negotiate a new path through uncertain and frightening times, we’re sure to make an already bad situation worse. To see…

  • Negotiating the open middle seat

    If you’ve flown in the past, it might seem impossible. But if you’re flying in the present (age of the virus), it’s actually becoming probable: an open middle seat. Indeed, I’m looking at one as I type this. Find yourself and your row-mate with an open middle seat, and you find yourself with a negotiation.…

  • Picking the right (and wrong) time to negotiate

    As I’ve noted repeatedly before, one of our biggest challenges as negotiators is overcoming misguided mythology about negotiation. The way we imagine negotiations is simply not the way many real-world negotiations happen. A prominent aspect of that mythology, in turn, is the idea that negotiations happen at pre-appointed places and times—two people staring at each…

  • Negotiating to protect our time

    One of the primary reasons people negotiate is to allocate scarce resources. And one of the scarcest of all resources is time. So it should come as no surprise that protecting our time—much as it seems little like a negotiation—is. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that our success in preserving certain…

  • Five non-deceptive reasons that negotiators don’t tell the full truth

    One of the biggest challenges any negotiator faces is getting the full truth from their counterpart—in particular, learning the real interests lurking behind their positions. Why’s my coworker really pushing that proposal? Why’s the homeowner really delaying that inspection? Facing a less-than-fully forthcoming counterpart, most of us draw a simple conclusion: They must be concealing…

  • Bartering over burgers: How trades and transfers can make you happier and healthier

    I love to eat out with my family. But I and any other adult who eats at restaurants receptive to small kids often encounters a problem: The meals on offer don’t quite match their culinary or health goals. In these situations, and in accordance with my book The Bartering Mindset, I’ve found that trading and…

  • Negotiations over Netflix

    One of our most common negotiations occurs on the couch. There we sit, next to a partner or friend, vigorously debating our differing opinions about what to watch. Given their ubiquity, could more productive “Netflix negotiations” (as we’ll call them) make life as a whole more negotiable? On the off-chance they could, let’s review some…

  • Five reasons to love ambiguity in negotiation

    One of the least-liked features of negotiations is their ambiguity. In many negotiations, we say some things, our counterpart says some things, and then it’s totally ambiguous what anyone should say or do. But I’m here to tell you that ambiguity is one of the very greatest features of negotiation; indeed, a negotiation particularly mired…

  • “What’s the worst that can happen?” A simple question to make life negotiable

    The situation’s more complicated, but I’ll first state it simply: If I had to pick just one way that people go wrong in negotiations, it’s that they don’t negotiate. Facing a dissatisfactory situation, they just live with it. And if I had to pick just one reason that people live with it, it’s that they…

  • Better meetings now: Agendas as first offers

    As I and many other negotiation researchers have observed, it often makes sense to make the first offer in negotiations—more sense than most of us suppose or most of the random websites on negotiation suggest. As I’ve argued throughout my writings on negotiation, however, the lessons of negotiation research are far from confined to formal…

  • An underappreciated reason to avoid being a jerk in organizations

    I have previously argued that treating the important issues in life as negotiations rather than rules can make life negotiable. But of course, if you do that, the person on the other end and will have to decide whether to accept your attempt at negotiation or refer back to the rules. And herein lies, in…