Short essays on negotiating through everyday life, work, and times of upheaval.
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Stop wasting food! Kids and contingency contracts
The world sometimes seems populated with two types of children: those who refuse to eat anything you put in front of them, and those who want to eat everything in the fridge—or at least say so. Previous posts have considered the former type, but I haven’t yet considered the latter. In the interest of getting…
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False anchors II: Don’t get sunk by your teenager
My latest post discussed the topic of false anchors: large numbers issued by retailers for the sheer purpose of anchoring the consumer, then creating an immediate contrast with the “sales” price. “Our amazing TV usually sells for $3000 but—today only—get it for an unbelievable $1800!” The purpose of the post was to alert unsuspecting buyers…
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False anchors: Don’t get sunk this holiday season
This holiday season, retailers seem particularly eager to make their lives more negotiable by selling you on their wares. So now is probably an appropriate time to alert you to one of the oldest negotiation tactics in the book and—in so doing—help to make your own life more negotiable. Several of my early posts discussed…
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Giving gifts as an analogy for mastering negotiations
The holiday season seems like an appropriate time to tackle the topic of gift-giving. A little reflection suggests that there are two types of gift-givers: “Recipient-focused” gift-givers think about what their recipients really like and try to give them that, even if they themselves find it boring. For example: the guy who gives his girlfriend…
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What they want and why they want it: Providing exceptional customer service
May I ask you to complete a difficult task? Please take a second and recall a recent experience in which you received exceptional customer service. Tough as that task may be, I’m sure we can all recall at least one time when we, the customer, felt like we were exceptionally well served. And I’m willing…
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Let them choose! Idiosyncratic preferences at home or at work
Over the course of many dinnertimes, many parents notice a pattern in their young children’s preferences. Shortly after sitting down at the table, and whatever the color of the child’s plate (fork, placemat, cup), the kid decides it’s the wrong color. Pink plate? Oops, they wanted the green one. Green plate? Guess tonight was a…
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Responding to organizational stupidity: To highlight or understand?
People in organizations make stupid statements all the time. They get the facts wrong in presentations. They make nonsensical statements in meetings. They portray an undoubtedly incorrect conclusion as the Gospel truth. Assuming you want to respond to a stupid statement, you face a choice. Should you highlight the stupidity latent in the statement, or…
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Dealing with the rigid rule enforcer: The case of the miniscule backpack
Last weekend, I showed up at a professional football game wearing a tiny hiking backpack—I mean, a pack small enough to scale Mt. Everest without breaking much of a sweat. But of course, the friendly gate agent informed me that this particular bag was “too big to go into the stadium.” “Is there a locker…
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Dealing with the dense: Implicit negotiation
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of taking my daughters to one of those fall farm thingies—you know, the combination hayride / pumpkin patch / opportunity to pet some animals? At one point, my four-year old expressed a desire to climb up and drive a pretend wooden tractor, only to be pushed aside by a boy…
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To each their own: Technological solutions to negotiation
Last weekend, my daughter and I went to Home Depot. As a means of making the errand slightly more interesting, I let her bring her LeapPad – basically a miniature iPad for learning. During the drive, she was playing her LeapPad, and I was listening to my music. Apparently the music was interfering with the…
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Saving time by learning to trust yourself
In a world where work-life balance seems like a quaint anachronism, most of us have to find every possible efficiency just to get our jobs done—especially when working on difficult tasks that require multiple rounds of revision: detailed reports, complicated analyses, complex pieces of software code. Though efficiencies on such tasks are often hard to…
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Capturing the attention of kids and executives alike
Anyone who works for an organization must at least occasionally negotiate with the people above them in the org chart. And anyone who does that knows that capturing and maintaining an executive’s attention is essential to negotiation success. What you might not know is that interactions with kids can highlight some important lessons about interactions…
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Negotiating with neighbors by planting the seeds of trust
If you’ve ever owned a house, you know that much of your happiness inside the house is attributable to people who live outside the house: namely, your neighbors. The fate of every homeowner is at least partially in the hands of their neighbors. Good neighbors—nice people who will work with you to resolve any neighborly…
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Will Trump be a good president? Wrong question.
Everyone who hasn’t already made up their mind is currently wondering whether Trump would make a good president. Despite the collective interest in this question, I submit that the election has raised another, equally fundamental question—and one that Trump himself should be even more concerned about: Is Trump a good businessman? On the one hand,…
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When the problem is not knowing the problem
We’ve all worked with someone and felt like nothing was working. No reply to emails, no answer to questions, no consideration of suggestions. What did you do? If you did something, it was probably to highlight the problem and discuss a prospective solution. And kudos to you, because confronting the problem can often make life…
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Don’t ask why! Negotiate with someone else.
Those of us who work in organizations—by which, I mean most of us—at least occasionally get responses we don’t like. That expense is not reimbursable; that laptop is not available; that TPS report is not acceptable without its cover sheet. It’s a fact: our organizations’ policies don’t always agree with our priorities. Although we probably…
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Getting the most out of your contractor
With the advent of the do-it-yourself revolution in home improvement, we are all tempted to look it up on the internet and then, well, do it ourselves. Tiling, painting, plumbing—internet as guide, house as palette. And when we can’t—when the task is too complicated or the time is too short—the temptation is to once again…
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Southwest seat selection: The art of choosing the right partner
I recently offered some tips on dealing with annoying airline seatmates—the ones taking up your space or blowing the frigid air on you, for example. The underlying assumption was that you can’t choose your seatmates, and for most airlines (e.g., Reunited), that’s all-too-true. Yet, a couple of recent flights on Southwest have reminded me that…
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Contagious conflicts: The case of the brawling boaters
My home state of Maryland is famous for all things water: crabs, the Bay, the Naval Academy, devastating floods, and now this viral video. In case you don’t care to watch, let me summarize in a sentence: a bunch of…less sophisticated folk…are boating on the Choptank River, and two of them get in a massive…
