Category: Negotiations

  • 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…

  • 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…