I have a confession to make – despite having spent an enormous amount of time in the last 25 years studying, teaching and consulting on negotiations full-time, I have made some negotiation mistakes. In fact, I would suggest that everyone – even the most...
I was shocked and dismayed a year ago when millions of us were grounded and effectively sentenced to house arrest as the world confronted the pandemic that upended many of our lives and livelihoods. Since then, we have all personally and professionally adapted in...
I was recently debating a public policy issue with my 15-year-old son, who has recently become enamored with a view quite different from my own. As the back-and-forth wound down without either of us substantially changing our opinions, he said he had “won” the debate....
I recently reached a dead-end in a negotiation largely involving one major price issue. I didn’t want to come down – and my counterpart wouldn’t go up. And I knew he had reached his end point, because he had already gone back to his boss twice for more, and we had a...
A client recently asked for negotiation advice about selling his business. He’s in his 40s and has been growing his business for about 15 years. He started as its marketing guru, progressed to an ownership share and took over its helm when its founders decided to...
She wouldn’t budge. Despite our concerted efforts to illustrate the unreasonableness of her position, she had dug in her heels. Or so we were told. The negotiation? The purchase of a house. The participants? The seller, the seller’s real estate agent, the potential...
Let’s say I want to buy the house at 123 Negotiation Lane and it’s listed at $300,000. I do my research, analyze comparable sales in the neighborhood, find out its length on the market, evaluate its renovations and conclude it’s worth $290,000. Figuring I’ll pay...
“The thing I always try to keep in mind in any negotiation is to know what I want at the end of it. And I always make a practice of writing it down – what is victory for me? And then I set up a series of stages, as the negotiations unfold, and I always [try] to...
A client recently sent me a list of negotiation “games” its counterparts regularly use. The list ranged from lying about certain facts to falsely pretending not to understand critical issues. After we discussed how to counter these “games,” my client asked me which I...
