There is an easy way to avoid the perception of failure in negotiations: don’t ever do anything risky. Set the bar for success super-low, and you are likely to succeed every time at doing at meeting that (low) goal. Fear of failure dominates many negotiators, leading them to take few risks. A basic reason is what Carol Dweck calls… read more →
Negotiators often have to decide what to focus on. It might seem that people will naturally concentrate on what is most important; after all, that’s the rational thing to do. But as we at Mobus Creative Negotiating keep emphasizing, human beings are not always rational. Recent research by a team led by Johns Hopkins University professor Meng Zhu, published in… read more →
Having worked with leading firms across the spectrum of American business, the stiffest negotiating challenge faced by procurement and sourcing professionals is trying to make a favorable agreement when buying from a sole source supplier. This topic was the focus of an article I co-wrote with Howard Levy, the Sourcing VP of Zimmer Biomet. The article, running in the current… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating emphasize that people are not always rational: they often react emotionally even when that reaction does not appear to be in their best interest. We draw on the research of modern economics – often called “behavioral economics” – which has shown how often emotions trump reason. That is a huge change from “classical economics” which… read more →
Words we never hear these days, yet the most successful negotiators are those open to the possibility that in fact: you are correct, and I am mistaken. In a recent New York Times column https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/opinion/sunday/liberal-conservative-divide.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists, Nicholas Kristof describes an experiment with 1,000 people. When asked to look at simple data and draw conclusions about a skin cream’s effectiveness, Democrats and Republicans… read more →
When Chief Justice John Roberts gave the address at his son’s 9th grade graduation last spring, he said he wanted to address “some of the harsh realities that everyone will face in the course of a full life:” From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so you will come to know… read more →
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