Mobus Creative Negotiating has made much use of the work of Wharton School psychologist Adam Grant. His new book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know has many insights useful for negotiators. One is about what psychologists call “escalation of commitment.” Grant explains, “When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first… read more →
How do you get the other side to see the point you are trying to make? The natural temptation is to think: facts and analysis will persuade them. Wrong! That’s the message of a new book by William Bernstein who is an MD with a PhD in chemistry who went on to be an investment advisor. In his The Delusions of… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have warned against the assumption that everyone is just like us – whatever the minor differences in taste and preferences, we all think and feel along pretty much the same lines. Wrong. Joseph Heinrich, chair of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, explains why in The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have drawn much from the work of Adam Grant, a psychology professor at the Wharton School. His latest book, Think Again (Viking, $28), is another gold mine of wisdom. His theme is how important is changing your mind. As Philip Delves Broughton summarizes in his review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, “We should be… read more →
Supply chain managers have for years discussed the pros and cons of diversifying their supply sources, generally concluding that it was more effective to rely on a close relationship with a low-cost supplier. But several recent developments mean that you should urge your firm to re-examine the issue. In particular, periodic Covid shutdowns of factories and ports have left some… read more →
Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind provides copious examples of one of the important insights of modern social science research, namely, that when we expect more of each other, we are more likely to rise to the occasion. As Bregman explains, part of the reason is what sociologist Robert K. Merton named “self-fulfilling prophecies”: if people expect that something is going to happen,… read more →
The Covid pandemic has made more acute the need to consider how we communicate. As always, we at Mobus Creative Negotiating have been on the watch for new scholarly research which helps address issues important to negotiators. We want to bring to your attention an enlightening article by Andrew Brodsky, management professor at U Texas – Austin, in the summer… read more →
The modern world of work is blurring the lines between work and home, a development which speeded up with the Covid19 pandemic. As negotiators, we need to be sensitive to how our clients – and our own team – deal with the blurring. Modern research shows that people react in very different ways. Wharton Management professor Nancy Rothbard has spent… read more →
At a time when many negotiators are working from home, it is important to reflect on how each member of our team is reacting to that experience. We at Mobus Creative Negotiating search out the experts who have been studying how people behave in practice; we recognize that how we act can be based on our emotional reactions more than… read more →
The law of supply and demand is a powerful force, but Nobel-Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler explains in the New York Times that there are times like the Covid19 panademic when a smart business ignores that law (The Law of Supply and Demand Isn’t Fair). Thaler, along with another Nobel-Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Jack Knetsch wrote the classic 1986 article,… read more →
Covid19 has forced many companies to tell people to work from home. We at Mobus Creative Negotiating are watching closely what serious researchers find about the impact this is having on our business behavior. So far, not a lot of good evidence, but a lot of people are looking at the question. What we do know is not very encouraging.… read more →
The current coronavirus pandemic has led to much talk about “black swan” events. To understand what that phrase means, realize that black swans are very common. It’s just that they are common in a place not visited much for a long time, namely, western Australia. Indeed, they are the state bird of Western Australia. It is only in Europe that… read more →
In these times, we are likely to be conducting more business virtually. That presents some unique challenges which will require creativity to resolve. Well, Creative is our middle name at Mobus Creative Negotiating. Some of the best advice we have seen for how to negotiate virtually comes from a Havard Business Review post about virtual meetings, What It Takes to… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating put the word “creative” in our title because that is such an important part of modern business challenges: coming up with new ways to address old problems. Our materials emphasize the importance of approaching negotiations not only as a way to get a better price but also as an opportunity to discover new opportunities and… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating talk a lot about the insights of the modern school of economic research called “behavioral economics.” At its most basic level, behavioral economics says that you simply can’t understand how the economy works unless you understand how people actually make decisions, and the way our thought process or, our mind, works. A big name… read more →
One of the all-time best-selling investment books is Burton Malkiel’s 1973 A Random Walk Down Wall Street, now in its 12 edition. Its thesis is “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would as well as one carefully selected by the experts” because the markets have already factored in all the information… read more →
Any negotiator is going to face setbacks – probably including some serious ones. Even if you follow all the advice we at Mobus Creative Negotiating give, sometimes things will not go your way. It’s important to understand how, when you have been knocked down, to get up, dust yourself off, and move forward. Catherine Sanderson of Amherst College gives much… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating point out that much modern negotiating is about the terms for an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time purchase. When making even what looks like a simple purchase like a software program, we should think about the technical support and the future upgrades that the supplier will provide. In The Optimists’ Telescope, Bina Venkataraman explores… read more →
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