THE HIGH PERFORMANCE LAB

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

• Noticing is very important in negotiations. By design, in negotiation there are many omissions, and unless we ask, we won't know. Noticing allows us to know precisely what to ask and when to increase the quality of our negotiation analysis.
   
• By design we, humans, are very bad at noticing, as we tend to form impressions quickly and ignore any contradictory information...

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

• Negotiation is information game. Disciplined exploration of 'intelligence' questions allows us to do four things: decide whether we want to investigate in the first place; set up the negotiation table most favourably based on detailed understanding of parties, interests and issues; decide on how to negotiate; and protect ourselves from critical omissions, misrepresentations...

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

Setting goals is extremely important in price negotiations, for we prime ourselves (a behavioural phenomenon known as anchoring) even before we go into the negotiation room. This may be used both to nudge ourselves to make correct first offers and to protect against the influence of first offers of the other side.

RELATED RESOURCES

Your FREE price negotiation...

Today I would like to talk a little bit about relevancy of negotiation and influence skills outside of big business and public cases - about job-related negotiations. In the past couple of months I have had amazingly many requests from coaching and consulting clients related to the job negotiations. What fascinated me is that people tend to think about them as something...

Hi, Inside Negotiator's Lab team!

After I have posted my analysis of the "Final Offer", more requests came in to recommend some negotiation movies. Here is one for you: "Bridge of Spies", a Spielberg's film featuring Tom Hanks as James Donovan, a NY attorney first defending Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy captured in the United States, and then negotiating his swap in Eastern Germany in 1962 for a...

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

• Empathy is “to sense the [other’s] private world as if it were your own, but without losing the ‘as if’ quality.” Carl Rogers.
• Before we can influence the hearts and minds of others, we need to understand them. Sometimes better than they do. We need to step into their shoes.
• The biggest advantage for a negotiator lies in a very deep understanding...

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

•  As one person (agent) acts on behalf of another person (principal), their interests may diverge, and an agent may act in her own best interests rather than in the interests of the principal. The problem is further complicated by the fact that agent is typically better informed than the principal being closer to the situation. This is known as asymmetric information.
  ...

Movie time! For some time Inside Negotiator’s Lab team has been asking for ideas about which film on negotiations to watch. Here is the one for you to consider. "Final Offer" by Sturla Gunnarsson and Robert Collison was released in 1985. It is a treasure of insights about dos and don’ts in complex, high-stake, high-pressure negotiations.

Click HERE to watch the...

IDEA IN BRIEF

• There are two fundamental activities in a negotiation: creating and claiming value. There is a fundamental tension between the two. Finding the right balance between them is an art form.

• Game theory may be used to understand dynamics at the table. A special game, Prisoner's Dilemma, demonstrates that rational action without cooperation is not a panacea as it may lead to awful...

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

• Make systematic preparation for negotiations a habit before everything else.  
• A better prepared negotiator with inferior influence skills typically dominates his unprepared counterpart who is an excellent influencer.
• There is no such thing as a preliminary meeting.
• When you are inadequately prepared:
  
  • It is much easier to influence you.
  • It is much easier to...