All posts with the ‘ strategy ’ Tag

Let’s say you’re a single person looking to adopt a French Bulldog. In a bizarre Because This Is A Hypothetical turn of events, there are only two dogs for you to choose from.… Read More

In negotiation, people confuse “having power” with “being a jerk” fairly regularly.

Go to a third-rate negotiation training and they’ll offer the unhelpful advice of “don’t share information,” “always be aggressive” and “don’t call back if it’s after 4:00 in the afternoon; wait 24 hours and then send an email.”

This advice is bad.  It is The Rules for business relationships.  You can contort yourself … Read More

A brand shiny new year, people!  Full of god-knows-what and well-I’ll-be-damned!

THIS!  This could be the year you do that thing!  Or give up the watchacallit!

If you haven’t settled on a resolution yet, I’ve got one for you.  It will improve the quality of your business relationships, reduce your stress levels, and maybe even make you more money.

I don’t want to go so … Read More

You’ve come to That Place in a negotiation.

Your client won’t sign off on the final product if you don’t retroactively assign him the rights to the work and you won’t do that because a large portion of the project is stuff you use with three other clients.  And this is after you’ve given this guy a huge discount and rearranged other projects to meet … Read More

As promised, we’re getting back into the groove of a more regular schedule around these parts.  “More regular” means a couple things: (1) less than a month will separate posts and (2) between now and the end of the year, you can expect a minimum of five brand spanking new WMFH posts.

Tell your friends, family & fellow artists in arms: The Blog, she is … Read More

Delivered direct to my inbox this morning was a snippet of an article about envy and negotiating.  And it made me feel very smug.  Because it’s very similar to what we just talked about in the last post.

Turns out, shockingly, that when we envy a counterpart in a negotiation, we’re more likely to hold back information from them. Or even just  flat out lie.… Read More

Interest based negotiation sounds all slick and cool when you only have a couple interests to track.

But what about if you’re a normal person and you have, on average, about two dozen interests competing for your attention in any given moment?

How do you figure out which interests to pay attention to when you’re negotiating? And how can you tell if you’re letting irrelevant … Read More

Perhaps one of the most useful phrases I’ve ever learned is “Yes, and….”

It’s a pretty simple little phrase, and not exactly revolutionary.  I’d probably said it a thousand times before I was taught it.

Because it’s not just the phrase, “yes, and…”, it’s when you use it.

You use it when your negotiation counterpart has just said something you KNOW is ill-informed and if … Read More