Cross-posted at She Negotiates.
At 8 PM Women on the Move gets down to business with attorney Victoria Pynchon, author of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog, who has been called a “master of conflict resolution and deposition skills.”
Victoria recently became a regular contributor to Forbes.com’s “On the Docket” column.
You can call in with questions!
Call-in Number: (347) 857-2102
I continue to bark at the moon.
Here's a piece I missed in April on real litigation filed over virtual property in Second Life.
Architect David Denton spends much of his time on a lush tropical island, where he experiments with cutting-edge building designs and creates spaces for artists to showcase their work.
Never mind that the island only exists in the virtual-reality world of Second Life, a popular online venue where people interact via digital avatars. Denton, 62, said he purchased the island for about $700 — real money, not virtual cash — from its former owner, and considers it his property.
Here's the thought this article triggers. If 90% of all litigation involving people (I'll skip corporate litigation and litigation brought to vindicate rights such as that declaring Prop 8 unconstitutional) will end with a retired Judge telling the people that litigation is too expensive and a jury trial too uncertain for them to bear, why don't we just litigate virtually (with Linden dollars!) giving the parties the experience of litigation that will eventually drive them to settlement?
I'm sure some smart programmer can come up with an algorithm for most personal disputes, including both factual templates and the application of simple legal principles. A "ticker" could keep track of the dollars your virtual attorney is billing on your law suit's screen everyday. Continuances, discovery motions, pre-trial proceedings and depositions could all be simulated.
Then the parties return from the virtual life of Second Life Litigation and sit down in the old fashioned way to negotiate a resolution to their dispute or, if necessary, hire a village elder trained in conflict resolution, sometimes called a mediator, to help them do so.
(cross posted at She Negotiates)
I asked one of my consulting clients for a testimonial yesterday.
"Anything," she said, "it's genuinely changed the way I do everything. It's not just the shift in my business relationship with [BigBiz, Inc.]. I dumped a boyfriend last week because of our conversations! So, seriously, what would you like me to say?"
My client and I, like the few women commercial litigation clients I had during my twenty-five years as a lawyer (2%?) were quickly becoming friends. And I was proud of her. Truly proud. Like a parent would be.
"I'm proud of you," I finally said, even though I'd been thinking it for weeks. "You've shifted the power in your working relationship and that was difficult to do. You were persistent. You're a first class learner. And you've been brave."
She laughed, the way we women do when we're praised, wanting the moment to pass instead of savoring it a little, particularly when we know deep down we've genuinely achieved something important in our own lives and careers but don't want to appear self-satisfied.
So I said it again. "I'm really proud of you. You've done great work and you never gave up. You didn't fold to the power of BigBiz, Inc. You stood up for yourself."
Continue Reading...
The numbers below represent an unscientific poll of women in business concerning their skills, attitudes and fears about negotiation. The women were asked to rate their agreement with the statements on a 1-10 scale with 1 being the least agreement and 10 being the greatest agreement. The numbers represent the average answer.
Here is an Excel spreadsheet of the data collected in this assessment.
Continue Reading...UPDATE: Something to keep in mind:
When Deepak Malhotra, co-author of the brilliant Negotiation Genius, taught business students at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, he required each one to “go negotiate something in the real world” and write a report about it. As Babcock and Laschever report in Women Don’t Ask,
From Women Don't Ask.
There's still time to sign up for the roof-raising "She Negotiates" online negotiation course.
More important than her religious background (Jewish) her Ivy League Credentials (Harvard) her progressive, liberal or conservative Democrat political leanings, is the prospect that Kagan's addition to the Supreme Court will result in the magic number of three women on the United States Supreme Court.
Why is three the magic number?
Recent studies have shown that it takes three women corporate board members to avoid the deliterious effects of group think on corporate decision making - my own supposition on the question "why three" being that one or two women easily risk falling into male group-think. This isn't male bashing, by the way. I assume three men on an otherwise all woman's board would have a similar performance enhancing effect.
Continue Reading...
We’re celebrating Mothers Day by posting Blawg Review #263 at the She Negotiates Blog for one obvious and some not so obvious reasons. The obvious reason is the word “She.” The not-so-obvious reasons are: (1) Mother’s Day was a peace and reconciliation movement before it was a holiday; and, (2) peace exists only when we have the political will to seek and the negotiation tools achieve the resolution of conflict.
In addition to the main post, we've also posted Blawg Review #263 on our She Networks, She Succeeds, She Transforms and She Resolves pages (up at the top of the blog).
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