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...In Workplace Negotiating Secrets From Bethenny's Shrink over at Forbes.com, Xavier Amador, the therapist on Bethany Getting Married? gives his "secrets" for "winning" workplace arguments. What Amador suggests (below and at the link) is really just collaborative interest-based negotiation, but his catchy acronym - LEAP - is a good one to remember for all negotiations, whether you're brokering peace in the Middle East or getting your guy to put the toilet seat down. If you read the article, and I highly recommend doing so, you'll see that no one is "winning" any "argument." Rather, people are finding ways to accomodate all of their needs simultaneously.
Amador, 50, uses many of the same methods with both individuals and corporate clients. His book I'm Right, You're Wrong, Now What?, lays out a strategy he calls LEAP, for listen, empathize, agree, partner. It applies to salary negotiations, to disagreements with partners or colleagues or underlings and even to challenging sales assignments.
An acronym enthusiast ("acronyms help me to remember"), Amador says the first step is "L," for listen. That may sound simple, but often it's very hard. In sales, for instance. Before he became a psychologist, Amador worked for an Arizona company that sold solar heating. Rather than simply trying to push his product, he found he got further if he patiently listened to his potential clients' objections.
Check out The Impact of the Irrelevant on Decision Making in today's New York Times. It's not just another article about the surprising power of anchoring and framing. It suggests that "framing a discussion" is so powerful that it is "an ethically significant act."
As economics Professor Robert Frank notes:
even conservative political commentators have begun to point out [that] Republicans have lately been far more aggressive in stretching [framing's] traditional boundaries. When Sarah Palin said that if health care reform legislation were adopted, her parents and her child with Down syndrome “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care,” most people probably realized the president had made no such proposal. Her statement nonetheless shifted the terms of the debate, making it harder for legislators to focus on genuinely relevant issues.
Is there any cure? Can't we simply raise our level of discourse to include critical analysis? Yes, answers Frank, but only if social sanctions are attached.
Economists have long recognized that social sanctions are often an effective alternative to legal and regulatory remedies. As Adam Smith argued, moral sentiments are extremely powerful drivers of human behavior. People who know they’ll be ridiculed for telling untruths are more likely to show restraint.
Some social sanctions are less effective than others. In recent years, the most conspicuous public falsehoods have been ridiculed by independent bloggers and Comedy Central’s faux news hosts. But television and Internet audiences are highly segmented. Many of Jon Stewart’s targets may never hear his riffs about them, or may even view them as badges of honor.
That’s why it’s important for the circle of critics to widen — and why we need to remember that framing a discussion appropriately is “an ethically significant act.”
Go forth, fellow lawyers, mediators and negotiators. Anchor and reframe, but do so ethically!
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).
She’s She Negotiates, the newest blawg on the block, taking the baton from The Public Intellectual’s brilliant Blawg Review #262, and getting ready to host Blawg Review #263 for Mother’s Day 2010
She negotiates Blawg Review.
In addition to celebrating mothers, we’ll be celebrating all women who negotiate (do you know any who don’t?) posting Blawg Review #263 on all of She Negotiates' pages – She Networks, She Resolves, She Succeeds and She Transforms, as well as on the She Negotiates posting page.
So if you’re a legal blogger and you have Blawg Review envy, now’s your big chance. Join She Negotiates to Power Her Dreams (it’s free!) and leave your link at the group “Blawg Review #263.”
The first woman legal blogger who joins She Negotiates to Power Her Dreams and leaves a May 3-week post beginning with the words, she negotiates, she succeeds, she networks, she resolves or she transforms will win a free ticket to the Negotiation for Women Workshop at the Pasadena Women’s City Club on June 10 (7-10 p.m.) with attorney-mediator, arbitrator and negotiation trainer Victoria Pynchon and east-coast business negotiation guru John Tinghitella.
The second woman legal blogger will win a free autographed copy of the book (due out in the very late Spring) A is for A**hole, the Grownups’ ABC’s of Conflict Resolution.
The third woman legal blogger will win a reduced priced month-long online personally tutored She Negotiates! Workshop at Craving Balance ($175 for a course costing $375). As with the last workshop Victoria Pynchon taught with life-balance coach and trainer Lisa Gates, they guarantee that any woman fully participating in the course will make back its cost within thirty days of taking it or her money back!
So get ready to celebrate the woman who negotiate, network, resolve, succeed, and transform with a nod to mom for Blawg Review #263!
What women are saying about the Craving Balance Negotiation Course:
"I learned more during this hands-on negotiating course than in another higher priced class. Victoria and Lisa helped me make the emotional changes necessary to demand a higher value for my work, and taught a step by step process for getting the most from sales negotiations."
Linda Gryczan, Helena, Montana
I'm blogging about gender and negotiation this month because March is National Women's History Month and March 8th was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day (commenced in 1910, a full decade before the Nineteenth Amendment would grant U.S. women the right to vote).
Today I stumbled over the post Women Deal with Conflict Differently than Men, reporting on a study done by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard in 2008. Results of the study showed the following similarities between men and women including:
The differences included:
We'll be working with gender differences through the end of the month of March and will likely discuss this data in more detail later.
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