Barack Interest-Based and Hillary Zero Sum?
The Daily Kos speculates on Hillary and Barack's different negotiation styles as being attributable to the lack of negotiation classes in the law schools of Hillary's and my era and the presence of those classes in Barack's era here.
Maybe that's why Obama appeals to me so.
Comments (5)
Read through and enter the discussion by using the form at the endmichael webster - February 25, 2008 9:58 PM
Here is an interesting paper, co-authored by Max Bazerman, which effectively concedes that most of the the training of negotiating skills has been a failure.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=701292
So the lack of negotiating classes probably means very little.
Vickie - February 25, 2008 11:50 PM
I skimmed the paper -- doesn't seem to be as broad a condemnation of negotiation training as you suggest, Michael, but I take your point.
Here's mine: thinking in a harmonizing, value-creating, conciliatory manner is not a trick or even a skill, but a discipline, a state of mind, a practice, a way of looking at the world.
It requires commitment to a principle and not simply a set of techniques.
I speak for myself only, but believe there are others, when I say that the transition from litigator to mediator has been far more profound an experience than I ever anticipated it would be.
It took me quite some time to make the shift and I still err on the side of positional bargaining. I'm working on it.
You can't tell from this paper whether the research subjects committed themselves to an entirely different way of thinking as a result of the negotiation training given. I doubt it. My own "gateway drug" was negotiation training. Without it, I never would have committed myself to the discipline and practice necessary to change zero-sum to integrative thinking.
Without negotiation training in law school, few of us even had the chance.
michael webster - February 26, 2008 4:46 AM
0. I don't doubt that most people are amazed to make the move from purely position haggling to managing the create/claim value problem. Obviously that does require training and education, but I think Bazerman has in mind a particular critique.
1. Bazerman writes that "even when people learn integrative negotiation skills [such as those taught at PON] they have great difficulty in transferring these skills to new tasks".
2. That seems to me a pretty strong claim that the current methods of teaching how to create value/claim value doesn't generalize well. --Despite almost 20 years of having negotiation training exercises provided by either PON or Kellogg's Negotiation program!
3. I would take a look at the exercises 4a and 4b, and tell me how you would handle them -and whether they are realistic or only toy examples. (I know how I would solve them and I am not the least bit surprised that people with 2 hours of negotiation training would fail miserably.)
4. Note also the overall claim that there is a difference between the performance of people who learn how to spot log rolling techniques versus people who have been taught log rolling and what the authors call "compatibility". This seems very odd: both integrative techniques are just a subset of my favourite technique: find what we could achieve if we were one, and then find the necessary credible commitments to bring this outcome about.
PS. Finally, if this is as Kevin claims, a dialogue or conversation how come there is no "subscribe to this thread" button? Just whining again about it.
Vickie - February 26, 2008 11:48 AM
I will take a look at the problems and likely devote a post to them.
YOUR "technique" IS the heart of the shift -- it's an ORIENTATION -- find "what we could achieve if we were one . . . "
As Ken Cloke says, "we simply need to remember that drilling a hole in the other guy's side of the boat will sink our side too."
Anthropologists who have studied mutual aid societies says that participants are given the opportunity to "correct the epistomological error that our interests are pitted against one another's."
Joseph Campbell says that people who run into burning buildings to save others have momentarily broken through to the metaphysical truth that we are one.
The rest is problem solving.
michael webster - February 26, 2008 8:55 PM
I used the concept of Kalai solution to bargaining game to motivate my thinking about how in general integrative solutions might be arrived.
Here is a very technical article by Alvin Roth which sets out the necessary and sufficient axiomatic conditions for the Nash and the Kalai solution.
Essentially, the Kalai solution posits that we start from an unobtainable point in which we both get our maximum claims and bargain back to the pareto line.