Negotiating Archive

I was recently working at my kitchen table while my adolescent son was watching the History Channel’s reality TV show Pawn Stars. The show caught my attention, as a litany of extremely unsophisticated individuals sold their family heirlooms and other “treasures” at cut-rate prices to the professional negotiators who star in the show. Having appeared on a reality TV show, I am well aware of the lack of reality involved in such shows. As the Producer of the show I worked on told me, “There is very little that is real in reality TV.” Even taking into account the show’s lack of reality, I found it to be an entertaining way to coach my son regarding basic negotiating tactics.  

Author Henry James understood the impact a ghost could have on a story. He also recognized that two ghosts haunting two children was even more effective than a single ghost and a single child, as his character Douglas notes in the 1898 novella, The Turn Of The Screw: "I quite agree – in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was–that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children – ?" "We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns!" (italics from original text) James understood that the introduction of each ghost and child effectively “turned the screw” – to a point. However, just as a carpenter understands that over-tightening a screw can cause it to break; James realized that too many “turns” of his metaphorical screw would render his ghosts ineffective as literary devices. Turning the screw just enough is an art in carpentry, literature and negotiation.

“Fight or flight?” Nothing is more elemental to an organism’s survival than knowing when to run and when to defend itself. In which instances should a creature pick a battle and make a stand, and when should it retreat to fight another day? Entrepreneurs often face a similar quandary, with the added wrinkle that sometimes it makes more sense to “flirt” rather than run or fight. In fact, startups, given their limited ability to effectively fight or flee, often must play nice when threatened. As such, rather than deciding between “fight or flight,” the more appropriate question for an entrepreneur is, “When should I fight, flee or flirt?” As with most business dilemmas, there is no dogmatic response that can be uniformly applied to every situation. Each threatening instance must be evaluated in light of your resources, the criticality of the threat and the probability that you could: survive a fight, escape by flight, or establish an ally by flirting. Fortunately, there are two excellent books that address the yin and the yang of this fundamental issue: Sun Zi’s The Art of War and G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa’s The Art of Woo.