Consulting, Seminars and Mediation
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Do me a favour: The next time you hand in your yearly budget, add a line item expense for “Being Right”. Now add another for “Teaching Business Ethics”. Go ahead and plug in a big fat number with a lot of zeros in both. Let me know how that flies with the Board. While most [...]
How many times have you been in a job interview and come across the question about salary expectations? Common wisdom tells us to not make the first offer, which is great on paper, but tends to lead to an impasse. The hiring manager (or board, or President) doesn’t want to move first, in case you [...]
There’s a lot to be afraid of these days. Pundits will tell you the economy has been through worse times, and they’re right. But never before has the economy changed so much, so fundamentally, in so little time. Industrial revolution? A snail’s pace compared to what’s happening with the internet today. So when things go [...]
…and how you can get what you want anyway. I love a good argument. More, I love a good Latin-American argument. The back and forth, the incremental hyperbole, the wild gesticulations. It’s fun, and if you’re paying attention you may actually learn something you didn’t already know. The problem is, arguing for fun and arguing [...]
One of the classic negotiating mistakes is failing to account for changing circumstances. By default, when trying to work out way through a negotiation, especially a conflict, we want to go back to where we were ‘before we got into this mess’ (status quo ante bellum, for those of us who like to use the [...]
Which is easier: learning a skill or learning a behavior? Anyone with kids can tell you how difficult is it to teach someone to be diligent, honest, friendly, attentive to detail, ambitious, or any of a host of traits we hope to instill. Ever notice how some people seem to always be positive and willing [...]
If you’ve ever been disappointed by the negotiation results of your sales force, you’re not alone. There could be many reasons for your employees’ unimpressive results, but there are two most likely culprits: a failure to understand what constitutes a good agreement and a failure within your organization to reward negotiators for meeting the organization’s [...]
It’s often the case that when two people or organizations try to resolve a dispute by determining who is right, they get stuck. That’s why so many disputes end up in court. There is a better way to resolve your dispute: by hiring an expert mediator who focuses not on rights but on interests—the needs, [...]
We generally think of mediation as a dispute-resolution device. Federal mediators intervene when collective bargaining bogs down. Diplomats are sometimes called in to mediate conflicts between nations. So-called multidoor courthouses encourage litigants to mediate before incurring the costs—and risks—of going to trial. Scott R. Peppet, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law [...]
I was asked to write an article on Conflict Resolution within organizations for the American Chamber of Commerce’s magazine here in the Dominican Republic. Here’s the link, I’m on page 15. A few caveats and observations: The article is in Spanish. If that makes it somewhat difficult to read, bear with me: it was difficult [...]
