We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have long described how most American negotiators detest disagreement. They want to be liked by everyone including the other side in negotiations, and therefore they feel uncomfortable about anything which could cause conflict. Recognizing that being effective in business requires confronting this attitude head-on, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has… read more →
You develop a way to save 50 million lives. Of course, you become rich and famous, right? Well, not always – showing that sometimes our greatest successes in business do not bring the reward we deserve. In the Bangladesh of the early 1970s, Dr. Dilip Mahalanabis developed a simple technique to treat people with acute cholera who would otherwise die. … read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating teach you how to face up to an inevitable part of negotiating that many of us find to be unpleasant – even intimidating. Most of us dislike disagreeing with others, which is part of what we must do as negotiators, no matter how politely and cheerfully we do it. We draw upon good advice from… read more →
At Mobus Creative Negotiating, creativity is our middle name. So it hurts us to acknowledge that nurturing creativity is hard to do. We do not just mean that it is hard to come up with creative ideas; we mean that there are deep barriers to implementing creative solutions. Much recent research has looked at “implicit bias,” exploring what people really… read more →
Recent research has brought out how much wisdom there is in Alexander Pope’s line, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” We at Mobus Creative Research have often drawn on the work of psychologists. Here is another case. In their Harvard Business Review article “Research: Learning A Little About Something Makes Us Overconfident,” David Dunning and Carmen Sanchez explore how confident people… read more →
As negotiators, we often think about whether we want lower cost or higher quality. Well it is intriguing to realize that in the big picture, economic progress has come from having both at the same time. Jason Crawford writes in “The Roots of Progress” about the history of economic progress. Consider his account about the Industrial Revolution (Did the… read more →
Many people get anxious just thinking about business negotiations: the conflict, the pressure, the worry, the fear of failure all combine to make us not just nervous but distracted, uncomfortable physically and emotionally, and overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness. Wendy Suzuki, a professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, warns, “When we get stuck in that loop,… read more →
Toyota is at it again, and manufacturers globally are following suit. This creates opportunities for suppliers to get new customers. A few decades ago, companies around the world marvelled at Toyota’s “just in time” model for supply-chain efficiencies and economies of scale. By having suppliers deliver parts a few hours before they were used, manufacturers saved on warehouses and the… read more →
Juilia Galef, in her new book The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t, describes Star Trek’s Mr. Spock as a “Straw Vulcan:” a caricature of rationality designed to make rationality look foolish. That’s because he thinks the way most economists did through the 1990s: they assume that everyone is rational all the time. Wrong! People are often… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have made much use of the work of economics Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton psychologist. Our recent blog drew from his new book, *Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment*, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, to discuss how group-think can lead us astray. Now let’s look at what is the most surprising… read more →
We had an earlier blog about “persistence – or stubborness” drawing on the book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Wharton School psychologist Adam Grant. Mobus Creative Negotiating prides itself on bringing to negotiators the latest insights of research, so here is another point made in that volume. Grant analyzes a classic study by Neil… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have made much use of the work of economics Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton psychologist. Together with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, he has a new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. They define “noise” as “variability in judgments that should be identical,” and that they show that is a common feature of human… read more →
Mobus Creative Negotiating has made much use of the work of Wharton School psychologist Adam Grant. His new book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know has many insights useful for negotiators. One is about what psychologists call “escalation of commitment.” Grant explains, “When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first… read more →
How do you get the other side to see the point you are trying to make? The natural temptation is to think: facts and analysis will persuade them. Wrong! That’s the message of a new book by William Bernstein who is an MD with a PhD in chemistry who went on to be an investment advisor. In his The Delusions of… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have warned against the assumption that everyone is just like us – whatever the minor differences in taste and preferences, we all think and feel along pretty much the same lines. Wrong. Joseph Heinrich, chair of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, explains why in The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have drawn much from the work of Adam Grant, a psychology professor at the Wharton School. His latest book, Think Again (Viking, $28), is another gold mine of wisdom. His theme is how important is changing your mind. As Philip Delves Broughton summarizes in his review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, “We should be… read more →
Supply chain managers have for years discussed the pros and cons of diversifying their supply sources, generally concluding that it was more effective to rely on a close relationship with a low-cost supplier. But several recent developments mean that you should urge your firm to re-examine the issue. In particular, periodic Covid shutdowns of factories and ports have left some… read more →
Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind provides copious examples of one of the important insights of modern social science research, namely, that when we expect more of each other, we are more likely to rise to the occasion. As Bregman explains, part of the reason is what sociologist Robert K. Merton named “self-fulfilling prophecies”: if people expect that something is going to happen,… read more →
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