Station 4 Negotiation October 27th, 2026 Is your leverage the reason you didn’t make the shortlist? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. Most people don’t lose negotiations by being too aggressive. They lose them by starting too early. Before you have an offer, you aren’t in a negotiation. You’re in an audition. And the instincts that win a negotiation can lose you the audition. Conventional wisdom says to...
12 days ago • 4 min read
Station 4 Negotiation October 20th, 2026 Would you bring an iced coffee to a negotiation? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. Recently, the internet started fighting about an iced coffee. Julia Munslow, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, wrote about it last month: a Miami recruiter for a Fortune 500 company posted a TikTok about Gen Z candidates showing up to job interviews holding iced coffees, and...
19 days ago • 4 min read
Station 4 Negotiation October 13th, 2026 How do honest people mislead you? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. Most people who mislead you in a negotiation never tell a lie. They don’t have to. I’ve spent 40 years as a trial lawyer, and I’ve heard the same sentence thousands of times. The bailiff turns to the witness and asks: “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the...
26 days ago • 3 min read
Station 4 Negotiation October 6th, 2026 Is "start high" just lying with better manners? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. "Ask for more than you expect to get." Almost everyone in business has been taught that. Very few of us have stopped to ask what it says about us. In 1983, Jeffrey Rubin, a social psychologist who spent his career studying negotiation, described the standard model in the journal...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Station 4 Negotiation September 30th, 2026 Are you selling too soon? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. The costliest thing you'll give up in a negotiation is usually something you've priced only for today. Most of us judge a trade by what's in front of us: what this is worth now, what I'm getting now, and whether it helps now. It feels practical. But everything on the table also has a future, and...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Station 4 Negotiation September 22nd, 2026 Could you say no to Elvis? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. In a negotiation, the order in which things arrive is a tactic too. The biggest term rarely comes first. We tend to judge a deal by what's in it: the price, the rights, the conditions. We don't pay enough attention to when each piece reached us. A skilled counterpart builds the sequence carefully. The...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Station 4 Negotiation September 15th, 2026 Does your pitch convince anyone but you? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. Most people get ready for a negotiation by studying their own case. The best negotiators study the person who has to say yes. Those are not the same thing. Your case is what you find persuasive. The deal gets made, or doesn't, based on what they find persuasive. Sun Tzu, the Chinese...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Station 4 Negotiation September 8th, 2026 Can you reopen one term without reopening all of them? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. Everyone who negotiates for a living has met the nibbler. The one who keeps reopening terms you thought were closed. We call it bad faith, and we are usually wrong about who started it. Retrading gets treated as a character flaw. Sometimes it is. More often it is a response...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Station 4 Negotiation September 1st, 2026 Did you reach an agreement, or did you just get tired? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. You never really get talked into a bad deal. Instead, you get tired. These things don't get lost on the merits. They get lost on the clock. There's a moment near the end of a long negotiation where you stop evaluating and start finishing. You can feel it when it happens. And...
2 months ago • 3 min read