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...
9 days 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...
16 days 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...
23 days ago • 3 min read
Station 4 Negotiation August 25th, 2026 Whose behavior did you just guarantee? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. A personal guarantee is not a promise that you'll try hard. It's a bet on how much of the world you control. Most people who sign one look at the number. The number is the wrong thing to look at. The number tells you how much you lose. It doesn't tell you whether losing is up to you. There...
30 days ago • 3 min read
Station 4 Negotiation August 18th, 2026 Would you trust a doctor who worked the way you negotiate? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. The fastest way to lose a negotiation is to answer a question before you understand it. Most of us are problem solvers by trade. Somebody puts a problem on the table and our hands start moving. We've seen this before. We know the fix. We start prescribing. Stephen Covey —...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Station 4 Negotiation August 11th, 2026 Why should the other side's trust make you nervous? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. Imagine this. You're working on getting a deal done when the other side says: we don't need to see the numbers. We just want to do a deal, and we want to do it with you. What's your first instinct? I'll tell you that most people's would be to celebrate. I know – you want the deal...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Station 4 Negotiation August 4th, 2026 How do you spot a lie in a negotiation? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. Sooner or later, someone across the table is going to lie to you. The only question is whether you'll catch it. Most people think detecting a lie is a matter of memorizing tells — the broken eye contact, the touched nose, the arms folded across the chest. Buy the right book and you'll learn...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Station 4 Negotiation July 28th, 2026 What can you make expensive — and when? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. The biggest, loudest threat across the table is almost never the one that actually has you cornered. And if you spend your energy answering it, you'll lose to the quiet lever you never looked at. Every negotiator confuses power with leverage at some point. Power is what someone can do to you —...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Station 4 Negotiation July 21st, 2026 How do you get people to do what you want? ↓ Negotiation in 2 Two minutes.One real situation.One thing you can actually use the next time you need to persuade someone. You can be completely right and still lose the room — when you're right about something that matters to you instead of something that matters to them. We're taught to make our best case: believe in it, lead with conviction, line up all the reasons it's true. But the person across the table...
2 months ago • 3 min read