Latest / The Action Catalyst / Dealcraft, with Jim Sebenius (Business, Negotiation, Strategy, Education)

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Dealcraft, with Jim Sebenius (Business, Negotiation, Strategy, Education) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Adam Outland: Welcome to the Action Catalyst podcast, and on
• 0:03
  today's episode, we're pleased to welcome Jim Sebenius, Harvard
• 0:06
  Business School professor, negotiation expert and host of
• 0:09
  the new podcast, Dealcraft: Insights from Great Negotiators.
• 0:14
  Jim, welcome.
• 0:16
  Jim Sebenius: Adam, it's nice to meet you and glad to have the
• 0:18
  chance to appear on your on your show.
• 0:20
  Adam Outland: Yeah, thank you. And where are you zooming in
• 0:22
  from today?
• 0:23
  Jim Sebenius: I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually Boston
• 0:25
  today, because I'm at the Harvard Business School campus,
• 0:27
  which is my where my day job is. For about 20 something years,
• 0:31
  I've chaired a program called Great negotiators, which is the
• 0:36
  program on negotiation is based at Harvard Law School. I'm not a
• 0:39
  lawyer, but I'm active over there. And you know, it's the
• 0:43
  professional schools at Harvard, the business school, the School
• 0:45
  of Government, the Kennedy school, law school, and the at
• 0:49
  MIT, the Sloan School, and some other schools there. And at
• 0:54
  Tufts University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and
• 0:57
  Brandeis. And there are about 60 faculty all told, who were
• 1:00
  associated with the program, on negotiation, some are on
• 1:03
  corporate deals, some environmental some family
• 1:05
  mediation, some really, pretty much across the board. And every
• 1:09
  year or so, we collectively nominate a man or a woman from
• 1:14
  around the world who's done remarkable deals and achieved
• 1:18
  things that other people found really hard to do or impossible,
• 1:21
  and we write cases and we bring them to campus, and we record
• 1:24
  public and private interviews. And I just realized, after doing
• 1:28
  this and then using that material and teaching and so
• 1:30
  forth, it really deserves a wider audience. These are just
• 1:33
  remarkable conversations. So we went all the way back to Henry
• 1:36
  Kissinger, you know, on through George Shultz and Baker and
• 1:40
  Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Hillary
• 1:42
  Clinton, when she was Secretary under Obama. John Kerry Rex
• 1:45
  Tillerson, who actually wasn't so interesting as a secretary,
• 1:48
  but the fact that he'd been chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil
• 1:51
  and had done a ton of stuff, especially in Russia, where
• 1:54
  there's some really interesting conversations there have this
• 1:57
  remarkable collection of sort of great negotiators from all
• 1:59
  sectors. And this sidebar with the US Secretaries of State and
• 2:04
  dealcraft, results from my sort of looking at this and saying,
• 2:08
  you know, I think this would be interesting to a lot of people,
• 2:10
  you know. So it's, I'm very much in the formative stages relative
• 2:14
  to a well established one like yours. But this stuff is
• 2:17
  interesting, and the response is really positive.
• 2:20
  Adam Outland: That's wonderful. Well, I was looking forward to
• 2:22
  this conversation on many levels. One is that I thought I
• 2:26
  had good practice negotiating as my role as an executive coach.
• 2:30
  But when we had our two children, I've never had to
• 2:33
  exercise negotiation nearly as much as a parent.
• 2:38
  Jim Sebenius: And they are instinctively fabulous
• 2:41
  negotiators. And you know, if you take all the normal
• 2:43
  expectations, you're much more experienced, you're much
• 2:46
  smarter, you've got much more power and money, and yet they
• 2:50
  win. You sort of say some stuff which is pretty standard, you
• 2:54
  know, they go to one parent, can I do it? Mom said I could. Then
• 2:58
  you go to the other one, and neither one said you could. But
• 3:00
  each Don't you know. And then they they closed the deal. I
• 3:03
  remember our daughter, when she was about three or four, was
• 3:08
  headed to a birthday party in a really far away suburb, and
• 3:11
  neither my wife, Nancy, nor I especially wanted to take her
• 3:14
  out there and back, but we kind of didn't want to admit that. We
• 3:17
  didn't want to take her, and so we're kind of doing this back
• 3:19
  and forth. So we finally asked, we said, Elisa, who? Who would
• 3:22
  you like to take you out there? Figuring okay. And she said,
• 3:26
  whoever loves me the most, we both ended up taking her out
• 3:33
  there. The normal rules don't always work. So, for example,
• 3:37
  there used to be a real a real competition between her and her,
• 3:40
  her older brother, and each one of them when, when there was
• 3:44
  something, ice cream or whatever they wanted it, each one wanted
• 3:47
  the biggest. And I remember at one point I said, Well, you
• 3:51
  could have the biggest and you could have the hugest. And it
• 3:54
  actually worked. And I thought, That's interesting, because why,
• 3:58
  in my little mind did I think that there could only be one
• 4:00
  biggest?
• 4:01
  Adam Outland: You know, that's a brilliant example.
• 4:03
  Jim Sebenius: I did find with my with my spouse. Someone told me
• 4:06
  there's an iron law of marriage, which you should always remember
• 4:09
  when you're negotiating with your spouse, you can never be
• 4:12
  happier than your spouse. Don't try to win.
• 4:16
  Adam Outland: That's one I have not heard yet. That's wonderful.
• 4:19
  Was it early on in your career where you began developing an
• 4:23
  interest along these lines?
• 4:25
  Jim Sebenius: When I look back on it, I kind of realized that
• 4:28
  it was a much earlier thing, but not something I studied.
• 4:32
  Because, you know, like many families mine, had a lot of, I
• 4:37
  don't call them feuds, but a lot of rivalries and difficult
• 4:40
  relationships, and I consistently was a person who
• 4:44
  was bridging those differences. I never thought of that as
• 4:47
  negotiating. Later, in retrospect, I realized my
• 4:51
  personality, which Okay, let me see if I can really get it from
• 4:53
  your point of view. Let's see if I can get it from your point of
• 4:55
  view. Is there something that we can, you know, craft that sort
• 4:57
  of works and and then later. Were, you know, I majored in
• 5:01
  math and English in college and then, but actually the major
• 5:04
  thing I did was debating, because that's what I really
• 5:07
  loved. And then I went on an internship in in Washington,
• 5:11
  which put me, you know, really by chance, with some very senior
• 5:16
  people who I learned a huge amount from. And I was put into
• 5:22
  a series of negotiations, and including one very complicated
• 5:27
  negotiation over the Law of the Sea. And it was everything
• 5:30
  having to do with, you know, hydrocarbons on the outer
• 5:33
  continental shelves, and fishing and shipping and deep seabed
• 5:36
  mining and the whole business. And I was, you know, I would go
• 5:39
  to Geneva, New York, and these negotiations, and there were
• 5:41
  hundreds, if not 1000s of people involved in this, and I just
• 5:45
  found it really interesting. And that kind of led me to I stayed
• 5:48
  longer in Washington, and then I switched programs. I came to
• 5:50
  Harvard and did a degree in Business Economics, which is
• 5:53
  basically finance and game theory, and with an economic
• 5:56
  background, an economic base, it just happened at that time at
• 6:01
  Harvard, there were several quite senior people who were
• 6:04
  really interested in negotiation, and myself and a
• 6:07
  good, good friend, Bill Urie, ended up kind of being graduate
• 6:10
  student gophers to, you know, start what was called the
• 6:13
  program on negotiations only, like 40 years ago, my
• 6:16
  grandfather said, Why do you want to work for Harvard? It's
• 6:18
  nice place, but you can't own it. Then the B school asked me
• 6:21
  to start a negotiation department, so I hired a bunch
• 6:23
  of people here.
• 6:24
  Adam Outland: You know, when I hear your story, there's part of
• 6:26
  me that's always had this thought about negotiation, that
• 6:29
  there's this real technical part of negotiation, because you got
• 6:32
  to be able to, you know, understand, in some cases, maybe
• 6:35
  financially, the table stakes and the statistics associated
• 6:39
  with it. But there's this part that you grew up with that you
• 6:41
  mentioned that made you this peacemaker in your family that
• 6:44
  probably had a lot more to do with empathy and understanding.
• 6:47
  You know, those are two qualities that I feel are hard
• 6:50
  to marry in this world. For individuals, what's more
• 6:52
  valuable? And what do you see out there?
• 6:55
  Jim Sebenius: Yeah, it's a really good question, and I
• 6:57
  think a spot on observation. And here's, here's how I think about
• 7:00
  it, a colleague, friend and business partner of mine who
• 7:03
  actually runs my outside advisory firm, trying to
• 7:05
  crystallize this in a, you know, in a method and in a book that's
• 7:10
  pretty distinctive, and we call it 3d negotiation. What we mean
• 7:14
  by that is, the most familiar aspect of negotiation is really
• 7:19
  the people side of the process, that's the tactics, the direct
• 7:23
  interpersonal interaction, and we think of that as, you know,
• 7:26
  the at the table, piece of the story. And then there's the
• 7:28
  substantive part, you know, that's the contents of the term
• 7:32
  sheet, or the contract, or the treaty, or the memo of
• 7:36
  understanding, or the informal, you know, informal understanding
• 7:39
  of what we're going to do and so forth, but that's a substance.
• 7:42
  It's not separable from the people, but the art and science
• 7:46
  of crafting deals that unlock value and do so on a sustainable
• 7:50
  basis. We call that deal design, and that's the second of the
• 7:53
  three dimensions. The third great negotiators do almost
• 7:58
  instinctively, but a lot of people don't recognize that
• 8:02
  explicitly as part of negotiation, but that's what you
• 8:05
  can think of as, as the setup of a negotiation. When you're going
• 8:09
  into a deal, have you got the right parties brought into the
• 8:14
  process in the right sequence, under the right set of
• 8:16
  understandings and expectations, facing the right set of issues
• 8:20
  by the right process and critically facing the right
• 8:23
  consequences in the event of no deal. Because a lot of times,
• 8:26
  even though people don't think about it that way, those are
• 8:29
  actually choice variables, and you can influence them quite a
• 8:31
  lot. Probably, you know, half to 90% of the outcome of a deal has
• 8:36
  to do with all the stuff you do before you're actually in the
• 8:39
  room. You know when you when you ask, what makes a negotiation
• 8:42
  hard? You know, if you have a target deal in mind, you want to
• 8:45
  ask, what are the barriers to that? Is it trust and
• 8:49
  communication or cross cultural friction? Is that the problem?
• 8:54
  Is it that the deal doesn't really work for one side or the
• 8:56
  other? Is it that one side has an option that's better than the
• 9:00
  kind of deals that you're talking about, or you might Are
• 9:03
  you dealing with an agent who doesn't have any power, or
• 9:05
  somebody has weird incentives, or, you know, they're so you
• 9:07
  kind of look at those, you say, what are the what makes this
• 9:09
  hard? What are the barriers that stand between me and the deal
• 9:12
  that I want? Then a strategy and tactics is a customized set of
• 9:17
  moves away from the table to set up the most promising situation.
• 9:21
  I only realized it actually when we were when we were spending a
• 9:24
  lot of time, kind of unexpectedly with Henry
• 9:27
  Kissinger and talking through a bunch of his deals. He's an
• 9:30
  interesting guy, because a lot of people think of him as a war
• 9:32
  criminal, and other people think of him as a brilliant statesman.
• 9:34
  And there's a kind of a battle over who the guy really was. But
• 9:39
  with Kissinger, we realized, what does he do? He does two
• 9:42
  things. First is he sort of zooms out to the big picture,
• 9:46
  the sort of analytic and strategic way that you figure
• 9:49
  out what you're trying to do in a deal, and kind of how it's
• 9:52
  going to work, how it fits in with your broader approach and
• 9:54
  your broader strategy. So you sort of zoom out. But then in
• 9:58
  the actual negotiation. Then you zoom in to the interpersonal and
• 10:03
  that's where you really need to focus on the person and people
• 10:06
  with whom you're directly dealing and be as persuasive as
• 10:09
  you can solve the problems that are there. You know, crafter,
• 10:12
  you know, agreements that make sense. And a lot of people think
• 10:15
  of it. You sort of zoom out and craft a strategy, and then you
• 10:17
  zoom in and execute it. But the way it tends to work is, you
• 10:21
  know, people zoom out, and then you zoom in, and you learn
• 10:24
  stuff, because negotiation is not static. People make moves,
• 10:28
  new information surfaces, and you often learn that at the
• 10:31
  table, and then you zoom back out and you need to recraft your
• 10:34
  strategy. A lot of people tend to be really good at one or the
• 10:38
  other. They're great at zooming out, and they're analytical and
• 10:43
  strategic, and, you know, kind of have a brilliant conception
• 10:45
  of what has to happen and why it should and so forth. But they
• 10:48
  may be absolutely inept interpersonally, and others are
• 10:52
  so good interpersonally, but they don't have an analytic or
• 10:54
  strategic bone in their body. And you can become better at
• 10:59
  both, but most people can do it better if they're aware of it.
• 11:02
  Adam Outland: I love that. What were the moments that really
• 11:05
  made your palms sweat? What were some of those initial moments
• 11:08
  where you were getting your your feet wet in the application of
• 11:12
  what you'd been learning?
• 11:14
  Jim Sebenius: I was fortunate in that when I was in the
• 11:18
  government and I was staffing challenging negotiations. I was
• 11:22
  working for people who, themselves, were pretty
• 11:25
  important and pretty prominent in the deals that they were
• 11:27
  doing. There used to be, there's a, there's a whaling convention
• 11:31
  with, you know, moratorium on taking whales and so forth. And
• 11:34
  I had a boss who was the US Commissioner for the whaling
• 11:37
  negotiations. And so I was there a lot, and I really watched a
• 11:40
  lot of it, and I'd get, you know, sent in to handles, you
• 11:44
  know, subsidiary sessions and so forth. And you realize, I
• 11:49
  remember having these two thoughts, one, I have no
• 11:51
  business being here. But then I look around me and I'd say,
• 11:53
  actually, these people don't either, you know, but there have
• 11:58
  been many times when I've been in the presence of of people who
• 12:02
  were really tough, but I remember being involved fairly
• 12:07
  early on in a remarkable negotiation between Guinness and
• 12:10
  grand met that ultimately, that ultimately led to the creation
• 12:14
  of Diageo and one of the people involved in that is one of the
• 12:19
  now one of the wealthiest people in the world and an
• 12:22
  extraordinarily tough negotiator. And I just remember
• 12:25
  thinking, this guy is so smart and so tough and so rich, and
• 12:30
  I'm a pipsqueak. I mean, I could think, but I don't have any of
• 12:33
  those assets when we do here. What do we know about this guy?
• 12:37
  And coming to understand it in many ways, his reputation for
• 12:42
  winning was critical to his self image and to his reputation. And
• 12:46
  is there any way that we could craft where he would not win?
• 12:51
  Now, we didn't see any way that we could win, but we did see
• 12:54
  where he might not, he might lose, and we would lose, and
• 12:57
  that would be a big blow. Well, could we engineer a sort of a
• 13:01
  doomsday machine, which would lead to a loss on his side, it
• 13:05
  would to ours too. So in some sense, it was kind of crazy, but
• 13:08
  that kind of cracked things. And I just remember thinking, there
• 13:11
  usually are places that you can find. There are other things. I
• 13:15
  remember high tech Canadian headlamp manufacturer that
• 13:18
  wanted to sell the business to a private equity firm. And there
• 13:20
  are few private equity firms and industrial buyer and so forth.
• 13:24
  And it was really very, very tough, and the money that we
• 13:27
  were able to get for this was just okay, but not great, and it
• 13:32
  was kind of disappointing, and we finally just said yes to
• 13:35
  something that was, you know, well better than the
• 13:37
  alternatives, but pretty shy of what we had aspired to. I looked
• 13:40
  at the term sheet, and the term sheet was in US dollars, and we
• 13:45
  had been negotiating implicitly in Canadian dollars, which were
• 13:49
  79 cents to US dollar. We said, okay, you know, I mean, okay,
• 13:54
  they were negotiating US dollars, Sure, no problem. And I
• 13:58
  just remember that told me a lot of things, you know. First of
• 14:00
  all, you know, no wonder they were fighting so hard, because
• 14:04
  they were like, 30% above what we thought they were in real
• 14:07
  terms. You know. The second thing, I think, was, it is not
• 14:10
  uncommon in negotiation for people to misinterpret aspects
• 14:13
  of the situation, and I've seen that time and again, and you
• 14:16
  it's easy to sort of assume that the other side is hyper
• 14:19
  rational, that you've got everything squared away and much
• 14:23
  more frequently than you might expect. That is not the case.
• 14:26
  Adam Outland: I think on the flip side, you know, how do you
• 14:30
  help people see their own blind spots when they maybe don't want
• 14:34
  to?
• 14:35
  Jim Sebenius: There was a very, very interesting negotiation
• 14:38
  that I wasn't part of, but that I studied pretty carefully the
• 14:41
  acquisition of Rolls Royce by what was ultimately BMW. It was
• 14:47
  a really interesting process. And ultimately they bid. In
• 14:53
  fact, they dramatically over bid relative to BMW to acquire Rolls
• 14:57
  Royce, and yet I got. To this case, because it was a disaster.
• 15:02
  Afterwards, it turned out that they bought the company, but
• 15:05
  there was a clause that said, if Rolls Royce is ever bought
• 15:09
  directly or beneficially by a non UK Corporation, the name
• 15:16
  Rolls Royce reverts to and actually some of the distinct
• 15:23
  distinctive design elements like the the horizontal grill on the
• 15:26
  radiator and the winged victory on the top of the, you know, the
• 15:29
  front of the hood. And so they bought this thing without the
• 15:33
  rights to the IP. I thought that this was a case about due
• 15:37
  diligence. I thought, you know, okay, this is a really good
• 15:40
  cautionary case of how people does. Turned out, when we got
• 15:43
  into it, wasn't anything of the sort. Well, it turned out that
• 15:47
  it was very public. They basically stonewalled. So they
• 15:50
  just went ahead and bid more and bought the thing. The actually
• 15:53
  the internal negotiations at Volkswagen, where the advisors
• 15:58
  were saying, You can't do this. And in fact, had they said not
• 16:02
  that you'll have an IP problem or you'll lose money, but you're
• 16:05
  going to look foolish to the world, so you're kind of putting
• 16:08
  his ego on the line rather than and it was actually, I think,
• 16:11
  the internal negotiation that failed, rather than the external
• 16:14
  one. You know, a lot of people think of negotiation as the
• 16:16
  between entities, but if you've ever been involved in one, and
• 16:19
  I'm sure are you with executive coaching? You see this all the
• 16:21
  time, lots of times. The internal negotiation is as or
• 16:25
  more challenging than the external ones. I remember when I
• 16:28
  was in the government and the the the start talks, the
• 16:31
  Strategic Arms Reduction talks, which a long time ago, but we're
• 16:35
  going to happen in Geneva, between the US and what was in
• 16:37
  the Soviet Union, there's a huge interagency battle over, over
• 16:41
  years to what the US position and approach is going to be. And
• 16:45
  the admiral in charge of the nuclear submarine fleet was
• 16:48
  interviewed on his way to Geneva and asked about how they're
• 16:50
  going to deal with the Russians. He said, the Russians, those are
• 16:52
  number five on my enemies list, after the Joint Chiefs, after
• 16:56
  OMB, after the Air Force after it was kind of like there'll be
• 17:00
  a piece of cake. And I think, and I think, and I found that in
• 17:02
  corporate situations a lot and CEOs almost never recognize they
• 17:06
  say, but we're aligned, and a lot of times you're not.
• 17:09
  Adam Outland: It made me think of two things. It made me think
• 17:10
  of also the cultural norms that play a role. I grew up in
• 17:13
  Germany for some time, and I remember the engineers of
• 17:16
  Germany are very much you can't language instead of you
• 17:20
  shouldn't. They're they're color inside the lines, which make
• 17:22
  them brilliant engineers, and sometimes culturally, they like
• 17:26
  to say you can't when you could, but you shouldn't, because it's
• 17:28
  not part of the game or right, right, right? And the second
• 17:31
  thing that it made me think of is how business owners often do,
• 17:35
  I mean, I get legal counsel, and your thought immediately is
• 17:38
  like, they're going to play it safe, they're gonna take the
• 17:42
  most legally. And so they're always telling you, no, you
• 17:44
  can't. And so you get to a place in ownership sometimes where you
• 17:48
  take the council, but you dismiss a lot of it to move
• 17:51
  forward with entrepreneurial initiatives.
• 17:54
  Jim Sebenius: Arrogance is a killer in negotiation, both the
• 17:58
  mistakes you're likely to make and the way that you irritate
• 18:01
  other people, even for people who have reason to be arrogant,
• 18:04
  but most of the time, when you think of culture or cross
• 18:08
  cultural negotiations, it's a very real consideration. But
• 18:12
  people tend to focus on the sort of most visible part, kind of
• 18:16
  like an iceberg, where you see the part that sticks up, and
• 18:19
  sometimes that's disastrous. I do remember advising somebody
• 18:22
  who was competing to be a joint venture partner with a Chinese
• 18:25
  firm. But as you know, in China, you should it's customary to
• 18:30
  bring nice gifts to the people you're dealing with. They had,
• 18:33
  in New York, gone to Tiffany's and bought a small but very
• 18:36
  beautiful and elegant crystal clock and had it wrapped in
• 18:42
  signature pale blue Tiffany's wrapping with the white ribbon
• 18:46
  and so forth, and presented it, you know. And the response was
• 18:50
  really horrified, because in China, a clock is a symbol of
• 18:55
  death, and you know your mortality in the end of things.
• 18:58
  And so if you're starting with a joint venture partner, die.
• 19:02
  Secondly, pale blue is a funeral color in China. So the whole
• 19:08
  thing was misbegotten, stuff like that. The kind of Kiss,
• 19:11
  Bow, shake hands, etiquette can screw you up or help you,
• 19:15
  although I think it's important to get that stuff right, but I
• 19:18
  think it's also important not to mistake that for what's really
• 19:21
  going on.
• 19:22
  Adam Outland: What's your most proud moment in your journey, as
• 19:26
  when it comes to consulting on these these opportunities and
• 19:31
  these negotiations?
• 19:33
  Jim Sebenius: I think one of them was that I mentioned, even
• 19:35
  though it was early in my career, figuring out how to get
• 19:39
  past this immensely powerful blocking individual, seeing
• 19:42
  that, thinking this, through doing the research and coming up
• 19:46
  with something creative, really worked in some of the public
• 19:49
  sector negotiations that I've been involved in. It's, you
• 19:53
  know, been pretty helpful to find things. That genuinely
• 19:56
  were, were useful. I And when you think you are able to help
• 19:59
  people see a different way, and I must say, when you see people
• 20:03
  who are experienced and who's just it's really a life and
• 20:07
  death situation for how their country and their families and
• 20:10
  everything will work out. And they look at it, and they've
• 20:14
  seen it in a in a kind of a narrow way, you kind of open
• 20:17
  possibilities, and they sort of step back, even though they're
• 20:21
  very experienced, they're kind of grooved in their thinking and
• 20:24
  so forth. I think that has given me a lot of pleasure. There's a
• 20:28
  real pleasure in in in helping people to see things so that
• 20:32
  they can achieve more of what they want, and particularly
• 20:35
  where it matters in a positive way. I mean, you know, sometimes
• 20:39
  just trying to get more than what they've got, and you better
• 20:43
  be good at that, because if you're in negotiation, that's
• 20:46
  often the case. You know you're buying, they're selling, and you
• 20:50
  know you're it's a contest over that. But even there, even
• 20:53
  there, it's rarely price. You know, there's often a lot of
• 20:57
  other stuff that's going on. As you know, at HBS, we focus
• 21:00
  mostly on the quote, unquote case method. Cases are not just
• 21:04
  a few articles cut out of business week and stapled
• 21:07
  together and given to a class. I mean, typically you spend a lot
• 21:10
  of time in the field with the decision makers, and in my case,
• 21:14
  it's often deals in which I've been deeply involved. And then
• 21:18
  you step back, and if people are willing to talk about it,
• 21:21
  sometimes, including where they've screwed up, which is,
• 21:25
  and you often learn the most from some of those, but, but
• 21:28
  there's something about feeling like you kind of got it right
• 21:32
  intellectually, and it was valuable to people in practice,
• 21:35
  and that helped. I think that's for me, probably the sort of a
• 21:39
  silent source of, you know, a satisfaction. I just feel lucky
• 21:42
  that I ended up kind of where I am, because it's a great platform.
• 21:46
  Adam Outland: Absolutely. With just the last few minutes here,
• 21:49
  what are you reading right now?
• 21:51
  Jim Sebenius: Let's see, what did I just read? I just read
• 21:54
  Nancy Pelosi, sort of autobiography. It's called The
• 21:57
  Art of power, because she's clearly a remarkable legislative
• 22:00
  negotiator, and I remember watching when Biden said, That's
• 22:04
  it. I'm running. No question. Case closed. Only the almighty
• 22:07
  could cause me to change. Two days later, she's on Morning
• 22:11
  Joe, and she says, we're waiting for Joe to decide whether he's
• 22:14
  going to run or not, and when he does, we will be 100% behind his
• 22:18
  decision. But that's a really important decision to make.
• 22:21
  Decision to make. And I'm listening to this and saying
• 22:25
  this is interesting, you know, and it wasn't long before it's
• 22:28
  now Kamala, and not, you know, not Joe, you know. And he was
• 22:32
  operating at a time when it was roughly divided, and in the
• 22:35
  Congress could have been, you know, completely deadlocked, and
• 22:39
  they managed to do a lot of stuff. So I was really
• 22:41
  interested in kind of seeing what she did and but she didn't
• 22:45
  really reveal too many of her secrets. I was we interesting to
• 22:49
  spend some time and see if we could draw her out on how do you
• 22:52
  do this? Not the not the Joseph, because she says she has nothing
• 22:56
  to do with it. But of course, obviously she did.
• 22:59
  Adam Outland: Well Jim, if she's listening. I think she'd be a
• 23:01
  great guest for your podcasts.
• 23:03
  Jim Sebenius: I think she might be a good candidate for a great
• 23:05
  negotiator. We've never used to we've never had a legislator. I
• 23:08
  put it this way, I'm really impressed, but her secrets are
• 23:11
  still with her.
• 23:11
  Adam Outland: That's amazing. Yeah, that would be great to
• 23:14
  hear. But last question for you would be, what advice would you
• 23:18
  give to a young Jim who had been negotiating without knowing it
• 23:22
  was negotiating inside his own family. What thing do you think
• 23:25
  that Jim would need to hear from you?
• 23:27
  Jim Sebenius: I guess the first thing I would say is to
• 23:30
  recognize what you're doing and see if you enjoy it. Because I
• 23:33
  must say, even though negotiation, for many people,
• 23:36
  you get scared and, you know, you sweat, because there's a lot
• 23:40
  of stakes and you don't know how it's going to work out, and so
• 23:44
  forth. Out and so forth. But if you find yourself kind of into
• 23:47
  it, that's a useful internal signal, I would say, if you're
• 23:50
  interested in negotiation, and I do have a lot of students, for
• 23:54
  example, who take the course and just find it almost life
• 23:57
  changing, they often say you can kind of go into it in a couple
• 24:01
  different ways. One is to just go into it as the field of
• 24:04
  negotiation. And there are people like Chris Voss, the
• 24:07
  hostage negotiator, or, you know, others, I have an outside
• 24:11
  small firm. There are others that do that, but those are
• 24:14
  small and they're kind of hard to that's a hard nut to crack.
• 24:17
  And people rarely say, I need a negotiator. That's not the
• 24:21
  category that they reach for. Find an area that you really,
• 24:24
  that really interests you substantively, you know, whether
• 24:28
  it's, you know, complicated sales, whether it's a particular
• 24:31
  area of technology, whether it's otherwise, and become an expert
• 24:35
  in that, while developing your capacity to negotiate in a broad
• 24:38
  sense, in the sense of, how do you get people with different
• 24:42
  interests and different perspectives to collaborate in a
• 24:45
  way that creates value? That's a very general description of what
• 24:49
  I think negotiation is people who see the world differently,
• 24:52
  who have different interests, but nevertheless might well be
• 24:56
  able to agree to something that's way better than what
• 24:59
  they. To do otherwise, and that's really what you're doing,
• 25:02
  if you develop the skill at that married to a substantive
• 25:05
  expertise that's a lot rarer than, say, technical knowledge
• 25:09
  of programming or, you know, a lot of things which themselves
• 25:12
  are challenging. And you don't get hired for that necessarily,
• 25:16
  but you'll, you'll progress as a result of that in an area that
• 25:19
  you care a lot about. That's the other piece I might you know.
• 25:23
  When you ask me about advice, every time you do you deal with
• 25:27
  a challenging interaction, write down what you did in reflection,
• 25:30
  what you might have done differently. Keep a deal diary,
• 25:33
  because it you know, sometimes experience just means making the
• 25:37
  same mistake over and over and sometimes succeeding, sometimes
• 25:41
  not. But if you are self conscious and you do this over
• 25:44
  time, experience adds up to real increases in capability. You
• 25:47
  know, because, as you say, if you're a parent, how often do
• 25:51
  you negotiate? You know, it's take late. Thanks for having me
• 25:54
  on. I really I've enjoyed the conversation, and I hope it's
• 25:58
  useful to your listeners.
• 25:59
  Adam Outland: Absolutely Jim, it's been a pleasure. Thank you
• 26:00
  so much for making the time.
• 26:00
  Jim Sebenius: You're more than welcome.