Planet Money - Summer School 7: Negotiating and the empathetic nibble

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

How do you get the best deal? How do you know you're getting the best deal? Whether you're talking down the price of a car or talking up your salary, you don't have to be a jerk to get what you want. Negotiations can be win-win – if you know what to ask for and how to grow the pie.We have three stories in today's episode about how to negotiate tactically. First, a hostage negotiator tries to buy a car. Will he get far? Then, one man's encounter at the airline ticket booth may inform how you respond to your next job offer. Finally, how to avoid a food fight and make a deal that benefits everybody.We'll learn about something called BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement, which can tell you when to stand firm and when to walk away. We'll find out how to shift our thinking about what success can look like in a negotiation, and shift your counterpart's thinking too.Come learn the techniques of expert negotiators in the penultimate episode of Planet Money Summer School, MBA edition. Next week: Graduation! So, you have one week to negotiate the cost of your cap and gown.Our Summer School series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Max Freedman. Our project manager is Julia Carney. This episode was edited by our executive producer, Alex Goldmark, and engineered by James Willetts. The show was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money Summer School, where you are only two lessons away from getting your totally free MBA. You get what you pay for. I'm Robert Smith. Normally in business school, as you're approaching graduation, you're being heavily courted by employers like banks and consulting firms. And I'm sure summer school listeners that Goldman Sachs is already blowing up your LinkedIn.

Maybe McKinsey is PowerPointing in your direction. But friends do not accept their first offers, no matter how good they look, because today's lesson is about negotiations. You know, the old give and take, back and forth, haggle time. Whether you're selling your company, boosting your salary, or figuring out who will do the dishes tonight, life is one negotiation after another. By the end of this show, you'll have all the tools not just to get what you want, but perhaps make everyone better off. Usually we invite one professor onto summer school to help lead the class, but how's this for negotiating? I'm going to throw in an extra professor for free, two for the price of one, both from Columbia Business School. We have Daniel Ames.

Hello. And Malia Mason. Hello. Today on the show, we will talk about all sorts of tricks. Are we allowed to call them tricks? If you'd like. Sure. Tactics.

Tricks. Practices. Yeah, about negotiations, you know, how to get a deal, how to make more money. But before we start, what are the mistakes that people make walking into a negotiation? I mean, I think one mistake that they commonly make is that they're underprepared, right? They assume that all the action happens at the table and that they're just going to gather some information at the table and figure out what to do on the fly. And I think the best negotiators know how much more effective they are when they've taken the time to prepare. And I think a lot of people view negotiation as this win-lose endeavor. And some negotiations are like that, but a lot of them have

this potential to grow the pie. I think it's often the case that my success in a negotiation doesn't require my counterpart's failure or humiliation and vice versa. And I think good negotiators come in with that mindset or they see that potential that maybe both of us could walk away with something that works for us. We're going to go into our first case study now. But before we do, I wanted to get one of our vocabulary words on the table. It's called the negotiator's dilemma. And Malia Mason, what is the negotiator's dilemma? The negotiator's dilemma is the idea that in any negotiation, you have two goals.

You're simultaneously trying to compete with your negotiation partner and cooperate with them. You're trying to extract value with them. And at the same time, you're trying to cultivate a relationship. You're trying to get them to trust you. And the challenge is the pursuit of one often undermines your ability to do the other effectively. Okay, so let's keep that dilemma in mind as we listen to three examples of negotiations in today's episode. We'll have stories about how to save money, how to get more out of a negotiation, and how to grow the pie. And our professors will return to help

us analyze each one. First up, what happens when an FBI hostage negotiator goes to buy a new car? Tricks, tactics, and practices, all after the break. Welcome back to Planet Money Summer School. The very simplest kind of negotiation is about price. Later on, we'll talk about more complicated negotiations, building relationships, growing the pie, that kind of thing. But for our first case study, it's a zero-sum game. The buyer wants the price lower. The seller wants the price higher.

buyer wants the price lower, the seller wants the price higher. Listen in this case study for the negotiator's dilemma and how the negotiator in question avoids getting in an argument. It was hosted by David Kestenbaum in 2012. This story comes from a hostage negotiator who wanted to buy a car, not just any car. An SUV that I fell in love with. It was this gorgeous color. What color was it? Manufacturer calls it Salsa Red Pearl. That has to be the best name for a color I've ever heard of.

It's sort of this sexy burgundy, great deep burgundy color. Just a great color. Chris Voss was a hostage negotiator with the FBI. Now he teaches at Georgetown. And here is the story of how he bought that Salsa Red Pearl SUV. He goes into the dealer on a Friday afternoon when he figures the salespeople will be kind of worn down. He meets the sales guy and then he has to make an offer. The trick here, he says, is that you want to start with a low offer. Low, but not so low that they get up and walk away. If you're going to play the bargaining game, your first offer really needs to just start to make the other side mad.

You don't want to offend them, but you want them to get a little annoyed. Where they're still talking to you, but they let you know that clearly they're angry, they're a little upset, and then you know you've come in with a good price. Voss says his number, which is significantly below the sticker price. I threw out the price, and a guy looked at Voss says his number, which is significantly below the sticker price. I threw out the price and a guy looked at me really, really hard and he got up and walked away from the table. So then I started to get worried because at that point I thought, this is probably near their bottom line. But the guy comes back with a counteroffer.

The counteroffer is more than Chris Voss wants to pay. And the normal way things play out in these situations is that you end up meeting at a price somewhere in the middle between your price and the other guy's price. Chris does not want to do that. So he needs to neutralize the other guy's argument, which is, hey, look, we came down from the sticker price. You know, the real trick to bargaining is get the other side to bargain against themselves. You just lay back and let them do all the work. But you have to be nice about it. You know, you can't make them feel like you're beating them up.

So he came back to me and he said, you know, we're going to counter. This is the amount. He was trying to be really positive and upbeat. So I said, you know, I'm really sorry because I shouldn't have even offered you a low price and this counteroffer you came back to me with, that's phenomenal price. The truck is worth that. It's worth more than that.

It's worth everything that you're asking for. It's a gorgeous truck. It's beautiful. And I'm embarrassed to say this, but I just can't pay your price. And that leaves them nowhere to go, especially if you're being really nice about it. Is this all stuff that's straight out of the FBI hostage negotiation handbook?

It's kidnap bargaining. I wouldn't say 101, but I would say it's kind of master's level kidnap bargaining. The people at the car dealership, they never went back in their office and Googled your name and found out you were a hostage negotiator? No, thank God they didn't do that. No. They just thought I was, you know, another poor guy coming in off the street trying to buy a truck. After Chris's little performance of kindness, the sales guy says, all right, let me go talk to my boss. He leaves the room, time passes, and then he comes back. Came back with another offer. And this time he had smiley faces written all over the offer sheet, and you win, underline, three, four times.

You know, and if he'd have had balloons, he'd have brought balloons out to me, I think. And I said, I just, I'm sorry, I can't do it. I just, I can't do it. I was being his, what we call, you know, disarming empathy. The smiley faces on the page are looking up at Chris. The eager salesman is patting him on the back. But again, Chris does not change his offer. He got up and walked away from the table about four times,

came back with a lower offer every time until he came back with my price. He came back to the original price that you'd asked for? Yeah, I beat him all the way down. How did you feel at the end of that? Well, even at that point in time, I said, look, you know, I got to make sure that I can do this. And so you have to give me till Monday. It's always good, he says, to sleep on a decision like that. So he goes around to other dealers.

No one can beat the price. So he comes back and writes the check. He still has the car. I do. I drove it here this morning. I love it. It makes me very happy. And every time you get in, do you think, I paid a good price for that?

I do. I suppose, besides the fact that I love the color, I feel like I paid a really good price for it. That story aired on Planet Money in 2012. Since then, Chris Voss has left Georgetown University and has written an excellent book about negotiations called Never Split the Difference. Let's bring back in our professors Malia Mason and Daniel Ames. Hello. Hello.

So the negotiator's dilemma, listening to that particular case study, it seems that Chris Voss went all in on the stubborn side of this, just wanting to get the best deal. He did, but I also think he makes points about being empathic, right? Trying to be nice about it. And I think some people feel like there's that trade-off between you can be nice, but that means you're going to give away the farm. And I think Chris is trying to show there that you can be warm, polite, even friendly, but still resist capitulating. And in the book that Chris

Voss wrote, he has many chapters about how to sort of make the person you're negotiating with solve your problems for you. He does a lot of like, but how can I do that? I want to give you what you want, but how would I possibly do that? And he says that the person you're negotiating with will often start coming up with solutions themselves. Something that we've done some research on is called constraint rationales. When you basically say, I can't afford this, or I can't, I'd love to, you deserve more.

I'd love to give you everything you're asking for. I just can't. Does it work? You have to be careful to be credible about it. You can't start backing off. You can't say, I can't spend a penny more and then start putting more money on the table because you lose all your credibility.

But if you really can credibly say, like, I can't do any better than this, sometimes your counterpart will, as you say, start to try to solve your problem for you. There are some things that Chris Voss in that negotiation is clearly doing that he doesn't quite articulate, which is he's clearly done research into exactly what this car can be obtained for because he said that he made his offer just a little bit above what it probably cost the dealership. And he goes and he looks, even after he has this fantastic deal,

he goes and he looks at other dealerships. Exactly. And I think this is part of what Malia was talking about in terms of preparation being really critical to negotiation success. So he's gone in with sort of a kind of a first and final offer. I'm not going to move. But he hasn't done that randomly. He's done some homework to think about like, what is a

place where they could actually agree to? Because if he's put out a completely implausible number, then it's just going to be kind of a staring contest and he's not going to land the deal there. So some of this is that he's done that homework, and then he's also understood kind of what his leverage is. What are his alternatives to this dealer? He went out and looked at other dealers and looked at other trucks and got other price points and is able to say, well, I've got a deal that's better than this one. I can go back and push harder. Or I can't find a deal that's better than this one. I don't want to let it slip away. one. I don't want to let it slip away. And Chris Voss has this leverage because he doesn't need this car. I mean, he wants it, but he doesn't need it. And he can always walk away from the deal. And I should say that leverage that you talk about has a name that they teach you in business school. In fact, using this term is the universal proof that you've actually been to business school. And the term is BATNA. B-A-T-N-A, BATNA. And Malia, tell us what that means.

What does it stand for? BATNA stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. It's your plan B. Power comes from being able to walk away from the table, not being dependent on your negotiation partner. And it would be easy for you to do that if you had an amazing alternative to them, if you had an amazing BATNA. So I feel like I'm getting two different messages here. One is you need to research and be flexible

and give all these reasons for what you do. But then there is a value for sort of having a secret number inside you, you know, and knowing for sure that you might walk. Yeah, I think if you don't have, haven't done the research and you haven't worked out that number, that limit for yourself in advance, a good-looking, nice-smelling, charming counterpart can just mop the floor with you, can push you into a deal that you should say no to. People who have that discipline in advance to say, this is my limit, this is my internal tripwire. And I may not ever say that number out loud, but I know it's the number I won't go beyond. And they find a way to honor that. And that number, it's not arbitrary, right? That tripwire, it's based on your budget,

or it's based on the value of your no-deal alternative. What else you have on the table? What else you have on the table? Is there a term for this number, this tripwire thing? There are a couple terms for this. Sometimes we say reservation price or... Resistance point. Or walkaway point. They all basically mean your limit.

The point at which you will say, no thanks. Now, I should say, all of this is easier with things you want to buy, like cars, because there's multiple car dealerships. There's a lot of cars out there. Maybe you can go a couple extra months with the car you have. Coming up after our next case study, we'll talk about something that feels a little higher stress, which is salary negotiations. Let's do it. Getting someone to offer more after the break. All right, MBA students, take your seats. I know you'll want to hear this next section because we'll be talking about making more money. Our case study isn't explicitly about

salary. It's about getting more benefit out of a negotiation. But think about how the negotiator asks for more and how you can use that in a work context. This story is also hosted by David Kestenbaum from 2012. Adam Glinsky teaches negotiation at Columbia, and his story takes place just after Thanksgiving. He's at an airport in North Carolina waiting to fly home, and a woman makes this announcement over the PA system. We are overbooked. We are looking for volunteers who can fly home tomorrow instead of today. If you think about it, this is a negotiation. I mean, on one side of the table, you've got the airline that needs some people to give up their seats.

On the other side are the passengers who will be willing to give up their seats if there's a good offer on the table. In negotiations, one side has to go first. In this case, it's the airline. The woman over the PA system says, we're looking for people willing to be bumped. And Adam says she offers a voucher toward a future flight. It was way overbooked. And so they started out at about $300. And I didn't really want to do it because you have to go the next day and stuff like that.

Over the PA system, the amount keeps going up, $500. Adam does not have a lot of money, so that's tempting, but not tempting enough. Then it goes up again, $700. And eventually they're offering a $1,000 voucher for a flight that I paid $180 for. This, Adam thinks, this I can do. And most people in his shoes, they would say, okay. They probably wouldn't even see this as a negotiation. But Adam does.

He goes up to the airline desk. He has a counteroffer. So I went up there and I said, so if I get bumped off this flight, will you put me in first class tomorrow? Yeah, we can do that. Now he's got a $1,000 voucher and he's going to fly first class. Then he says something else. I need to stay somewhere tonight since it's tomorrow. Will you put me in a hotel?

I didn't want my parents to drive back and pick me up and stuff. And they said, yeah, we can do that. Voucher, first class seat the next day, hotel. The boy's got to eat, so will you pay for my dinner tonight? And they said, yeah, we can do that. And I said, now someone's supposed to pick me up in a car tonight. Can you get a car service, take me home tomorrow? And they said, yes, we can do that.

This, this is the nibble. That's the technical term. You reach a general agreement, $1,000 is good for me. And then you say, oh, one more thing. One more thing. Asking the other side to throw in something small. In this case, these were things the airline probably did not care that much about. Probably had meal vouchers, probably had deals with the hotel,

and probably had a first-class seat that was just going to be given as a free upgrade to some frequent flyer. And no one else got this. They all got the $1,000 voucher. It was about 10 of us who got bumped. But I was the only one to get first class, the only one to get the hotel, the only one to get the dinner, and the only one to get the car service. If you don't ask for something, you can't get it. The moral here, always be negotiating. Even if it looks like you have a deal, you can often get more. David Kestenbaum from 2012.

David Kestenbaum from 2012. Here with us, listening along to the story, are this week's professors, Daniel Ames and Malia Mason. This was a story from your Columbia University colleague, Adam Galinsky. What did Adam do right in this negotiation? I think one thing he did right here that's a little bit of a contrast with the initial story, which was really just about price, Adam found ways to grow the pie. So I think he pushed as far as he could on the voucher value, but then he started to think, what are some other things that would be useful for me that might be within their power to give? They could put me up in a hotel. They could give me dinner.

And so he started adding issues to the negotiation, and I think this is a great move. It makes me feel greedy when I do this. I just can't. I can ask for a little bit more, but asking for 10 servings, it just feels like too much. Am I wrong to feel that way? One of the questions I know I am asked all the time by my students is, can you give me a formula

for how extreme or how pushy or how aggressive I should be in negotiations? And, you know, there is no formula that you can apply across the board. I think the reality is it should be conditioned on your definition of success. Sometimes you're trying to squeeze every last penny out of your negotiation partner. Sometimes you have to implement the deal with them, right? The point is that your strategy, including how assertive you are, should be conditioned on what success means for you in this particular negotiation with this person. Yeah, because sometimes negotiation is a one-time thing. You probably

won't have to deal with that particular gate agent ever again. But often in a negotiation, you have to continue to work with the person every day. So you should care what they think about you. I don't think Adam was trying to be impolite or rude to the gate agent, but I don't think he was trying to build a long-term relationship. When you go in to negotiate your compensation package with your manager, I think then that relationship looms larger in your definition of success. Sure, you want to walk away maybe with as much income or bonus as possible, but you also want to leave on reasonable terms with your colleagues. And so that's part of your definition of success. It shapes maybe how much you'll ask for, how hard you'll push. Let's talk about salary negotiations next.

There are certainly things we've already talked about that apply to salary negotiations. Things like doing a lot of research, knowing what other people are being paid, having maybe a walkaway number, and certainly having other options is great, another job offer. Those are all things we talked about in the last segment. But what else as you're coming into the salary negotiation should we think about? Well, one thing that I think of, especially in light of the airline negotiation with Adam Galinsky, is this idea of potentially adding other things onto the table. I think what's critical here is to think of what are things that your counterpart can do for you that have value for you that are within their power to give? And then to flip that around and think, are there things that I could do cheaply, easily, that have value for my counterpart? Sometimes we call those lopsided priorities. It's an issue that matters more to one side

than the other in a negotiation. Give us an example. Well, if I can say, you know, Malia, I'd like to hire you to come work for my company, and I put salary on the table, and we're going back and forth, and maybe we're at an impasse. We're not able to land on the right term.

But then we realize... Well, would you let me work from home four days a week? And to be honest, I'd rather not, but it's within my power to give that to her. I can't go any higher on salary, but here's something I could cheaply give to her that doesn't, you know, maybe it's not ideal for me, but it doesn't hurt me that much. But for her, it has real value. So keep going. Ask for more. What else can you ask for, Malia? But for her, it has real value. So keep going.

Ask for more. What else can you ask for, Malia? Is there a budget for me to attend a conference or to take a leadership course? Is that something you do at your organization? In fact, this is something we enthusiastically support. And actually, this is a great example that Malia's tapped into here because this is what we sometimes call compatible or aligned issues in a negotiation where we both want, get ready for it, the same outcome. So it's like we're negotiating and she wants a higher salary and I want to give her less and she wants more days at home and I want to give her fewer. But her developing as a professional, that's exactly what I want. And

it's exactly what she wants. So here's a case where our interests are actually aligned. And good negotiators look for those opportunities and try to bring those into the mix. And they might even do some reflection on that in advance. We will be back with our professors after our final case study. And this one is the biggest negotiation we've talked about yet, worth billions of dollars between two of the largest corporations on earth and all over a little spider, man. After the break. Welcome back, everyone.

When we asked our professors what kind of negotiation they most wanted to talk about, they mentioned a recent episode that Planet Money did about Spider-Man movies. The episode was about a fight between two movie studios, Sony and Marvel, over who got to put the web slinger on the big screen. And there's one short, perfect example of a negotiation that worked out really well for everyone, and we wanted to replay a couple minutes of that. Here's the brief backstory. Back when Marvel was just a comic book company, they sold the right to Spider-Man movies to Sony Pictures.

Everything was fine. Sony made a bunch of Spider-Man movies. Marvel sold the comic books. But then Marvel started to make movies themselves and needed Spider-Man back to rejoin the Avengers. The fans were demanding it. Marvel desperately needed to renegotiate the deal. Weiland Wong and Kenny Malone pick up the story from here

and listen for the moment when the negotiation goes from a price haggle to a growing the pie moment. We'll be back with our professors in a couple minutes. in a couple minutes. Just to set the scene here, the year is 2014. Marvel is making tons of movies that people love, though it certainly does suck

that Spider-Man cannot show up in those movies because Sony has the rights. And to keep those rights, Sony is stuck rebooting Spider-Man like Sisyphus. Marvel starts to wonder, maybe, maybe now is our moment to try and get a little control back over Spider-Man. A couple of names we have to introduce here. Number one, Marvel's big, important movie producer, Kevin Feige. important movie producer, Kevin Feige. Kevin Feige calls an emergency meeting over at Marvel to say, OK, what if we got Spider-Man back? What would we do with him? Joanna Robinson is co-author of MCU, The Reign of Marvel Studios, also podcasts about this kind

of stuff over at The Ringer. Feige goes off to meet with Sony Pictures, which, not unusual. He often went to talk strategy with the big important movie producer over there, Amy Pascal. Spider-Man played a big part in the fact that Amy Pascal rose up the ranks at Sony. Her association with Spider-Man was a part of her career's legacy. And so Amy Pascal sits down with Kevin Feige over lunch. Sandwiches are ordered in, in her office, I believe it is. She talks to him and she's like, okay, what are we going to do next? We would like to keep going with this current arrangement. How's that going to play out? And Kevin basically said, that doesn't work for us. You know, this doesn't work for us anymore.

And then Kevin Feige basically says to Amy Pascal, we know that you technically have the rights to Spider-Man. We're not disputing that. But Marvel is very good. She says she cried. And she threw a sandwich at Kevin Feige. I'm sorry, did you say she threw a sandwich? She threw a sandwich at Kevin Feige in this moment. Listen, I've never thrown a sandwich at someone, but maybe I would if they came in and told me that I wasn't doing a good enough job with this kid they asked me to babysit. After this mini food fight, I guess you'd call it, rumors start to circulate about the

meeting. Fans get super excited at the prospect of a superhero reunion and urge Sony to make some sort of a deal. Sony, from all reports, has no clue what they're doing with this franchise. Give the rights back to Marvel Studios. Who actually cares about their characters. For me, that's the dream. So fan pressure is mounting on Sony.

Meanwhile, Marvel would still really like to bring Spider-Man back home. Somehow. And so Marvel goes back to Sony with, it sounds like a variation on the original deal. Basically saying, look, again, we know you're not going to give up the Spider-Man rights, but we are here to help you make Spider-Man movies. We can co-parent him, collaborate on your next movie, and we, Marvel, will barely even take any of the money. Marvel puts the full production force behind making Spider-Man films and only takes 5% back for themselves. And Sony gets 95%.

It's a great deal for all of us. It's a great deal for Sony. It's technically a bad deal for Marvel. And that is how this deal gets made, is they take a bad deal. gets made is they take a bad deal. But it was a deal that cracked open the door just a little to bringing Spider-Man home into the Marvel universe. It was a pretty clever solution. Marvel would let some of its characters show up and hang out in a Sony Spider-Man movie, which, you know, is good for Sony because they're desperate to create a bigger universe for Spider-Man. And then in return, Sony agreed to let Spider-Man show up like a kind of guest star in at least one Marvel movie.

Okay, MBA class, Robert here. I'm just going to break into this story. If you just looked at the money split, it seemed like Marvel made a bad deal. Sony got to keep most of the Spider-Man money for Spider-Man movies. But remember, Marvel was starting to make a series of super blockbuster Avengers movies. Their long-term vision needed Spider-Man, and they got it. They got Spidey to show up in the Avengers films, some of the top grossing films of all time.

Joining us again are our friendly neighborhood business school professors, Malia Mason and Daniel Ames. Hello. Great to be here. So do you have a whole section in your class when you talk about what you can and can't throw at somebody in a negotiation? And what sort of sandwich works best? I'm not sure sandwich throwing is a reliable negotiation technique, but maybe like a well-placed tuna melt could get your counterpart to move. No, it's too hot. You could hurt somebody that way. But seriously, what were we listening to

there really in that negotiation? Well, I kind of think of the conversation that didn't happen, that could have happened, which is Kevin and Amy could have gotten bogged down and stuck in a kind of war, a battle over, you know, what percent was going to go to Sony versus Marvel. 3%, 7%, 12%, you know, bonuses, like all this money back and forth, three years, five years, seven-year contract, yeah. Exactly. And they could have done, you know, almost like two children squabbling. Spider-Man is mine. No, it's mine.

No, it's mine. But somehow they didn't get stuck in that conversation. And they opened things up and they realized Sony's success didn't require Marvel's failure. And Marvel's success didn't require Sony's failure. And there's some terms that describe some of what this was. failure. And there's some terms that describe some of what this was. I think Daniel is illustrating the distinction between what we call position-based bargaining and interest-based bargaining. Positions are what parties want in deal term language, right? So the stuff that's going to go into the contract, I want this percentage, no, I want this percentage. Interests are the motives,

the needs beneath the positions parties are taking, right? The goals that negotiators have. And the critical thing to realize is that for every underlying interest, every goal or need or problem that your partner has, there generally exists multiple ways of satisfying that interest. But you need to know what success means to them, what they're trying to accomplish. Ah, so in this case, the positions were who gets to make money from the next Spider-Man movie. That's what initially they were arguing about. But their real interests, their inner dreams were kind of the same thing, which is to make Spider-Man the most popular superhero of all time. And I think if you're in a dynamic with somebody where it feels like a fight or a contest and you see me as your adversary or your enemy, you don't really want to tell me your dreams.

And so this is something I think good negotiators do. They try to create a climate where someone is ready to open up and say, this is what I'm really struggling with. This is what I'm really trying to achieve. If we're fighting each other, we're at each other's throats, maybe for throwing sandwiches at each other, maybe we're not going to have that conversation. each other, we're at each other's throats, maybe for throwing sandwiches at each other, maybe we're not going to have that conversation. But good negotiators look for ways to take that conversation deeper into those underlying interests. Normally on Planet Money Summer School, we end with a list of vocabulary words. But I thought today we should end with sort of a lightning round of tips that we've already gone over

in this episode. So the number one thing would be do your research. What else? I think have a mindset that says, let's look more broadly at what could be on the table. Like, what can I do that doesn't hurt me much that my counterpart might value? And what could they do that wouldn't be hard for them that I would really appreciate?

Can I make the sort of set of issues on the table bigger? And one way to do that is by not getting stuck debating positions, but by looking at those underlying interests. I would say that if you care about the outcome of an upcoming negotiation, the single best way for you to use your time is to seek out an alternative to your negotiation partner, to build a BATNA, to have a no-deal alternative. to your negotiation partner, to build a BATNA, to have a no-deal alternative. And to separate in your own mind that you can be tough on the terms of the negotiations and still be a really nice person and still figure out what they want, show empathy, really what are their needs, and have them help solve your needs.

You can do all that while having a secret number inside. You don't have to be a jerk to get a great deal. Let me write that down. No jerk. Got it. Thank you so much for coming in. This was fantastic. It was our pleasure.

Loved being here. Danielle Ames and Malia Mason are professors at Columbia Business School. I should note that I teach down the street from them at the less fancy, but still awesome, Columbia Journalism School. Next week, graduation. Make sure you get your caps and gowns and invite your parents to listen to our graduation episode. It's our long-awaited version of Shark Tank that we call the Guppy Tank because it's so friendly. Some of your fellow students have bravely decided to show the class what they've learned over the semester

by pitching their own business ideas. We'll have a real professor and a venture capitalist here to give feedback, and you can help determine, are they really solving pain points? Do they have a marketing plan? And can they negotiate their way to fame and fortune? That's next week. Our Summer School series is produced by Max Friedman. Our project manager is Julia Carney. This episode was edited by our executive producer, Alex Goldmark, and engineered by James Willits.

The show is fact-checked by Sierra Wadams. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Do you know all the words? Thanks for listening. and then spins another web. Nerds. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.