The Indicator from Planet Money - The Art of the deal ft. Beyoncé

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

All of us negotiate — whether it's accepting a job offer, buying a house or working out who does the dishes. Economist Daryl Fairweather has a new book out: Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work. It's all about the negotiation lessons she's learned through the research, her own career and Destiny's Child. Related episodes: What women want (to invest in)A conversation with Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin (Update) Summer School 7: Negotiating and the empathetic nibble For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. Daryl Fairweather's first job after her economics PhD was at a small consulting firm. It was a lot of work, but her boss was complimentary. He called me a workhorse, and he said it with a smile on his face. Okay, that's a little ominous. A double-edge compliment. Yeah, after several months of being a so-called workhorse, Daryl said she started to feel exhausted.

I would be working like up to 100 hours a week, And 100 hours a week. Yeah, but it was a tough deadline. That sounds unhealthy. Yes. I mean, it wasn't like that every week, but sometimes it got to be quite a lot. And I think that all of that stress, it just felt like I should be getting something more in return for how much I was working. Darrell had read Cheryl Sandberg's famous book on women in the workforce, Lean In.

In fact, she was going to a Lean In Circle Support Group for young women professionals. The main message, women should negotiate more. So she decided to lean in herself, try to get a pay raise. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darien Woods. And I'm Adrienne Ma. Today on the show, Bargaining. Economist Darrell Fairweather just released a whole book on negotiation.

It's called Hate the Game, Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work. And getting better at negotiation is important in so many aspects of life, whether it's getting a raise at work or buying a house through to global trade. deals. We hear Daryl Fairweather's negotiation lessons learned from her experience and from fiance. Daryl Fairweather's big lesson on negotiating started that day she asked for her raise. I remember being in my office, like trying to psych myself up to go and ask for a raise. Like I wasn't happy at the job. So I was really just trying to suck myself up like, well, it's either this or you quit. In her boss's office, Daryl talked about all the extra tasks she's been taking on,

how she's been performing at a more senior level. And he said no, and that raises will be negotiated at the end of the year. That's the policy. In her mind, Daryl was giving her boss a take it or leave it deal. And he left it. I walked out of that pretty dejected. Daryl was trying to figure out why she couldn't get that raise. She thought back to a chapter of late 1990s R&B history.

That is kind of the perfect example, Daryl thought, of the pitfalls of this lean-in messaging. of always be trying to negotiate for more. Yeah, so I think one of the most famous negotiation fails that I know of is what happened with Destiny's Child. At the time, Destiny's Child was a quartet. Beyonce Knowles, Kelly Rowland, Latavia Roberson, and Latoya Luckett. The four piece broke through with their first number one single, Bills, Bill's, Bills.

At first we started at Recool. Beyonce was starting to emerge as the breakout star, getting all the interviews, getting all the attention, And they concluded that it was the management, Matthew Knowles, which is Beyonce's father, that was the reason that Beyonce was getting all this preferential treatment. So Latavia and Latoya came to the group and said it's either us or it's Matthew Knowles, like she did an ultimatum. So take it or leave it deal, just like you had in your head when you went to your boss? Yes, but that's where they made the miscalculation about what Beyonce and Matthew actually saw for the vision of the group, which was Beyonce being the breakout star and that they were more planning. this role as backup singers. What Matthew had in his mind was Diana Ross and the Supremes, Michael

Jackson and the Jackson Five, a history of artists who had launched super successful solo careers off the back of a musical group. I think Matthew Knowles actually had the economics right there, because what oftentimes happens in entertainment or other industries that rely on popularity is that there are these superstars. And so what happened is Beyonce and Kelly Rowland decided to stick with Matthew Knowles, while Latavia and Latoya found themselves out of the group. I felt empathy for that situation because that's what I was as an entry-level employee. I was just a backup singer in a sense. Like, I didn't have the standing to go and be negotiating or issuing ultimatums.

Daryl says we can learn a lot from what Latavia and Latoya and she herself missed. And she has four main takeaways. First, try to identify your negotiating. Potten is objective. Don't be like Latavian Latoya. Don't be like me. And just assume what your opponent wants, try to really dig in and understand what they want out of you. Daryl thought back to that workhorse comment, her boss gave her when she started. Like, what does a workhorse really mean? They get the job done, no matter how long it takes, no matter how hard it is, and they don't complain. That's what a workhorse does. And that's not who I am. I'll work hard. But I will raise concerns if

I have them. The goal of Daryl's boss was to have employees who didn't complain. The very act of Daryl unexpectedly negotiating went against her boss's goals for his workplace. In hindsight, maybe she should have waited until the regular annual pay discussions, or really maybe she should have gone to another job entirely. The second lesson Daryl says is to scrutinize whether your negotiating partner might be withholding information from you. You know, Matthew Knowles, he might not have been exactly lying to litigate. and Latoya, but I think he probably gave them reason to believe that they were going to be

equal members of Destiny's Child when really it was Beyonce who was the star. And my boss, I mean, he wasn't outright lying to me either, but I felt like I was signing up for a job where I would have different opportunities and different job environment than what I got. A third lesson, and this one's a classic for a good reason, is to do research on how much you are really worth in the market. Just gathering information in general is a a good approach, just understanding what competitive pay rates are, how hard it would be for them to hire someone to replace you is a good thing to understand. All that can kind of help you understand how the negotiation might play out. In a pay negotiation, maybe that would be by seeing

what other people at your experience level are getting paid at other places. One way to do this, and you can think of this as the fourth tip, if you're going to ratchet up the temperature by making an ultimatum with your employer, you could actually have another offer from somewhere else. It's concrete information and also a backup option if your negotiating partner calls your bluff. It's typically better to go out and find your next job offer before you make that ultimatum. Darrell says this can be especially important for women and minorities who are kind of in this bind where people may underestimate their worth and yet by negotiating, that can be interpreted as aggressive.

If women are perceived as being aggressive, they get penalized more than men tend to. Also, just for any group of people that have perceived to have worse options tend to do worse in negotiations because whoever they're negotiating against just assumes that whatever they give them is the best that they're going to get out there. So signaling what your outside options are, that your outside options are good is a way for women and minorities to kind of counteract that and to go in armed with information so that you don't let somebody else tell you how much you're worth. When the words of Beyonce knows, you need to get information.

That's exactly right. Okay, ladies, now let's get information. This episode was produced by Lily Kiroz with engineering by Kwayze. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kikin Canon edits the show and the indicators of production of NPR. this conversation. Always thank gracious. Best revenge is your paper.