Blog

  • Political Persuasion
    Change Their Mind: Political Persuasion We’ve all got a friend or an uncle or someone we know who has completely different political opinions than us. We’ve had a dozen arguments and nothing changes their mind even though they are a nice person and perfectly smart in every other way. It...
  • Have A Happy Neighbour!
    Change Their Mind, Have A Happy Neighbour So, here’s the scene: you want to build an extension to your house but you know it’s going to cause a lot of disturbance to your neighbour for a few weeks and you don’t want to upset them. Or maybe they might even...
  • Get that pay-raise!
    Sometimes I have a coaching client and they tell me they want a pay-raise but it will never happen. “How do you know?” I say. “Well I’ve already asked, I got a flat ‘no’! There’s no question about it.” So I sit them down and we think it through a...
  • Conversations on Lie Detection
    Following on from last week’s article where I discussed the great conversations I had with Luan De Burgh about influence and persuasion, this week is about a similar series of chats I had with Mike Reddington around the topic of lie detection, especially in the context of negotiation. Mike is a...
  • Conversations On Influence & Persuasion
    I’ve been working in the field of influence and negotiation for nearly twenty years now and I still find it an absolutely fascinating topic and never more so than when exploring it with colleagues in the field. Last summer I enjoyed a series of conversations with my friend and colleague...
  • Let’s Get Specific
    In 1981, Microsoft negotiated a deal with Seattle Computer Products to license their operating system, known as 86-DOS. The deal was $10,000 up-front plus $15,000 for each sub-license sold by Microsoft. As such, Microsoft paid a total of $25,000 because they only ever sub-licensed it to one customer. A little...
  • Thinking On Your Feet
    3 Top Tips For Thinking Quickly When The Pressure Is On   Imagine you’re in the Dragons Den, you’re up against a panel collectively worth a billion pounds. The success or failure of your business rests with the decisions you make in the next few minutes. There are 4 million...
  • The Main Reason We Don’t Get What We Ask For
    So we ask for our pay-rise and we give many very good reasons why we deserve it and nine times out of ten they say ‘No’. And this is true for all types of negotiations. We ask for that discount, they say no; we ask for more to be thrown...
  • Goldenballs: Split or Steal
    How to lock trust into your deal   You probably remember the Goldenballs programme, a gameshow hosted by Jasper Carrott a few years back. It was fun and an interesting insight into human behaviour. It was, of course, based on the game-theory construct of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is a...
  • The Secret to Making Negotiation Easy
    Easy negotiations!*   Negotiations are tricky... Negotiations, they can be tricky, can’t they? You find yourself in a situation where your back is against the wall, emotions are running high and you’ve really got to think on your feet under pressure to get out of this one.   ...Or not?...