Quotations 2020-Feb-13

Book: Negotiation Genius (Deepak Malhotra, Max Bazerman)

A sentiment once expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson captures the essence of our message: "Man hopes; Genius creates."

...

reservation value:
Your reservation value is the lowest value you will accept in a deal. It goes by many names -- your bottom line, your walkaway point, but whatever you call it it is the worst possible deal you would be willing to accept.

...

In other words, asking for too little diminishes the amount of value you can capture; asking for too much diminishes your chances of consummating the deal. 

...

WHEN WHAT IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES IS IN YOUR BLIND SPOT
In the 1970s, Ulric Neisser, a psychologist at Cornell University, created a now-famous video thatshowed two superimposed groups of students passing basketballs to each other.19 In the video, one group wore white shirts and passed a basketball to one another, and the other group wore dark shirts, and passed a different basketball to one another. We have often shown this video to our executive and MBA students and asked them to count the number of times the members of the white-shirt group pass the ball. 
Because the two groups were filmed separately and then superimposed, the pass-counting task is difficult; the viewers have to pay close attention to avoid confusing the two different basketballs.
Many of our students are able to accurately count the total number of passes: eleven. Yet most of them miss something. After the players in the white shirts make their fourth pass, a person holding an open umbrella walks from one end of the screen to the other, passing right in front of the two groups of students. Anyone watching this video who has not been asked to count passes immediately spots the person with the umbrella. However, among viewers who are busy counting passes, typically only between 5–20 percent see the person carrying an umbrella! Full disclosure: neither Deepak nor Max saw it the first time they saw the video. Neisser referred to this phenomenon as inattentional blindness.20 This blindness is not due to a flaw in our vision; rather, it is a natural consequence of the human mind’s limited ability to focus on multiple tasks simultaneously.
If it is this easy to miss an image that is (literally) right in front of your eyes, imagine how much easier it is to miss issues, interests, and perspectives that are important to the other party, but which are not in plain sight because they are less critical to you.

...

Just as “many hands make light work,” the many eyes of your team can lighten the task of expanding your awareness.

...

Recall the distinction we made in Chapter 6 between experience and expertise. Experience is what you gain when you engage in a particular behavior (such as negotiation) many times. Expertise is what you gain when you are able to infuse your experience with a “strategic conceptualization” of what you are doing. Unfortunately, many people confuse these two ideas and mistakenly think that their vast experience in negotiation qualifies them as experts.

##  ##  ##  ##  ##