The Bartering Mindset: A Mostly Forgotten Framework for Mastering Your Next Negotiation
248
The Bartering Mindset: A Mostly Forgotten Framework for Mastering Your Next Negotiation
248eBook
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Overview
We use money to solve our everyday problems, and it generally works well. Despite its economic benefits, however, money has a psychological downside: it trains us to think about negotiations narrow-mindedly, leading us to negotiate badly. Suggesting that we need a non-monetary mindset to negotiate better, The Bartering Mindset shows us how to look outside the monetary economy – to the bartering economies of the past, where people traded what they had for what they needed. The book argues that, because of the economic difficulties associated with bartering, barterers had to use a more sophisticated form of negotiation – a strategic approach that can make us master negotiators today.
Now available in paperback, this book immerses readers in the assumptions made by barterers, collectively referred to as the "bartering mindset," and then demonstrates how to apply this mindset to modern, monetary negotiations. The Bartering Mindset concludes that our individual, organizational, and social problems fester for a predictable reason: we apply a monetary mindset to our negotiations, leading to suboptimal thinking, counterproductive behaviors, and disappointing outcomes. By offering the bartering mindset as an alternative, this book will help people negotiate better and thrive.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781487512170 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Toronto Press |
| Publication date: | 01/02/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Sales rank: | 1,048,468 |
| File size: | 687 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Limits of the Monetary Mindset
On 9 April 2017, shortly before the departure of United Flight 3411, passenger David Dao was forcibly dragged from his seat, up the aisle, and off the flight by airport authorities – kicking, screaming, and bloodied. Other passengers captured the soon-to-be viral video on their phones, imploring the authorities to stop their seemingly brutal treatment. As the world watched, the backstory slowly emerged.
United had determined, after fully boarding the flight, that they needed to put four crew members into passengers’ seats. They offered passengers monetary incentives to take a later flight, and three accepted the offer. But the airline needed a fourth. In the absence of any takers, they randomly selected Dao, a doctor trying to return home. Learning of his selection, Dao became increasingly agitated, mentioning his ailing patients and refusing to leave the flight. From there, the situation escalated and culminated in his forcible removal and subsequent hospitalization.
In the wake of these events, United’s troubles only multiplied. The viral video sparked worldwide outrage and condemnation on social media, especially on the Chinese website Weibo, where it attracted 210 million views within two days (a major problem, considering the airline’s strategic focus on Asia). Incensed passengers around the world called for a boycott, and the company’s stock initially took a $1 billion hit. United’s CEO seemed to make matters worse, first by saying they had “re-accommodated” Dao and then by blaming the passenger for his belligerence even while praising the company’s measured response.
The focal issue in this story was the disputed seat, not the monetary incentives offered to passengers. Nevertheless, the story embodies what this book will call the monetary mindset: an I-win-you-lose way of looking at the world that originates, at least in part, in our daily monetary transactions. United’s stance embodied the monetary mindset in that its decision-makers saw themselves as occupying one side of an adversarial relationship with one other party, Dao, who wanted the opposite of what they wanted. Thus United saw no alternative to a show of force or a forced compromise on the monetary incentives. United’s behavior and the world’s reaction reveal the monetary mindset’s shortcomings. This book will describe a mindset that can serve everyone better, helping us solve our own problems and meet our own needs much more effectively: the bartering mindset. By the end of the book, you should be able to devise a solution to the seat dispute that does not involve anyone’s forcible removal.
But first, let’s consider the mindset we already have: Think about a typical weekday, and count the number of times you at least implicitly use money. How many monetary transactions do you engage in, be they with cash, credit, or check? Maybe you buy gas in the morning, lunch at work, or an on-demand movie at home. Maybe somebody else pays you a salary or some other form of income. And even if you don’t engage in any explicit monetary transactions, isn’t money all around you – in the ads on the web, the bills in your mailbox, and the back of your mind when your kids leave the lights on? Whether we know it or consciously consider it, money is all around us. For most of us, monetary transactions are ubiquitous.
And monetary transactions are ubiquitous for a good reason: they help us satisfy our needs and thereby solve our problems. Fundamentally, we use money to meet our unmet needs and help other people meet theirs. When you needed fuel, sustenance, or evening entertainment, didn’t money help you obtain them? When somebody else needed your skill set or services, didn’t they pay you for that reason? Anytime we need something from someone or someone needs something from us – and regardless of whether that someone is a person or an organization – engaging in a monetary transaction is an obvious and omnipresent way of obtaining it, albeit not the only way.
Even before the days of Adam Smith, the economic benefits of monetary transactions and the surrounding monetary economy were well established: buying lunch with the same resource your employer just provided makes life easy. Indeed, monetary transactions are ubiquitous because they allow us to solve our problems so efficiently. For example, if we had to scrounge around for something to trade with the cafeteria manager whenever we wanted lunch, we would undoubtedly live in a hungrier, poorer, and less pleasant world. So the economic benefits of monetary transactions and the surrounding monetary economy are not in question.
Yet an economic analysis of the monetary economy says little about its psychological effects. This book starts from the premise that the ubiquity of monetary transactions has an adverse psychological effect: it trains us to make a particular set of assumptions whenever we have a problem – assumptions that essentially portray our own needs as directly opposed to somebody else’s. Assumptions that I call the “monetary mindset.” Satisfactory as that mindset may be for satisfying our everyday needs efficiently, it serves us poorly when we apply it to our biggest problems and most pressing needs. Steeped as we are in the monetary economy, though, most of us do just that. In sum, while money is not the only way we solve our problems, it’s such a ubiquitous and useful solution that it steeps us in a particular mindset – a mindset that can backfire when applied to bigger and more consequential problems: individual, organizational, and social.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1 The Limits of the Monetary Mindset
2 The Bartering Mindset
3 Step 1: Deeply and Broadly Defi ne Your Needs and Offerings
4 Steps 2–3: Map Out the Full Range of Transaction Partners and the Full Range of Their Possible Needs and Off erings
5 Step 4: Anticipate the Most Powerful Set of Partnerships across the Market
6 Step 5: Cultivate the Most Powerful Set of Partnerships across the Market
7 Integrating the Bartering and Monetary Mindsets
8 Objections to the Bartering Mindset
9 Conclusions and Applications
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Brian Gunia has achieved a difficult and very valuable trifecta. He has leavened important insights from behavioral psychology, and relevant frameworks from negotiating theory, with intensely practical problem-solving know-how. The result is an innovative but pragmatic 'how to' guide to significantly improve negotiation outcomes."
"This book does something highly unusual: it offers insights about negotiation that are both novel and useful. Brian Gunia is an expert on how we can get better at bargaining through bartering, and the studies and stories he shares in this engaging read are well worth your time."
"So true to bartering as I know it! Gunia pulls back the curtain on barter, showing the world how to thrive by thinking in terms of trades. A must-read for anyone who wants to discover the magic of bartering!"
"Marshaling decades of evidence, Gunia persuasively shows us that negotiation has neglected the world of bartering as an important alternative perspective. In the process, he offers a set of tools and strategies that can truly make the lessons from negotiation training stick. Importantly, his methodology also provides a playbook for mastering the multi-party, multi-issue negotiations so common in the real world. I would urge negotiators and negotiation scholars alike to take a close look at The Bartering Mindset."
"Based on my 25 years leading large-scale organizational transformations, I can tell you that The Bartering Mindset should help you solve your organization's most pressing problems, which often involve creatively addressing the needs of your people. Building on his own impressive body of research and others', Gunia shows you how to create real and lasting change in your organization in practice—not just in theory—particularly by helping you figure out what's in it for your people. I would highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to make organizational life negotiable!"
"Whether they're dealing with change, grappling with resource constraints, or adapting to turbulent times, leaders and managers everywhere will find guidance (and even hope) in this book. I particularly like how Gunia trains the reader to negotiate with a wide variety of people at the same time—rare in negotiation books but critical in organizations!"
"The Bartering Mindset is a powerful and strategic mindset for successful negotiations and achieving your goals. It offers a pathbreaking and eminently actionable take on the negotiations of the future. You'll thank yourself for reading it—I did!"
"The Bartering Mindset is a transformative book that will lead everyone, from scholars to practitioners, to look at all negotiations in a new light. Gunia shows how adopting a new frame, a new lens on negotiations can put people in the right mindset for success. If there is one book you'll need to prepare for negotiation, this is it!"
"In the decades since Getting to Yes, fresh perspectives on negotiation have been exceedingly rare. By combining ideas from bartering and the psychology of money, The Bartering Mindset offers a totally new perspective. It shows, in surprisingly simple language, how to think differently about negotiations in order to negotiate more effectively. The Bartering Mindset is the go-to book for anyone hoping to master their next negotiation."