Seth Freeman is an award-winning negotiation and conflict management professor at New York University and Columbia University.
In his book, "15 Tools to Turn the Tide- A Step-by-Step Playbook for Empowered Negotiating," Seth provides practical tools to navigate conflicts effectively, guiding individuals to create value, strengthen relationships, and approach negotiations with empathy.
In the episode, Seth emphasizes "winning warmly," ensuring that negotiators can achieve their goals while considering the other party's needs. Seth believes combining strength and kindness can lead to better outcomes in conflict resolution, even when disagreements remain.
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TRANSCRIPT
Stephen Matini: When did you decide what you wanted to pursue professionally? Is that something you've always known or unfolded over your time?
Seth Freeman: Well, as I often say, I used to practice corporate law. Now I enjoy my life. I was a very unhappy corporate lawyer for six years, and through a series of life events, I found myself trying just as an experiment to teach a class to paralegals on securities regulation.
Nobody wants to learn securities regulation, so I made it a little fun and they loved it and I loved it. And that was a revelation. I said, well, all right, I'll do it again. And ditto. And then I said, well, maybe I could teach corporate law and ditto. And now I've got a stack of reviews of students who said this was really great. So I started to pursue it, and that led me to Fordham Business School and I taught there.
And along the way I became pa interested in mediation, which led me to teaching negotiation. And that led me to teach at New York University, and that led me to teach at Columbia, and that led me to teach around the world.
Stephen Matini: So what, what do you think that was missing, like at the time that you were not having fun?
Seth Freeman: Well, I think I had to unlearn some things. I think I had understood that the purpose of work is to work more, and that you can get interested in anything. And so just find whatever's enjoyable about it and find something that you're reasonably okay with and just, you know, do it and don't, you know, don't worry about trying to find your calling or anything like that. And all of that proved to be in my hands, very unhelpful. And I was chronically miserable and I felt very bad about that.
I said, there must be something wrong with me because I just find this work so boring and stressful and I'm not very good at it. So there must be something wrong with me. And what I now realize is that Albert Einstein's remark is right, you know, he said, if you ask a fish to climb a tree, it's not gonna do very well, but if you put him in the water, it'll swim brilliantly.
That was me. I was definitely doing work that I really wasn't called to do. And this idea of calling became a critical realization. What am I called to do? And that takes some real introspection. It takes some prayer, it takes some, some, some exploration. But what do you know, 30 years later I rejoice in this. The idea of retiring to me sounds awful because I just love doing this.
Stephen Matini: You know, in hindsight it's so much easier to see what happened. So if you had to do it all over again, would you say that could have been possible for you as a younger professional to find out earlier on what your direction could potentially be?
Seth Freeman: Well, I'll answer for myself and separately. For others, for myself, I'm very grateful. I did not know, because what that would've probably meant was I would've sought a PhD and I would've found myself doing some rather obscure scholarship and some rather obscure place and perhaps getting into this work to some degree.
But I wouldn't have been primarily teaching, I would've been mostly focused on scholarship, which I love as an avocation, but I would not want that to be my primary focus. And that is what it is, what it means to be a, a tenure track academic. So it was a, a real mercy for me to discover this indirectly to first get a law degree in practice and discover what I don't enjoy doing. But it turns out that printed on the back of every law degree is a stamp that says good for a second career in academia.
For others, what I would recommend is make little bets, try different things, information interview. And those ultimately proved to be very valuable for me, along with understanding what it means to have a vocation if possible. All that I think would be my advice to others.
Stephen Matini: And then you focus on an area which is not necessarily something that a lot of people love, which is conflict management, negotiation. What was about that area that spoke to you?
Seth Freeman: You know, I took a vocational test when I was a corporate lawyer just to see if somebody had any perspective for me that I had missed. And they said, you have too many interests and abilities, so there's not gonna be one subject or field that will work for you. You're gonna need to basically build a three-legged stool and try to do several different things or take on a an enormous task. And that might occupy your interests and skills better, like say world peace. That was kind of a throwaway line. But here I am 30 years later and it's a term of art that I try to avoid whenever possible.
Cuz world peace can be such a cliche. But how do we get along is such a remarkably rich and varied question. It, you can bring any field of study to bear on it. It's the richness of it, the depth of it, the practical usefulness of it.
I can walk into a kindergarten or I can walk into the United Nations and I have or anything in between and talk with them about what I'm working on, what there is to learn. And they go, yeah, this is useful, this is interesting. Let me tell you my situation.
And as a result, what I'm learning is that it opens almost every door. If you want. If you're interested in psychology, you've got this history, politics, law, economics. This subject covers all bases. So that I think is why it remains so fascinating for me.
And most importantly of all, the sheer joy of seeing people go from being afraid or on the other hand, very arrogant and finding a way to work together with others that's powerful and gentle at the same time is just delicious, to be able to see people create more peace and prosperity and harmony, I never thought I could do that and I could do it. And what a difference that makes.
Stephen Matini: You know, one thing that I've noticed speaking to different guests for the podcast is how, for so many of them, what they decided to pursue was either a response to a problem they had an issue, something that they struggled with, that somehow became their life calling. Do you think that we are better off or what in terms of how we get along as people?
Seth Freeman: Well, there's several ways to answer that. One is that one of the least well known and most astounding developments in your life and mine, is that the world is doing better than we have ever done in our lives.
In 1961, John Kennedy talked about a global alliance north and so east and west that can secure a better life for all mankind against the common enemies of man, tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. Now, this is no observation about John Kennedy, it just notes that those goals seem completely unreachable and lofty.
But fast forward to today, and what we discover is that tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself, not withstanding some of the headlines we dread, are actually in better conditions than at any time in human history.
Two billion people have left extreme poverty in the last 20 years. It's unbelievable. Deaths due to disease have fallen off. Literacy rates around the world are way higher than they've ever been. Many diseases have been cured. It just goes on and on and on, and it's just not widely known.
And if you think of all of those as part of what the larger definition of peace is, then things are actually in a better place than you would've ever dreamed. And yes, there's less war and deaths due to war than there've ever been notwithstanding Ukraine, notwithstanding in the Middle East and all and and such, not to trivialize that at all, but in general, we are doing better.
Now, does that mean everything's hunky dory and that I'm out of a job? Absolutely not. Could it change tomorrow? Absolutely. And there are all kinds of interesting questions about why this is so, and you might be familiar with a book by Steven Pinker, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” And he talks about how the violence has declined for the last 500 years. And just to the point in the Middle Ages in Europe, the murder rate in most villages with something like 70 per hundred thousand, today it's two per hundred thousand. It's unbelievable how violent our ancestors' lives were, and we're not living that way.
Stephen Matini: Why do you think there's so much emphasis on the negative? It's impossible to read the news that all that we hear is just a celebration of negativity.
Seth Freeman: You know, my grandmother used to say, if it makes you happy to be unhappy, you should only be happy. And there can be a tendency for us to court that which makes us unhappy. It may have something to do with story mastery. We feel the need to master something that's disturbing or distressing. We run to it to learn it. And so we don't have to feel the fear anymore. Whereas if something is good, we're kind of almost programmed to go, okay, I don't need to worry about that anymore. And we don't discuss it.
Now that's just one brief level of discussion. It's also the nature of news itself. Not to say anything politically, but the nature of news is something happened that was big and noteworthy and the changed things. And typically it's negative and often explosive things that answered that description.
How did we cure polio? Well, it took years. There were certain people who were key to doing it and they eradicated it around the world over the course of several years or smallpox, but there was no one moment where that happened. And so it's much harder to craft that into a news story.
And so each year I curate a list. I, I usually find it online, something called 99 Good News stories that you didn't hear about. And some of it's a little political, but some of it's really wonderful like science breakthroughs and discoveries and the decline of tyranny, poverty, disease, and war.
And you go, oh my God, why didn't I hear about any of this? Hans Rowling is a demographer from Sweden. He passed away a couple of years ago, but he had a whole thing called the greatest PowerPoint presentation of all time and even wrote a book about it. And it shows how remarkably the world has advanced in the last 20 years. But he found that most western audiences, including journalists and scholars, had no awareness of this. And often when you tested them, they would score worse than chimpanzees.
And the reason is because they're reading the news. So for example, if you read the New York Times, and then I ask you, what's the likelihood if you catch Covid that you will be hospitalized?
The average New York Times reader would say 50%. Turns out the answer is 1.5%. So here's even the New York Times, and yet readers are kind of being led to believe their problem. And I, this is not a comment on how serious or unserious Covid, this is an order of magnitude difference in understanding of what the, the risks are. And it's not specific to the New York Times, it's not specific to that issue.
There are lots of issues I can name where almost every time you have a percentage in the headline, there's some misleading quality to it. And so you have to read with great care and you wanna check the footnotes, you gotta check other voices who has the time for that? And so as a result, we wind up hearing the negative and just assuming it's true,
Stephen Matini: How do you overcome polarization? What could it be a one first, a super small step?
Seth Freeman: If you're asking on a macro level, what can I, or what can you do to change the tenor of the times that we live in, in a great nation like Italy or the United States? I don't think there's a lot, at least in the moment. Although we can certainly plant seeds and we can live a life that looking back we feel glad and and hopeful.
But on a one-to-one basis, I do think there are things one can do. And indeed, I've been teaching one vein of this to my students for the last three or four semesters. And I teach them a very simple method. It's quite counterintuitive. And then send them out and I invite them as an optional assignment to try it to have a, what I call a hot topics conversation about a political issue that they're an eight, nine or ten about.
And that someone in their life is a one, two or three about, you know, opposite sides. They care about it. So there's a lot, there's, there's something at stake. Somebody they very much disagree with, can they talk about it?
I would guess 60 to 80% of the time they come back and say, that went way better than I expected. And it went way better than my counterpart expected. We both enjoyed it. We felt closer to each other afterwards. We didn't necessarily change either's mind, but my counterpart said he was energized, he enjoyed this, he wants to do more of it. And in the process they sometimes say, I learned things. I thought there was no possible thing they could say that would make a difference. And they go, oh my gosh, I learned something. I hear that. And I go, what a delight, what a joy.
And I've seen students do this, literally the world from New York to Pakistan, to Korea, to Haiti, to China. It doesn't matter what the culture is, it doesn't matter what the issue is. They've talked about everything and they've still had these experiences. So it's kinda a test of concept. You can do this and it's not that hard to learn.
Stephen Matini: So basically what is it they did? And they made it possible was about listening? Was about not trying to convince the other person that they should change their mind?
Seth Freeman: Very good. Each of those is part of it. But it really comes down to just three little words. And just as a side note, this is my next book, not the current book or it's part of it, but the three little words that they're using are paraphrase, praise, probe. Lemme say that again. Paraphrase, praise probe.
And the idea is you get onto a hot topic and you start by just listening when the other one is finished talking about his view on the issue, you see, lemme make sure I understand that. And you say back what the other one says, so well that the other one goes exactly.
And then you praise, you actually intentionally highlight something non-obvious that you can truthfully say you learned or appreciate about what the other is saying. Does that mean you're agreeing with them? No, but almost invariably there's something, in fact probably several things that this person has shared that is worthy of praise and that takes a little discipline.
And if there's absolutely nothing, then you go back and say, say more. And eventually you discover, I don't agree with this person, but this person is really caring, really cares about children's safety here. Or this person really cares about justice or this person really cares about the free speech and these are worthy things to care about. Now their conclusion may be opposite line, but those are worthy things to praise so you can praise them.
Then you ask a question, not a prosecutor's question. Isn't it true? But a question that a child would best ask, like, can you help me understand this? Or when you use this word, what do you mean? Or Can you gimme an example? Or how would we falsify that? Or how could we test that in really simple questions? And then you just repeat the process.
Now, eventually you do share your view. By the time you do, you have built such goodwill, such trust, such validation. The other one is interested in reciprocating and you've modeled for them the very kind of conversation that you would like.
And the conversation turns out to be delicious and you can go anywhere you want with it, but it's a lot better than the arguing. And I can speak with some confidence about this cuz I went to argument school or law school and I know that's a great way to alienate people and bother them.
Stephen Matini: Anything you say is very kind and very positive. Would you say that kindness and being positive could be part of these formula on how to negotiate?
Seth Freeman: Paraphrase, praise probe gives you a tool, dare I say it, to structure intentional respect and kindness. The basic thing I teach my students is the goal here is not to change someone's mind, but to touch their heart and to be 3% more loving.
It turns out that that's often one of the best ways to change somebody's mind eventually. And a good example of this is Darryl Davis. Darryl Davis is a 50 something African-American jazz musician, rhythm and blues artist I should say living in southern Maryland. And over the course of about 10 years, he built relationships with a number of members of the Ku Klux Klan. And in one-on-one conversations with them, the way he was with them was such that they left the clan.
In fact, many left the clan. Hundreds left the clan because of the way he was talking with them and essentially doing what what I'm describing. And they would give him their clan outfits and he has a whole closet, dozens, dozens of clan outfits because they renounced their racism and apologized.
And he said, I never ever set out to get any of them to leave the clan. I just wanted to engage with them human being, the human being, and ask them, how can you hate me when you don't even know me? And that gradually destroyed their misconceptions.
Stephen Matini: Seth, how do you preserve your energy? Because it's not easy what you do. So how do you stay positive? How do you stay kind, particularly when things get tough?
Seth Freeman: The truth is I'm not up against a lot of toxicity. I'm not up against a lot of animosity. I'm not putting myself onto social media in situations where people are prone to act like snipers. I'm actually in a very fortunate place and I have to speak with respect and humility about those who aren't so fortunate. But I can tell you that there are people who I've had the privilege of getting to know, who are dealing with incredible toxicity and they're succeeding.
That's hostage negotiators. I've had the privilege of getting to know the leaders of the New York Police Department hostage negotiation team, and they've come to my classes, we've had interviews, they're kind of become friends.
They'll tell you that there are specific learnable skills that make a difference. And it can be horrible to be talking to somebody who's got a gunpoint at the head of a 10 year old boy. And yet they succeed. Not always, but they succeed. And how do they cope with it?
Well, they have a team with them. Partly they have training, partly they're doing a lot of the same things that I would, I was just talking about paraphrasing, very big part of it.
And one of the things that's crucial in this work is taking a break. When you're overwhelmed, getting out of there, finding a way to detox is very important. There's an old misquote, never go to bed angry, terrible advice because what's the chance that drunk and exhausted at two in the morning? You and your significant other are gonna work it out. You know, if you're just take a break and you might do much better.
So there's no one thing that can protect one from toxicity, but that's one of the reasons having an array of treatment options is such a big deal.
Stephen Matini: What would it be in your experience the best way to approach that, when you know that you have something that could potentially change things for the better, but you are afraid of voicing them out?
Seth Freeman: In a sense you've just framed the thesis of the book or the challenge that the book seeks to speak to. Sometimes I refer to this as Godzilla. How do you negotiate with Godzilla?
So it may not be somebody who's mean, but somebody who is so powerful that it feels like I'm Bambi and he's just gonna crush me. How do I actually engage with this person in a way that's gonna be at least have a chance of being constructive and successful.
In a sense, every tool in the book is designed to help with that. I'll start with the very first one. I had a student who got a phone call from her client, biggest client of her, of her company, represented by a woman named Brenda.
And Brenda said, hi Janice, how's the project going? Oh, it's going great. We're gonna have it for you when you asked in 60 days. Yeah, that's what we're calling about. We need it in 30 days.
And she says, I really don't think that's gonna be possible. Would you please check cuz we really need it checks? No chance comes back, says, I checked, there's really no way she's not happy. Brenda's not happy. She says, all right. She hangs up. Long story short, her boss calls and says, if you don't give us this project in 30 days, you're gonna lose us. And with that, the company would die itself and the boss has no idea what to do. And Janice is with him when that call comes in and she says, tell him you'll call him back. Okay, but you're gonna have to come back in 20 minutes.
Okay, so now we've got Janice and her boss and the boss calls everyone else in and says, we've gotta do this, we've gotta get this done in 30 days. And everyone, but Janice says, we can't.
The boss says, you've got to can't got to, can't got to. They're in a classic impasse and the clock is running. Now what would you do in a situation like this? That's the very question you're asking me, Stephen, what would you say to your boss? Your boss is clearly freaked out and essentially his boss is freaked out what to do?
Well, what Janice did was to deploy the first tool of the book and it transformed the problem from an impasse to a dare I say it, a negotiation that allowed them to develop a counter offer. And the counter offer was so satisfying to the client that the client said, you guys are rock stars.
You're gonna get more business from us a lot more cuz you're fantastic. And the calls ended happily. Janice was a hero. How do you do that? Well, I couldn't do that in a crisis by myself. But what Janice used essentially was the first tool of the book. And the first tool of the book is the key to solving that kind of a problem.
Stephen Matini: When I looked at your book, how did you come up with such a great name for every single chapter? Because none of them is what you would think a book on negotiation is, you know. How did you come up with these great names?
Seth Freeman: Well, it's very, very kind of you and I'm pleased to hear you feel that way. That was not what I came up with. My editors said come up with something short, pithy and catchy. And I said all right, so, I came up with these things. Yes, he said, that’s what I want.
Stephen Matini: ”Decide with three birds in the bush;” What is that about?
Seth Freeman: That is a tool that's designed to answer the biggest, the most frequent question I get from students during interview season. And that is, professor, I've got one job offer. It's not very good. I have till Friday to get back to them. I don't expect to have another offer anytime soon, but I really don't think it's a good offer. What should I do? Do I have to take it?
And that reveals a real flaw in what we negotiation instructors teach. What we teach is that when you're in a situation like that, you should develop your BATNA and that means your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. The only problem with that, although it's good advice on its face, you do research, you get creative, you come up with something that makes you stronger, that's great, but I don't have time for that.
I've got till Friday and I've been looking and I haven't gotten, you know, maybe in a, in, you know, a month or two, but I got nothing right now. So what that implies is that you should take any darn offer if you got nothing else. Cuz the conventional wisdom is you walk away if and when your BATNA is better. But here your BATNA is zero. Does that mean you should take an offer for a dollar a year? Obviously not. But what do you do?
So the tool you're asking about is designed to help better answer that question. And in essence what it's asking is, alright, you have a bird in the hand, right? But what if it's reasonably likely that in the next two, three or four months you could very well get three birds in the bush, should you let go of that first bird?
And the answer is, well, very possibly yes. And the tool walks you through a systematic way to wisely discern what your likely near future prospects are and to discount them in a way that recognizes both logic and the human heart and the practical wisdom of somebody older, wiser, and smarter than you.
And you put those together and you come up with a good estimate of what I call your notional BATNA. You don't have it now, but in 2, 3, 4 months you may very well. And that's the logic that most business people use to make critical business decisions.
How does a game designer design a game? Very often what they have to do is assume that a microchip will be powerful enough in 18 months to do what it right now can't do. And they build toward that. Now that takes a certain burden of hand three in the bush way of thinking. And there's a lot of decision science that's designed to help you think this way too. And what I've done is adapt all that into this tool.
Stephen Matini: Do you think it's possible to negotiate anything if the other person doesn't sense some sort of humanity on your side?
Seth Freeman: Oh, it's absolutely possible. And one of the reasons why we need to know how to cope is because a highly aggressive or obnoxious or manipulative negotiation practice or conflict management practice is a high risk, high return bet.
It's very risky. It can cripple your reputation, it can alienate people, it can blow up, it can really, I don't recommend it at all. And it's tempting and that's why people do it.
So one of the most scary examples of this is Soviet style bargaining tactics. For example, in June, 1961, John Kennedy goes to meet for the first and only time with his opposite number from the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. And 90 minutes after they first met Kennedy walked out of the room shaking like this, and his, his his aide went, what, what, what?
And he gets into the car and he melts down and he later said this was the worst thing that ever happened to him. John Kennedy, a man who, who nearly died twice in the hospital, a man who was nearly killed in World War II, a man, his brother was killed, his his sister was institutionalized. This was the worst thing. Why?
Cuz Nikita Khrushchev practiced the most aggressive and severe and menacing kind of negotiating practice there is. And it harrowed Kennedy and it can work at least in some ways. So that's why you can't just assume that everyone's gonna be nice. Our goal is to be strong and kind. If you're just kind, you can wind up like Kennedy shaking and ruined. If you're just strong, you can wind up like a, a Soviet premier, you know, just all the strength and and awfulness that comes with that.
But if you know how to combine these seeming opposites, you can be hard on the problems, soft on the person. And that's one of my aspirations for the book. It's certainly not original, but my op my goal is to make that much more operational, to make much more accessible in real time when you most need it.
Stephen Matini: Is there a word to point out what you just said? The strong and the kind.
Seth Freeman: There are people who embody this quality. I'm not sure there's a single word for it, but you know, the people who I find who are most able to bring these qualities together are people like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They had this, this remarkable capacity to do both and it seems impossible, but they literally changed the course of history, saved entire nations saved millions of people.
And so it can feel like, well I'm not Martin Luther King, I'm not Nelson Mandela. No, actually you can do what they did on a more local scale. Very much this in the same way, because these are not lofty tasks, these are very accessible tasks, but it takes just a, a little training or a little, you know, some tools to help you do it.
Stephen Matini: Is there any specific hope that you have for readers, for anyone who decides to read your book? Is there anything you would like them to take away?
Seth Freeman: Oh, I'm very ambitious for my readers. Well, as for my students, I end with this, go make me proud. And my intention is for them to do wonderful things. As I often say to my students, and as I might say to my readers, when you win the Nobel Peace Prize, remember me in your speech.
Even that is just a small ambition, truly because I want them to create more peace, prosperity, justice and success for themselves and others in every walk of life. This is something that literally an 11 year old child can, has learned to do and demonstrate remarkable maturity, wisdom, and graciousness in the process.
And I've also seen companies create literally a hundred million dollars in savings in the course of a year, and yet do it in a way that left their suppliers saying, you guys are great. We love you, we wanna work with you more. Seems impossible, right? But there's a word for those sorts of results. And the word is shalom, which is, you know, is a Hebrew word. And it doesn't just mean what we usually think it means that often is translated as peace, but it really means “wholeness” or the full flowering of human potential and the nourishing of human aspiration, harmony, understanding, prosperity, justice.
Seth Freeman: All these things are daily longings. And if you take those lofty words and put 'em aside and you listen for other words that we find in business life, in political life, everyone is longing for these things. They just have different language for it.
But my aspirations for my readers to actually be able to speak to a boss in this way, in a way that might help the day or help the company survive and thrive that can help them talk to friends more lovingly and still nudge them toward a wise and different outcome to discover hidden paths to opportunity that people think are nowhere to be seen.
Stephen Matini: Maybe based on what you said, the word wholeness could be the word that could put together the kindness and the strength. I always had this sense that when two sides are battling, it does require a much larger, holistic vision, you know, to get somewhere else. Because as long as you stay in the little confined space, nothing is gonna happen. So that's a word that somehow really resonates strongly with me.
Seth Freeman: When we're most in conflict, we're most seeing things through a pinhole and we're seeing ourselves and not seeing the other or seeing the other as an adversary and an implacable flow. It was Stalin who famously said, get rid of the person. You get rid of the problem. And so we can usually think of the other person as roadkill. And there's a lot of negotiation advice or wisdom out there that basically nurtures that view. And I wanna be careful here because it's certainly important to advocate for yourself and to claim a goodly portion of the wealth.
And the book very much talks about how to do that. It it actually gives you specific tools so that you can do what I call winning warmly. You can create a lot of wealth and claim a favorable portion of it. That's a wonderful ability too.
And isn't it fantastic that not always, but more often than you might think, we can actually care for the other well as we care for our own people really well. And that's a state of affairs that never ceases to delight me and my, those who I know who do it go, everyone is so much better off.
Stephen Matini: Do you think is it just so happened that your book came out this year? Or is there reason why this year and not two years ago, three years ago, five years ago?
Seth Freeman: The funny thing is that I started writing it as recession was starting up. And this was about three years ago and it was originally titled “Negotiating Recession.” And my agent and editor said, this is a bigger book than that. This is a perennial, this is much more to offer than just in the narrow circumstances where times are tight.
And so we expanded it. So you know, it's not just an economic tide that you wanna turn. There are all kinds of others as well. As long as they're human beings, they'll be, I'll have full employment because conflict is just part of human nature and it really is like fire.
If it's out on your rug, it can burn your house down. But if it's in your fireplace and your stove, it can heat you and, and feed you and help you live. So the question is how do you tend it?
And the tools are probably very timely because certainly people are distressed about all sorts of things right now. And the book can speak directly and immediately to that. But 5, 10, 20 years from now, I have every confidence these tools could still be very useful.
Stephen Matini: So Seth, we talked about different things and there are so many different components, important components about negotiation and conflict management. What would you say that it is the one thing that would be important for our listeners to pay attention to in order to better handle their own conflicts?
Seth Freeman: I’ll run through a few basics that I think you don't need the book by itself to learn. I think many books will tell you there's some key principles. One of course is what you're doing so well and that's listening. There's ways to do it and there are ways to really do it. Actively listening. Preparation, knowing your all, your BATNA. These are principles that you'll find in, in many, many books.
My fascination and what animates the book is not nearly giving people the principles, but doing what you got when you were in school. When you're, when you were in school, your teacher didn't just tell you the alphabet, she didn't just tell you how to read.
She covered the wall with tools, little templates, little mnemonics, little reminders, little charts, little graphs, little things that could remind you to that, that what teachers call scaffold your learning so that you have a structure, a framework that you can take with you that can make it much easier to retain and use this work.
I would say it's those principles, but also crystallized in the form of usable tools or sayings. But that said, I think just transcending any one book, I would say it's a little mind shift from the idea that we are necessarily adversaries to the idea that we actually might just be able to collaborate in ways that we are both happier with. And I'll give you one very specific example.
Consider the supply chain or purchasing agents and suppliers. I was talking with Abe Ashkenazi, who is the head of the Association for Supply Chain Managers and he said, for the last 50 years, purchasing agents have lived by the motto, I gotta get it for a dollar less.
And he said, that method simply won't work today because the supply chain is too complex, it's too fragile, witness Covid and all the upheaval that that's led to. And there are so many ways that that can cripple you, that purchasing agents and suppliers have got to learn a different way.
Well, I actually know consulting firms and my own clients who have learned to do that. They've learned this more, better, different way. And it's literally created billions and billions of dollars in value and much better relations, but it's still a secret.
So in a sense, this idea who cares about nicey nice, this is actually a competitive advantage as well as something that can make you more humane. And I leave it to my listeners and readers to decide, which is more important.
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