Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It

Book Reviews / Job Search / Negotiation

Getting to Yes may still be the bible of negotiation books, but Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference offers an intriguing alternative perspective. Instead of preaching objectivity and separating the people from the situation, Voss, a former FBI crisis negotiator, teaches how to wade into the messy emotions of a negotiation and make tactical use of them to get what you want.

Voss introduces each chapter with a case study from his FBI career before dissecting the situation and tools he used to handle it, which makes this book more of a page-turner than you might expect from a business book. Key to Voss’s approach is empathy for the other party in the negotiation. This doesn’t (necessarily) mean being nice to them, but rather understanding why the other person’s actions make sense to them. Once you have developed empathy with the other party, several tools become available to you.

Voss posits that behind each objective argument lies an emotional driver, and speaking to that driver results in a better outcome for you. Through labeling emotions and “accusation audits,” strong emotions can be identified and defused. (Tricks such as the “Late Night FM DJ Voice” help here too.) Examples of this in the book include overcoming a potential donor’s reluctance by labeling her fears (the charity won’t use the donation in the way she wants); representatives from one company acknowledging their actions look bad to a partner company, thus breaking through animosity to work on solutions; and Voss himself acknowledging two fugitives’ fear of the FBI team outside their door until they gave themselves up, convinced they would not be shot on sight.

Along with labeling emotions, one of the most valuable strategies Voss recommends is using questions that begin with “what” or “how” to elicit more information and work towards agreement. For example, instead of “does this work for you,” ask, “What about this works/doesn’t work for you?” With these kinds of questions, you implicitly ask for help, which triggers goodwill, and gently engineers the situation so that the other party uses mental energy and resources to overcome your challenges, thus guiding him or her into helping you design a solution.

These questions also engage the other party and allow them to feel in control. Voss uses the example of kidnappers asking for a large sum of ransom money; he (calmly!) replies, “How am I supposed to do that?” thus engaging the kidnappers in building resolution. This tool might be useful if a chair asks you to take on so much clinic time that it interferes with your K’s 75% protected time. Try asking, “How am I supposed to balance X days of clinic with the time the NIH requires I spend on research?”

Dozens of strategies like this wait inside the pages of this book, well-explained and exemplified with situations where they have worked in the business, personal, and law enforcement realms. How can you afford to pass it up?

More Resources

Asking for What You Need: Intentional Negotiation

Like It or Not, You’re a Negotiator: Getting to Yes

You Can’t Always Get What You Want, But It’s Worth a Try

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Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

Book Reviews / Management & Leadership

Are you a genius or a genius maker?

We’ve all had experience with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the ones around them and always need to be the smartest ones in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, lightbulbs go off over people’s heads, ideas flow, and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves to deliver results that surpass expectations. These are the Multipliers. And the world needs more of them, especially now, when leaders are expected to do more with less.

In this engaging and highly practical book, leadership expert Liz Wiseman and management consultant Greg McKeown explore these two leadership styles, persuasively showing how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations–getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation.

In analyzing data from more than 150 leaders, Wiseman and McKeown have identified five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers. These five disciplines are not based on innate talent; indeed, they are skills and practices that everyone can learn to use–even lifelong and recalcitrant Diminishers. Lively, real world case studies and practical tips and techniques bring to life each of these principles, showing you how to become a Multiplier too, whether you are a new or an experienced manager. Just imagine what you could accomplish if you could harness all the energy and intelligence around you. Multipliers will show you how.

Benjamin Tingey is leading the Edge Conversations virtual book club on Multipliers. It’s not too late to request to join this closed group discussion – the format is read-as-you-go: https://www.facebook.com/groups/edgeconversation/

Benjamin Tingey is an Innovation Manager with the Atrium Health Innovation Engine. In this role he champions the voice of the consumer in the designing of care experiences. He co-leads the community partnership and social innovation efforts with the YMCA of Greater Charlotte, as well as Atrium Health’s corporate intelligence and environment scanning. He and his team apply human-centered design, disruptive innovation strategy, Jobs to Be Done theory, Lean Startup, and other demand-side innovation tools to transform Atrium Health into a more consumer-oriented system of health. Benjamin also curates the voices of his brilliant Innovation Engine teammates and other innovation thought leaders as host of A Sherpa’s Guide to Innovation podcast. 

Most importantly, Benjamin is the proud husband of Jackie and father to Ian, Spencer, Truman, and John. They fill his days with endless wonder, his nights with interrupted sleep, and his heart with gratitude.

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Reviewers & Editors Share the Secret Sauce

Book Reviews / Writing & Publishing

Publishing Your Medical Research, 2nd Edition reveals the secret sauce for maximizing the palatability of your manuscript submissions.

Edge reviews have featured exceptional books about the mechanics, inspiration, process, and editing of writing. What differentiates this offering by Daniel Byrne, MS, is data from two rounds of surveys of reviewers and editors identifying the most common flaws of submitted manuscripts that lead to revisions and rejections. Complete with figures that analyze top concerns. This data from inside the peer review machine is the key ingredient well-paired with practical guidance about how to avoid mistakes at each step from the initial design and implementation of research through reply to reviewers.

Byrne is a biostatistician and has more than two decades’ experience teaching and consulting in a Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigation program in which all students – most of whom are physician-scientists – develop, conduct, and publish research projects. Virtually all seek him out for stats consultation and pragmatic guidance. As a result, the core recipes in his book provide sufficient detail that a new cook can garner everything they need to craft a solid paper themselves.

We particularly like these tables and figures (from among more than 50):

  • Self-Education Reading List for Medical Researchers, a solid starting inventory for what should be on the bookshelves of academic investigators and teachers
  • Reviewers’ most common criticisms of manuscripts
  • Editors’ most common criticisms of manuscripts
  • How to avoid annoying a reviewer/an editor
  • Elements of a good title
  • Sentence beginnings to avoid/use sparingly
  • Suggestions for resubmitting
  • How a paper fills a niche in the literature
  • Manuscript section that is most often responsible for rejection
  • Frequency of presentation problems
  • Internal peer review form

And dozens of additional pointers.

If you are refining your writing or research, or teaching others to do so, you won’t go wrong to have a copy of this book to supplement conventional academic writing guides. Don’t be surprised if it becomes the most referenced one on the shelf.

Conflict of interest: Dr. Byrne is faculty at Vanderbilt, the operational home of Edge for Scholars. So far he doesn’t give us any of the royalties. We can always hope – the Keurig needs supplies.

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Like It or Not, You’re a Negotiator: Getting to Yes

Book Reviews / Negotiation

 

“Like it or not, you are a negotiator,” state Harvard Negotiation Project faculty Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton in the introduction to this clear and concise guide to negotiating on principle rather than position.  This book will help you navigate all the negotiations in your life, from hiring lab staff to deciding where to go to dinner with your spouse.  Originally published thirty years ago but still full of sound advice, this revised edition is newly updated with contemporary examples of each component comprising the method of principled negotiation.

The authors begin by identifying the problems with traditional, or positional, bargaining: namely, that by digging into their positions, each side misses opportunities to work toward mutual gain and to retain good relationships with the opposition.  In clearly-delineated and focused chapters, the authors go on to detail each step of their negotiation method.  They teach you the best ways to invent options for joint gain—frequently, the parties in a negotiation do not want mutually exclusive things, and in fact can both stand to gain much of what they want, as with the parable the authors use about two children squabbling over an orange and finally dividing down the middle only to learn that one child wanted the fruit and the other the peel.  They teach you how to insist on using objective criteria, and the best ways to separate the people from the problem and see things from the other side’s point of view.  The dialogues they use to illustrate each of these concepts, ranging from union members speaking with management to a tenant negotiating with his landlord, are especially helpful as starting points for your own negotiations.

If something goes wrong, the authors have your back.  In a section on the major problems that can crop up in negotiations, they tell you how to make the most of their method even if the other side has more leverage than you do, or how to use “negotiation jujitsu” when the person on the other side won’t go along with, for example, using objective criteria like average salary for a position across multiple organizations when discussing a possible raise.

Step-by-step structure makes nebulous ideas we have about negotiation strategy concrete. For that, this book is invaluable.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Revised Edition)
Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton
New York: Penguin, 2011

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Research Manuscripts Should Tell Really Good Stories

Book Reviews / Writing & Publishing

Book Review: The Art of Scientific Storytelling by Rafael E. Luna, PhD

Chapter 1: Introduction

Skim or skip. This section promotes the book and the promising ideas it conveys, when many of us (me, me, me) just want to get to the meat of the book. After several pages it reads as blah, blah, blah.

Key takeaways: The author, (who is Executive Director of the National Research Mentoring Network), has golden credentials and oodles of experience to share to help you write better.

Figure 3

Chapter 2: Fashioning Your Scientific Story Using the Basic Elements of Narrative Craft

Here’s the content I expected earlier. If you’re already familiar with narrative arcs, this section will feel familiar. If storytelling form is a new concept, then this can help identify the various narrative structures and prepare you to think creatively about how they apply to a research manuscript.

Figure 3 (at right with modifications) helps make the connection without needing to read the entire chapter. The Essential Toolkit of Storytelling Terms is basic, but does teach how to apply these terms directly to the scientific paper you are writing.

Key takeaways: Lifecycle of a Scientific Story begins with the Introduction, Results Section 1, Results Section 2, Results Section 3, Results Climax, Results Validation, and ends with the Discussion.

Chapter 3: An Order of Operations to Streamline Scientific Storytelling

A bit too wordy when telling stories within the larger story. I would prefer to cut to the chase and lay out the steps needed, which does happen by about the fourth page of the chapter, along with some solid general writing guidelines to consider in early drafts.

Key points are summarized in the following excerpt:

“The Introduction ushers your protagonist into a scene with a major problem/scientific unknown, which sets up your hypothesis. Results Sections 1, 2, and 3 show the protagonist undergoing increasing tension by step-wise experimentation to address the major problem/scientific unknown (overall hypothesis), which drives the reaction forward to its highest tension. The Climax experiment is the critical experiment that is centered on the protagonist and provides the strongest evidence for the major findings in the research study, which drives the reaction toward completion. The Validation step lends the most credibility of the study by making a step that makes your story believable. The Discussion section places your results in the context of the current literature, returning your protagonist to his original scene and showing how he is irrevocably changed.”

Key takeaways: The structure of research narrative mirrors other stories, and you can break it down by section. In fact, you should break it down by section and carefully include essential supporting details.

Chapter 4: Specifics for Writing Each Section (Here are the meat and potatoes!)

In the longest (and best) chapter of the book, we get section-by-section guidance on topics like selecting the best title, abstract essentials (sentence by sentence), storytelling through figures, results, introduction, discussion, and finally revision. These steps read a bit like recipes, and offer concrete and clear guidance about what to include.

The author notes:

“If you remember only two things from this book, it should be the following:

1.) A hypothesis can be defined as Conflict Resolution, which is the basis of all stories, especially Scientific Storytelling.

2.) Boldly state your testable hypothesis in your Title and throughout the text of your manuscript provide scientific evidence to substantiate your hypothesis (or in the urban vernacular: Drop the Mic!).”

Included at the end is a quick-start guide to hosting a Scientific Storytelling workshop of 6-18 participants along with critical analysis questions, which can be helpful even outside of the workshop setting and in solo editing.

Key takeaways: Use this section of the guide when crafting your first draft, then refer back to it throughout the revision process. If you mentor, consider if the Scientific Storytelling framework offers a fresh way to bring out more nuances of the flow of scientific writing.

Additional Resources:

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Simple Steps to Validating and Managing Others: A Bedtime Story

Book Reviews / Management & Leadership

You may be scoffing at finding time to read, but let’s face it, if you want to reach the next level you have to reach for it purposefully.  As a K-level scholar, I know my next step is managing a large research team, and I need some additional management skills to round out my skill set.  Vanderbilt’s Edge Library has been my go-to reading on the topic.  I’ve found carefully curated books that are, on the whole, easy to read at the end of the day when I just can’t take one more journal article.  It’s like having a bedtime story that prepares me for the job of my dreams.

My favorite book so far is Hardwiring Excellence.  Look past the boring cover and the outdated title. (Do we even use wires anymore?) Inside is some great, easy-to-use advice.  It uses stories and examples to make the point, and the fairly short chapters mean you can take it in small chunks.  I won’t spoil the book for you, but it gives you concrete steps for forming and growing positive relationships with members of your team or area of interest.  These are simple to implement steps that you can use right now without purchasing a thing or getting another app on your phone.

For example, the book encourages you to spread good news.  When you hear a colleague has done a good job, spend some time spreading that news and credit the person who said it.  For example, a friend says that a recent journal article used some fabulous new methods and you know the author, then let the author know that your friend was impressed.

Always the skeptic, I tried this method out in a recent series of interactions, and lo and behold, it worked!  Relationships strengthened, people made happier.  Boom.  All because of a good bedtime story.

More Resources

Microaffirmations

Go go go…read The Progress Principle

Not that Kind of Boss: Tales of Team Management and Mentorship

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Why You Should Read The Creative Habit

Book Reviews

So you’re not a dancer.  You’re not a musician.  You’re not an artist or a poet.  Why read this book?  Because you have ideas: ideas for new population studies, new treatments for disease, and new ways to look at data.  And this book will give you the habits that beget more good ideas and allow you to take advantage of them when they show up.  For creativity, as choreographer and author Twyla Tharp stresses, is not an inborn characteristic nor merely the odd bolt of inspiration; it is a collection of patterns and practices that allow anyone to create—as long as they’re willing to put in the work.

Tharp begins by describing how she has aligned her own life to foster creativity, because “[e]verything is usable….But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.  Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by the thunderbolt and it’ll just leave you stunned.”  She knows her own “creative DNA” (there’s a questionnaire included for you to discover yours), creates and hews to rituals to make beginning a project automatic rather than scary, and daydreams creatively (see p. 30 for a primer on how).  Included in proper preparation is mastery of the fundamentals of one’s art—the basic barre work for a ballerina, grammar and diction for a writer—through “perfect practice,” and a lot of it.  (Tharp doesn’t let anyone off easy.)

She then arranges the rest of the chapters as a journey through her creative process, from how she “scratches” for inspiration, to how she determines the “vital…difference between good planning and too much planning,” to how she benefits from both resources and limits.  If you’ve ever had to figure out a novel method of running an experiment because the money just wasn’t there to do it any other way, you know what she’s talking about.

She ends each chapter with several helpful and unusual “exercises” built around the same theme: getting out of a rut, or determining the critical “spine” of your work.

Perhaps because of her dance background, Tharp’s advice is rich with visual metaphor, such as her description of planning as scaffolding around a construction site that goes away as the building rises above the ground.  This background of course gives rise to many exercises and habits grounded in physical movement, but they aren’t just for dancers; anyone can do “Egg” (112) or “Do A Verb” (203).  They are, as she writes, “exercise[s] that teach…you how to accomplish the most difficult task in any creative endeavor: begin.”

So if you’re finding it hard to sit down and write that manuscript, or turn that great idea into a workable study, take a look at this book, and get into the habits of creativity.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life
Twyla Tharp with Mark Reiter
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003

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Recapture Your Free Time with How to Write a Lot

Book Reviews / Productivity / Writing & Publishing

Do you find your grant-writing intruding on time you’d rather spend with your family?  Did revisions to that last journal article ruin your vacation?  Then this book might be just the thing you need.

Author Paul Silvia wanted to call How to Write a Lot  “How to Write More Productively During the Normal Work Week With Less Anxiety and Guilt, but no one would buy that book.”  As the brevity of the volume indicates, his secret is simple: Create a schedule and stick to it.  Of course, simple in theory and simple in practice are different things, so Silva spends the rest of the book on methods to make keeping a writing schedule easier, and includes sections on how to write more clearly, better organize a manuscript, and submit your best work to journals and publishers, all of which will help you become a more productive writer.  Although Silva is an Associate Professor of Psychology, his tips and tricks hold true for academics in almost any field.

“If you allot 4 hours a week for writing,” Silva says, “you will be surprised at how much you will write.  By surprised, I mean astonished; and by astonished, I mean dumbfounded and incoherent.  You’ll find yourself committing unthinkable perversions, like finishing grant proposals early….You’ll be afraid to talk with friends in your department about writing out of the fear that they’ll think, ‘You’re not one of us anymore’—and they’ll be right.”  Though four hours is a good starting point, your own schedule and needs will dictate how much time you allot.  The key is the regularity rather than sheer number of hours.

Still unconvinced?  Silva breaks down several “specious barriers” to keeping a writing schedule in the second chapter.  If you need to do more reading, your allotted writing time can be used for anything related to writing, including reviewing page proofs, crunching statistics, or reading articles.  Can’t write without a better computer/desk/printer?  Check out page 21 for Silva’s Spartan setup, including a plastic chair and a laptop with no internet connection (it keeps distractions to a minimum).  Waiting for inspiration?  That’s the most specious barrier of all, because as a chart on page 25 shows, in an experiment where some people were asked to write on a schedule and others only when they were inspired, those who write on a schedule wrote three times as much as the “spontaneous” writers, and had twice as many creative ideas.  Silva backs up all his recommendations with evidence from behavioral studies and personal experience that is often as witty as it is insightful.

“Writing is a grim business,” Silva writes, but if you follow the advice in this book, you can find ways to release its stranglehold on your free time, leaving you much less grim.

How to Write a Lot, Revised Edition
Paul J. Silvia
Washington, D.C.: APA Life Tools, 2018

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Why you should read The Opposable Mind

Book Reviews / Management & Leadership

For fifteen years prior to this book’s publication, author Roger Martin studied successful leaders, interviewing more than fifty of them for up to eight hours at a time, trying to find a pattern to their success.  The pattern he discovered was what he calls “integrative thinking.” Such thinkers have the predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads.  And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.

Martin breaks this way of thinking into four identifiable differences from conventional thinking: First, when integrative thinkers face a problem, they include as many “salient features,” or points of consideration, as possible.  They welcome the mess, because it assures them that they haven’t edited out features necessary to the contemplation of the problem as a whole.  This is critical for all the steps, which rely on looking at problems as a whole rather than as component parts.  Relationships between parts of a problem are multidirectional and nonlinear (considering these is the second step of integrative thinking), and considering these relationships and components as a whole avoids the trap of coming up with the perfect solution that’s impossible to execute, or which will solve one part of the problem but worsen another (yep, that’s the third step).  Finally, rather than settling for one option or another, integrative thinkers ?search for creative resolution of tensions, or the best of both worlds, even if it means delays and rework at the last minute.

Martin illustrates this process with a case study of the Four Seasons Hotel, whose founder refused to settle for either large, lavishly-appointed but impersonal hotels or small, cozy motels that lacked state-of-the-art amenities, instead creating a business model that provides both.  Other examples discussed include the Institute for OneWorld Health, whose founder decided it was “unacceptable!” that many lethal diseases afflicting primarily the world?s poor went unacknowledged by traditional for-profit pharmaceutical companies.  She filled the structural gap between companies that developed new drugs they needed to sell at high prices to recoup costs, and non-profit organizations that distributed existing drugs to the world?s poor at subsidized rates, with a not-for-profit pharmaceutical development company.  Have there been instances in your career where you had to choose between the proverbial rock and a hard place?  Then you need to read this book.

As Martin acknowledges, The Opposable Mind largely chronicle[s] the obvious that has been taken for granted.  However, looking at the obvious from new angles and considering new salient features is the first step of integrative thinking.  What better place to start than right at the beginning?

The Opposable Mind
Roger Martin
Harvard Business Review Press, 2009

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Don’t Delay (Or Do). Read Wait: The Art and Science of Delay

Book Reviews

wait-largeDid you know that speakers who frequently pause for short periods are more persuasive than those who don’t?  Or that not lingering on a date that’s going well can make a new relationship stronger?  What about the fact that taking some time before apologizing causes the wronged person to view the apology as more sincere

Frank Partnoy, a corporate lawyer and former investment banker who also happens to write Wall Street exposes such as F.I.A.S.C.O. and Infectious Greed, says that most people, influenced by the rapid pace of modern life, tend to react too quickly—shooting off an email without thinking enough about the content, say—and that instead, “we generally should delay the moment of decision until the last possible instant.  If we have an hour, we should wait fifty-nine minutes before responding.  If we have a year, we should wait 364 days.  Even if we have just a half a second, we should wait as long as we possibly can.  Even milliseconds matter.”

Although this position flies in the face of popular wisdom, Partnoy marshals convincing evidence from psychologists, economists, business analysts, military strategists, and even sports scientists to demonstrate the benefits of delay.  Baseball players who spend the longest waiting for the ball to arrive before swinging stand the best chance of hitting a home run.  Programmers often write short pauses into their code to prevent data packet traffic jams.  Famously, the use of checklists in operating rooms almost halves OR deaths.  As Partnoy writes, the value of a checklist in any stressful, fast-paced scenario is that, like waiting for the baseball to approach the plate, it forces people consider their actions before they act.  Taking just “a few extra seconds before the incision helps to slow down the tempo of a surgical procedure, and that slower tempo leads to better outcomes.”

Partnoy peppers the book with other intriguing findings: we feel we work longer hours not because we do (“if you actually work longer hours than your parents did, you are an outlier,” he notes), but because technology enables us to do many things at once, and “the intense focus required by multitasking makes us slower and less efficient at our jobs, even as it stretches our perception of work time.”  Think getting paid more might negate that feeling?  Think again; the more someone is paid, the more time pressure they feel.  And fascinatingly, he reports on one study that found subliminally flashing fast food logos at people interfered their ability to take pleasure from attractive photos and pleasant music.  Having it your way has some hefty hidden drawbacks.

A mixture of engagingly-presented information, object lessons, and advice about how to incorporate optimal delay into your own life, Wait is not to be missed.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
Frank Partnoy
New York: PublicAffairs, 2012

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