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What is the sweet spot?
The inspiration for my book,
"Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art
of Leaving Nothing on the Table",
came from a story that I read when I first
started doing research on negotiation.
That story,
attributed to business
scholar Mary Parker Follett,
involves two sisters quarreling
over a single orange.
I could not find clip
art of two sisters.
Let's imagine that
these are two brothers,
maybe the 'Property Brothers'
we see on American TV.
They have a long
term relationship,
they're in business together,
and hopefully they're imagining
a long future together.
But the problem is there's
only a single orange.
One of the brothers
threatens the other,'
saying, "Look, it's my
turn to get the orange.
The other brother says, "Not
so fast, I demand to have it."
Finally, they decide that they're going
to cut the orange exactly in half,
because that seems fair.
It seems like a
reasonable compromise.
One brother squeezes
out the juice
and throws the peel away.
The other brother takes
his half of the orange
and carefully zests
the peel to make
his orange scone recipes
for the open house,
and throws the juice away.
Then the garbage
truck comes and goes.
Then they look at
each other aghast,
because it's only
then did they realize
that one of them only
wanted the juice.
The other only wanted the peel,
and they missed the sweet spot.
Had they carefully remove
the peel from the orange,
rather than cutting it in half,
they would have both
been wildly happier.
That's a silly story,
but I argue that in workplace
and business negotiations,
we often do exactly like the
'Property Brothers' did.
We cut the orange in half,
rather than doing what it takes
to find the sweet spot solution.
You know, a lot of my managers,
clients and business people
find the siblings in the
orange story very cute,
very memorable, but they don't
see a connection to real
business negotiations.
Let me give you one.
In this situation,
