Episode 211 · 3 July 2025 · 34:14
How To Get Anything You Want At Work (The BATNA Method), with Richard Birke
Featuring Richard Birke
How To Get Anything You Want At Work (The BATNA Method), with Richard Birke
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Introduction to the BATNA method with Richard Birke
Why most people don't know what they want
The discontent question
What BATNA actually means
Richard's own BATNA story
interview#batna#personal-story#negotiation
The ethics of building alternatives
interview#ethics#authenticity#negotiation
Strategic misrepresentation — should you fake it?
Honouring feelings without making transient decisions
interview#decision-making#emotions#career
Richard's step-by-step negotiation coaching
interview#coaching#negotiation#step-by-step
Timing — how long before you decide to stay or go?
interview#timing#career-decision#negotiation
Show notes
How To Get Anything You Want At Work (The BATNA Method) — with Richard Birke
Guest: Richard Birke — mediator, negotiation expert, and Chief Architect of JAMS Pathways, the premier training and development platform for alternative dispute resolution.
What if the reason you're not getting what you want at work has nothing to do with your performance — and everything to do with your alternatives?
Richard joins Al and Leanne to break down the BATNA method (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) — the psychological framework that world-class negotiators use to walk into any conversation with quiet confidence. He's helped settle billion-dollar legal cases, trained thousands of leaders, and worked with organisations like NASA, NBC and the UN.
In this episode, Richard shares why most people negotiate poorly (they don't prepare, don't know what they want, and bargain against themselves), how to build a genuine BATNA without being manipulative, and why having strong alternatives actually makes you more generous at the table — not less.
Top 3 Takeaways
Most people negotiate badly because they don't prepare. They don't know what they want, they limit their options before the conversation starts, and they bargain against themselves by shrinking the bargaining range.
Your BATNA changes your psychology, not just your leverage. When you have a genuinely strong alternative, you become more relaxed, more confident, and ironically more generous at the table. The power isn't in threatening to leave — it's in knowing you could.
Be honest and ethical about your alternatives. Using a job offer you don't actually want as pure leverage feels manipulative — and people can tell. Build real options, be authentic about what you want, and let your preparation do the heavy lifting.
More From Richard Birke
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/richard-birke-3840741
- JAMS Pathways: jamsadr.com/what-we-do/pathways
Connect With Us
Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect
Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14
Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Full transcript
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Al ElliottWhat if I told you that the reason you're not getting what you want at work has nothing to do with your performance, your qualifications, or even how much your boss likes you?
Leanne ElliottResearch by Francesca Gino and Deepak Malhotra from Harvard Business School shows that having strong alternatives changes how you negotiate. You become more confident and willing to take risks. But here's the thing, most of us negotiate from the worst possible position, desperation.
Richard BirkeWell, if I have another job offer, if I have somebody in the background who said, Rich, the moment you leave your current industry, I'll give you $1 million a day to work for me. I'm gonna negotiate a lot harder with you because I can afford to walk away. Now, if I have nothing and I lose what I have, I might lose my apartment, I might lose everything. My walkaway alternative is terrible, and so I'm not gonna have a lot of power negotiating with you.
Al ElliottThat was Richard Birke, who's a mediator, negotiation expert, and one of the most experienced dealmakers in the world. He's a Harvard Law graduate who went on to lead research at Stanford, taught business decision-making for 25 years, and now handles billion-dollar disputes, including cases like Enron and Trump University. But today he's here to talk to you about something much more personal, your career. What if the key to getting what you want at work isn't how you ask, but how easy it is to walk away?
Leanne ElliottYou are listening to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, Work, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.
Al ElliottMy name is Al. I'm a business owner.
Leanne ElliottAnd we are here to help you simplify the science of work.
Al ElliottAnd as you would have heard already, we're joined by Richard Birke, who spent 40 years mastering the art of negotiation. He's a Harvard Law graduate who became Associate Director of Stanford Center on International Conflict Negotiation, then spent 25 years as a law professor teaching decision-making. Now at JAMS, he handles billion-dollar disputes such as Enron, Trump University, and massive corporate settlements.
Leanne ElliottAnd what he's discovered will genuinely surprise you. You know how we always think negotiation is about being persuasive or charming or even having the right arguments?
Al ElliottWell, it turns out that's completely backwards. The most powerful negotiators don't win because they're great talkers. They win because they have something called a BATNA.
Leanne ElliottBATNA stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, and the psychology behind it is really interesting. When you have a strong alternative your brain literally operates differently. You're more creative, more confident, and paradoxically more generous in negotiations.
Al ElliottSo today we're going to show you how to create your own BATNA so you can negotiate like a pro. We're also going to look at why most people negotiate badly.
Leanne ElliottWe're also going to give you a step-by-step system for getting anything you want at work, not through manipulation or aggression, but through preparation and strategic thinking.
Al ElliottSo are you ready to discover the secret that world-class negotiators have been using all along? Let's find out after this very short message from our lovely sponsors. The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.
Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot. Because why? HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.
Richard BirkeNice.
Al ElliottCheck out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Welcome back. So here's the thing. Before you can negotiate for anything, you need to know what you actually want. And Richard has this brilliant technique for figuring that out because our wants change depending on our mood, maybe even the time of day, whether we've had coffee.
Richard BirkeOne of the basic questions in negotiation is, what do I want? And, you know, because it's hard to get things if you don't know, if you can't articulate them to at least to yourself in the privacy of your own home. So you have to be able to think, what do I care about? What do I want? And yet, I know that wants are very transient. There are things that I might want 10 o'clock at night when I'm getting ready to go to sleep, and then I wake up in the morning and think, yeah, maybe not. There's a wonderful social scientist who says, the me that makes my lunch in the morning is a different person than the me that opens my lunch at noon. And sometimes The me at noon says, who packed this and why did they think I would want 4 lettuce leaves? It was like, so the me in the morning was thinking about a healthy lunch and the me at lunchtime wanted something more substantial. So knowing that wants are transitory, that some of them change, that they're dynamic, not static. When I'm thinking about any kind of decision or negotiation, I usually take out my phone and I have a little notes section, as we all do in our wonderful little computers in our pockets, and I'll just make a caption of whatever it is I'm thinking about. Where do I want to go on vacation? Which car do I want to buy? Should I leave my job? What will I do next? It could be anything. And I might have a thought when I'm commuting to work and think, oh, open my phone note, put that in. I might have a thought later when I'm at lunch. I might have a thought when I'm at dinner. And I will just sort of keep that list of phone notes until I start to see that I'm not adding anything new. Because I will notice that there may be basic conflicts on there. Like, you know, I want to lose weight and I love to eat pints of Ben and Jerry's. And so what I will have to first admit to myself, and this is a tough one, is it's hard to know what you want because sometimes you want things that are mutually exclusive.
Leanne ElliottWhat Richard's describing there is actually backed by psychological research From Barry Schwartz, link in the show notes. When we make decisions under emotional stress, like when we hate our job, our cognitive load increases and we start to limit our own options. It's called choice overload, and it makes us worse negotiators before we even start.
Al ElliottAnd this is where most people make their first mistake. They decide they only want one thing and refuse to consider alternatives. Richard calls this bargaining against yourself.
Richard BirkeA mistake that many people make is they bargain against themselves and they reduce the bargaining range before they've ever found out what's available. So if I say, do I want a red car or do I want a blue car? And I decide I only want a red car and I will not even consider blue cars. And so then I go to the car dealership and I start asking for cars and they say, would you consider another color? And I say no, I never find out that there was a blue car that they were willing to sell me for a dollar that would've been the perfect car and that would've made me very happy. But I've already limited the bargaining range by negotiating against myself in advance. So when I'm taking those phone notes, when I'm writing things in there, I expect that there will be contradictions because I know, like Walt Whitman said, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Richard BirkeSome of those multitudes don't exist in the same universe as some of the others. I want to lay in bed all day. I want to go get exercise. So once I start to see that the notes are kind of coming to an end, I can tell that I've tried that. Well, I'm going to take a note when I'm hungry. I'll take a note when I'm full. I'll take one when I'm tired. I'll take one when I've just had a cup of coffee. When I start to see that nothing new is happening, then I can look at those notes and I can start to prioritize what are the main themes that I'm seeing. And I try to look at it as an objective third party.
Al ElliottSo that's the first problem. We don't know what we want. And the second problem is we limit our options before we explore them. The third problem is that most people just don't prepare properly. They think negotiation is about being clever in the moment, but Richard says it's actually about the work you do beforehand.
Richard BirkeFirst thing I would ask you is, well, tell me about your discontent. What is it? Were you happy once and now you're not? Because that could be your interests have changed, you've gotten bored, something has changed at work. But I want to find out what happened. What do you care about? Because your discontent is going to be highly revealing about the things you want more of, and less of? So I want us to be 100% clear on that. Is it just money? Is it something else? What's the issue there? Then I'm going to ask you questions about your relationship with your boss. Say, okay, so can you have an exploratory conversation without it leading, going to a bad place? Can you say, I'd like to talk about making a change.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Richard BirkeIs your boss going to say, well, the change could be we'll just remove your name from the door and you'll be, you know, or do you socialize and say, yeah, I think that they'd be open to that. So I'm going to first start thinking about what do I want? And then I'm going to think, how do you inquire about what's available? Right? Can that be a collaborative conversation with your boss?
Leanne ElliottSo we've established that most people negotiate poorly, Because they don't prepare, don't know what they want, and limit their own options.
Al ElliottNow, this is where we get to this BATNA idea. And honestly, when Richard first explained it to me, it completely changed the way I think about every conversation I've ever had at work. Let's learn more about this BATNA after this very, very short break.
Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number one management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?
Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common We both use behavioral science to help people do better at work.
Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.
Al ElliottAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good looking. And you're not going to say which. Fel, host of Nudge, UK's number 1 marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s— the HubSpot Podcast Network.
Leanne ElliottThe audio destination for business professionals.
Richard BirkeSeamless.
Al ElliottSeamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Fel. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work.
Richard BirkeAnd we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff, and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.
Al ElliottIt is.
Leanne ElliottIt's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
Richard BirkeIt can.
Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?
Richard BirkeI am.
Al ElliottGo and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.
Leanne ElliottBut come back.
Al ElliottYeah, come back.
Richard BirkeDefinitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this.
Al ElliottSo come back. I'll cut that out.
Richard BirkeKeep that in.
Leanne ElliottWelcome back. Here's where it all gets interesting. Richard has a framework that solves all of these problems. It's built around 3 questions, and the 3rd one is where the real power lies. But firstly, let's just remind ourselves what BATNA is.
Al ElliottCan you just tell us what the BATNA was? Is that— it was an acronym, was it?
Richard BirkeBest Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. It's what you walk away to. I like to boil things down to simple, easy-to-remember rubrics. And I think in every decision, in every negotiation, you want to ask yourself 3 hard but basic, simple questions. And the first one is, what do I want? And like we say, that one's hard. So if you're thinking, do I want to leave my job? Do I want to make my job better? Well, what does better mean? Because better is going to be eclectic. It's going to be better to you. You need to separate out the means to an end from the end. It's like, well, I'd like to get a raise. Well, why? Well, because I want a nicer car. Well, maybe the company can lease you a car. There may be other options. There may be a way that— so the interest versus the way to achieve that interest are different. So the question, the first question everybody should ask themselves is, what do I want? The second question that they should ask is, what's available? Because many people in decision-making become attached to things that would never in a million years happen. So you need to think what's available because it's no use getting attached to things that are never going to happen. And when I say what's available, part of what makes that complex is let's say we're in a negotiation. You're my employer and I'm looking for a change of status. What's available is going to be a product of what you're going to say yes to. So that second question is a question that requires exploration of a world outside of you. So if you're interacting with others, I'd like to get a job as a movie star.
Leanne ElliottOkay.
Richard BirkeIs that available? Have you explored that? You know, how realistic is that? And the third question is, well, what happens if there's no deal? In other words, how well does the status quo serve my interests?
Leanne ElliottThat third question, what happens if there's no deal? That's your BATNA. And the psychology here is brilliant. Research by Adam Galinsky at Columbia Business School shows that people who have strong alternatives feel more confident. take more risks, and achieve better outcomes in negotiations. It's not just strategy, it's neurological.
Al ElliottSo let's go back to Richard explaining how he used a BATNA when he was negotiating for his current position at JAMS.
Richard BirkeIn the negotiation literature, the best-selling book in our field of all time is Getting to Yes. The authors talked about something called the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, and they created the acronym BATNA. What's my BATNA? For folks around the world, they can just think, what do I walk away to if the deal falls apart? Now, the better your BATNA, the more power you have at the negotiation table. When I was negotiating with JAMS about, am I going to join? I was a tenured law professor. I didn't have to take a deal in order to keep feeding my family or enjoying what I was doing.
Al ElliottRight.
Richard BirkeSo I had a really good walkaway and I brought that right to the table and said, look, it's going to be hard for you to persuade me to leave because I kind of like where I am, but I'm open to listening. And of course they succeeded and here I am. So if I'm sitting down with you and you're my employer and I say, Al, I want to be wearing the headphones and doing the interviews sometimes, And you say, well, maybe. I don't think you're quite— I make it look easy because I'm a pro, but there may be some things that you could develop and we could think about that. Well, how hard am I going to bargain with you if I'm going to say no? If I don't get a podcast in a week, I'm out of here. Well, if I have another job offer, if I have somebody in the background who said, Rich, the moment you leave your current industry, I'll give you $1 million a day to work for me. I'm going to negotiate a lot harder with you about how soon I'm going to get a podcast because I can afford to walk away. Now, if I have nothing and if I say, gosh, if I jeopardize my relationship with Al and I lose what I have, I might lose my apartment, I might lose everything. My walkaway alternative is terrible. And so I'm not going to have a lot of power negotiating with you about a change in duties. So one of the first things a savvy negotiator will do before they sit down at the table to think about what's available is they will make their walkaway better. It's kind of like if you're negotiating for a new car and your car is broken, maybe you want to see if maybe a little small fix to your car is available because when you're negotiating with the car dealer, if you have a car that doesn't work, the dealer's going to have the upper hand. If you have a car that you can at least drive for a little while, you bought yourself some time. And so some of what might need to happen is before you sit down and negotiate with your boss about different terms, you might want to ask, well, what happens if the negotiation goes south? And can I prepare better? Can I have a better walkaway alternative? That's gonna make a huge difference in the negotiation.
Leanne ElliottI love that car analogy because it shows how your BATNA isn't just about having options. It's about your psychological state. When you know you can walk away, you literally negotiate differently. Your posture changes, your voice changes, your confidence changes.
Al ElliottSo it's not about being manipulative or aggressive. It's just about being prepared. For example, you should never go into a client pitch without knowing exactly what you'll do if they say no. It's gonna make you much more relaxed, which makes you better at the actual conversation, cuz you can concentrate on what people are saying. Now, to be fair, this does raise an interesting question. Imagine you're negotiating for a raise at work. If having a strong BATNA gives you power, should you go out and get job offers just to use as leverage? I asked Richard about this because honestly, it felt a bit weird to me.
Richard BirkeThat doesn't really feel that ethical to me. I mean, if you're just using a job as leverage, you have to go back to the, what do I want? And maybe you say, well, geez, I don't want to have bad relationships in the industry. And so I'm kind of poisoning the well if I go and let's just say flirt with a lot of people with no intention of ever taking a next step. That'll quickly become known. And I don't think that'll feel good to you as well. But I don't think there's anything wrong with being open to exploring. When JAMS was talking with me about joining, I didn't really ask them, they asked me. And so I guess I was in a little bit of a privileged position that way. Had I really desperately wanted out of my job, it might've looked a little bit Different. But I wasn't going to go try to get another offer that I wasn't going to accept just as leverage on my own job, because then I have to turn back to that person and say, thanks for the job offer, but no. And if they say, why? It's like some level of, well, I was just using you as a tool. And maybe some people feel fine about that, but I wouldn't. Now, exploring, seeing what's available, talking to friends in other industries or adjacent industries, a lawyer talking to another lawyer at another firm saying, how are things over in your shop? Um, are you looking for people? Um, what kind of qualifications? How do mine match up? There's a lot that you can do short of applying for a job strategically, just as leverage.
Leanne ElliottWhat Richard's touching on there is something psychologists call authentic self-presentation. Basically being genuine about your interests rather than playing games. And there's research from the China Europe Business School showing that people can actually sense when you are being strategic Versus when you're being honest and it affects their willingness to cooperate.
Al ElliottNow there's another question, something I read about, and it's about whether you should pretend to want something you don't actually want just to get something you do want. Richard's got some quite strong views on this. I read somewhere, I think it was in Bo Burlingham's book, that there was an entrepreneur and he used to negotiate very hard on certain— when he was buying real estate on certain terms. Like the price, for example. He negotiated really hard on the price knowing that actually what he wanted was more square footage or something, or he wanted something else. So he sort of like negotiated really hard on the price and then went, all right, tell you what, I'll go to your price, but you have to throw this in. And the point was he was prepared to pay the price and all he wanted was the thing that he asked them to throw in at the very end, like a sort of offhand comment. Is that just a nice story? Is that, is there a lesson there perhaps for someone who is doing a bit negotiating at work?
Richard BirkeYeah. And I don't know that I agree with that lesson entirely because we categorize that as strategic misrepresentation of interests. Be careful what you ask for because the other side might say yes. If in the real estate negotiation somebody just accedes to the price, well, now all of a sudden you say, oh, but I really want square footage. Well, so you're either saying, okay, so you want everything. You wanted the best price and you want more square footage, or you were lying to me about price and you only care about square footage. Now all of a sudden the deal is in a whole new place and the negotiation, the party on the other side might say, I'm not really sure I want to work with you. So if we're talking about employment and you're talking about a continuing relationship with an employer, that's strategic misrepresentation of interest, like asking for a job duty you don't want because you think that it'll go to somebody else and then they'll owe you a favor because they said no. Ooh, that could be a big problem. But now I have reason not to trust you or anything you say because I know you're asking for things you don't want and you're not bargaining in good faith. And in an employment context, that could be Terrible. But at least if you go forward, you talk about your interests as opposed to the positions. And the same is true with your employer to say, I want more responsibility. I want more money over time. I want to feel excited about my job. I want to— maybe you can point at somebody in the organization and say, I eventually want to be them when they retire. So if you talk about your interests as opposed to turning them into concrete positions, there may be many ways to achieve your interests that the other person knows about and they could start to reveal. Well, we're thinking about starting a new project and we weren't sure who was going to do that. We were thinking about expanding this division or opening a new branch over here and maybe— Would you be interested in some of those things? And now you're in a nice dynamic conversation. Whereas if you say, you know, if I don't get $10,000 more a year by Friday, I quit. Well, you better have a really good BATNA if you're gonna negotiate that hard.
Leanne ElliottSo we've established you need to be honest about what you want and ethical about how you build your BATNA. But Richard also has this brilliant technique for figuring out what career move should make in the first place. It's all about role models.
Al ElliottNow, this comes from Richard's own story of leaving the DA's office to become a professor. He had this moment where he realized he needed to find someone in his field who was actually happy.
Richard BirkeI would encourage anybody who, uh, is— first, honor the feelings that you're having, but don't take a transient moment as reality. It's just a reality in that moment. So it wasn't like I had one day where I thought, oh, I don't feel like getting up and going to work. It was the beginning of a seed of something that kept going on. And I realized, okay, I need to make a change. And so first, the honoring your own sense of where you need to be and what you want to do. Secondly, have a role model. I have a daughter adopted from China and she was super excited to see Asian figures represented as the leads in movies. And so there was that sort of, if you can see it, you can imagine it. And so I think in your profession, just ask yourself if you could be any person in your field, Who would it be and why? Right? And so I started making decisions based on role models who were one step ahead of me in the path toward happiness. And of course, the funny little paradox was happiness is the journey, not the destination. So once I was moving toward a goal, I realized I was waking up in the morning and I was excited again. So that served me well, and that's a piece of advice that I give everybody. Step back and always imagine, is there something you want to do? And if there is, it's probably because you saw somebody doing it and thought, ooh, I'd like to be doing that. Yeah.
Al ElliottRight, so let's just bring this all together for a second. You've worked out what you want using the phone notes technique. You've identified a role model, someone who's genuinely happy, and you've built your BATNA ethically. Now what? How do you actually have that conversation with your boss?
Leanne ElliottThis is where Richard basically becomes your negotiation coach. He walks through exactly what questions to ask yourself before you sit down with your manager.
Richard BirkeAs a practical matter, um, if I were helping you, I'd say, why are you unhappy? What do you think would make you happy? And tell me about your boss. So that's a practical way of saying, taking the big questions and turning them into a context. And of course, you're going to have answers to those questions with me, and those are going to lead to additional questions as well. So with the limited information that I have now, That's about as far as I could get. But if you started to enrich the story and tell me, you know, I would like to do more of this, you know, and it's like, oh, sounds like you should be inventing a new AI company.
Leanne ElliottAnd finally, there's this question of timing. How long should you wait before deciding whether to stay or go? Richard's approach here is really smart.
Al ElliottI love this idea of finding out the person who is happiest in your industry. I'd never thought of it that way. However, let me ask you this. Everyone has bad days at work, and lots of people have bad weeks at work, and some people are unfortunate to have bad months at work. So how long are we leaving it before we start going, this really isn't for me?
Richard BirkeI'm going to think more proportionally. You know, if you've been in a job for 15 years, And let's just say you're, well, a law professor and there's a change in who's the dean. And all of a sudden the dean doesn't support your program quite the way the prior dean did, or financially or class schedules or whatever. Things aren't the way they used to be. And we put on our rose-colored glasses and we say, wow, yesterday was so much better. Well, 15 years, you know, one bad semester is not enough to say time to go. If you're in your first semester and you hate it, maybe it was a bad fit. So I think that you can't make that decision in isolation.
Leanne ElliottSo there you have it, the BATNA method. It's not about being ruthless or manipulative. It's about understanding how true negotiating power comes from having genuine alternatives.
Al ElliottAnd like Richard said, when you have a good BATNA, you can actually afford to be more generous in negotiations because you're not coming from a place of desperation. Your entire psychology is going to change.
Leanne ElliottWhich brings us back to that preparation piece. As we said before, people with strong alternatives don't just get better outcomes, they're more creative problem solvers, and they maintain better relationships because they're negotiating from confidence, There's a very famous book by an FBI guy.
Al ElliottI think his name's Chris something. Negotiation.
Richard BirkeChris Voss. Never split the difference.
Al ElliottMy question is that a lot of the stuff in that book, you read it and you go, oh, so if I just use certain words in a certain way, I'll get my own way. Doesn't seem as simple as that.
Richard BirkeYou know, in order to sell a book, you have to distill things down into some pretty simple phrases that are memorable. And, you know, Chris Voss is a brilliant negotiator. He's a great marketer. It's a very popular book and there's a lot of great stuff in there, but everybody who's giving advice in some respects cannot get outside of that's the advice that they would give themselves. So I would say it's not enough to read one negotiation book, no matter what that book is. Read 3, 4, 5 negotiation books. And ask yourself what they all have in common. And if you read Getting to Yes, or if you read Lacks and Sabinas' books on negotiation, they're Harvard Business School people, or Max Bazerman's books, whatever. There's plenty. And you also want to be looking for books written by authors who feel like maybe they resemble you. I'm going to do a plug for a book by a colleague. Damali Peterman just wrote a book called Negotiating While Black, and it's how to be who you are to get what you want. And so maybe if you're thinking, maybe you are a young African American female and you're saying, oh, I'm reading 5 negotiation books by 65-year-old white guys.
Al ElliottYeah.
Richard BirkeI just don't necessarily see myself in these conversations. Just be aware that there's a much bigger literature out there and you can find people who kind of speak to you. Now, one of the things that they're all going to say is prepare, prepare, prepare, right? So Chris Voss was not just sort of, oh, it's a hostage situation, let me pick up the phone. I mean, he was asking questions about like, who is this person? What is this situation?
Al ElliottRight?
Richard BirkeSo the amount of preparation that, you know, you're going to find that to be common. Whenever you see hard and fast rules, I have a knee-jerk negative reaction. Never split the difference. Actually, sometimes splitting the difference is really the most efficient, simple, best way. And I do that with friends when we go to lunch all the time. So never split the difference is like, Avoid knee-jerk splitting the difference. I would say to buy Chris Voss's book wherever you are. Chris, I'm a fan, but you're not the only voice out there. And I think the title of your book, while provocative, maybe it was a little bit too absolute for me. So always prepare and Then take everything else with a grain of salt.
Al ElliottSo here's your homework this week, and this is gonna sound completely mad, but trust me just for a second. I want you to go out and try and negotiate for something you absolutely do not want. Maybe it's a car you hate, or a service you'd never use, or a product that's completely wrong for you.
Leanne ElliottBrilliant, because your BATNA is perfect. You genuinely don't want it. You can walk away from anything they offer because you never wanted it in the first place. Just be careful not to talk yourself into actually buying it.
Al ElliottExactly. And pay attention to how differently you feel in that conversation. Notice how relaxed you are, how curious you become about their position, how willing you are to explore creative options when you've got zero attachment to the outcome.
Leanne ElliottThen ask yourself, how can I bring this same energy to the negotiations that actually matter? The promotion conversation, the salary review, the project assignment you really want.
Al ElliottIf people want to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go, Rich?
Richard Birkejamspathways.com is a wonderful website where you can learn more about how some of the ideas that I've been thinking about for decades are manifesting themselves in practice at work. You can also easily link to my bio, and I'm also on the main JAMS site, which is just jamsadr.com.
Al ElliottJAMS.
Richard BirkeSo feel free to reach out to see if there's a question I can answer for you or whether there's something that our company can do for yours.
Al ElliottWe'll be back next week with another deep dive into the science of work. Until then, remember, your BATNA isn't just your plan B, it's your secret weapon.
Leanne ElliottThis is Truth, Lies and Work. We will see you next week.