Insight
Cain: Bias Emerges in Ambiguous, Non-Extreme Performance Evaluations
“It's where bias happens is when the Video shows someone doing something pretty well, but not perfectly. Like an eight out of 10. Seven or eight, somewhere in there. Then the man gets the eight, and the female gets the seven.”
Assertion Supported
Cain: Negotiation Gender Differences Disappear With Bargaining Zone Clarity
“It looks like that once Women have a good sense of the bargaining zone. A lot of these gender effects go away”
Insight
Cain: Negotiators should make first offers after estimating bargaining zones
“Once you have a good estimate of the bargaining zone, then you go first, and you go for the whole thing. In other words, a good first offer as an anchor is usually the way to go, but that doesn't mean that you come in guns blazing, but if there's an offer to b…”
Insight
Cain: Market power shrinks unique deal synergies, not your fair share
“The theory of the pie says that once you've correctly identified your unique synergies, no matter how small they are, they need you just as much as you need them. For example, market cap and market power shrinks the pie, but it doesn't give you proportional ad…”
Insight
Cain: Smaller M&A partners should demand equal 50% split of unique synergies
“If these synergies are unique to this deal, and the two companies can't get them without each other, the smaller company absolutely has to fight for half of them.”
Assertion Supported
Cain: Female Negotiators Receive Lower Ratings Than Men Using Identical Scripts
“The female actor Negotiator gets ranked lower than the male negotiator, and women raters do this too. Female raters rate women worse.”
Insight
Cain: Ask Where a Negotiation Counterpart Is Least Flexible, Not Most
“Don't ask where Shelley flexible, ask where she least flexible. What shouldn't I ask for? Cause I don't want to ask for too much.”
Insight
Cain: Negotiation decisions inherently assign an implicit price to intangible values
“And the problem with that is your decision will put a number on it. In other words, if you accept the deal, I guess it was good enough. And if you walk away, it wasn't good enough. And so your actions imply a price. On your values.”
Insight
Cain: Valuing intangible relationships during live negotiations causes mispricing
“You don't want to be thinking about your value of commutes or relationships while a person has his hand extended to you. That's the worst time to be putting a value on your relationships because you'll either pay too much or even worse, too little.”
Insight
Cain: Negotiators should plan contingencies rather than trying to predict outcomes
“People spend Far too long predicting what will happen in an exchange. And so in other words, you and I are negotiating in two weeks, and it could go X, Y, or Z way, and people will sit there and try to plan and think, like, is it going to be X? Is it going to …”
Insight
Cain: Master negotiators script and critically rehearse answers out loud
“What most people do when they're going to have a conversation is, at best, they might have an outline for what they're going to say. But the master class people like actually word it and say it to their closet ahead of time with a critical lens. Like they'll s…”
Insight
Cain: Top Negotiators Prepare Honest, Non-Revealing Answers to Tough Questions in Advance
“Usually it's the people who are prepared to answer tough questions in an honest way. They don't have to be revealing, but they kind of know their answer ahead of time, and those people are always in the top five of my class.”
Insight
Cain: Information advantage decisively outweighs charismatic personality in negotiation
“All these useful things that would be probably good to have in a personality for a negotiator will pale in comparison to what she has, which is so clear. Massive information advantage.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cain: Opening negotiation offers correlate poorly with counterparty budgets
“In math speak, your first offers in my data are very poorly correlated to budgets. Because we have 400 people doing the same case with the same budget on the same darn sugar bowl, and the offers are from 300 to 3300.”
Insight
Cain: The negotiation pie is only unique surplus minus friction and alternatives
“Yeah, so then the pie is really 10, because I create 30, but you can get 20 without me. And then we have to look at my alternatives and then transaction costs of getting out of this deal and going chasing the other deal. And is it a certain 20 or an uncertain …”
Insight
Cain: Counterparties are convinced by actual shared surplus, not negotiation theory
“It's not the theory of the pie that convinces them, it's the pie itself.”
Insight
Cain: Focusing on money first creates zero-sum win-lose dynamics in negotiations
“What's bad about money in a negotiation, you have to deal with money. You have to talk about it. It's the thing. But what's bad about focusing on it first is it's a win-lose. What I mean is it's valuable to both of us.”
Insight
Cain: Founders should trade upside for guarantees instead of fighting every level
“Often negotiators, when I see entrepreneurs do entrepreneur buyouts and spin outs through Yale a lot, and they fight on every issue. Like if it's a low success, a medium success, a high success, They grab at each level, even though one level is super valuable …”
Insight
Cain: Contingent agreements neutralize emotional disputes over differing future forecasts
“What's really great about the contingent agreement is it can cool the emotions thusly. We don't have to fight about the future. We just agree on what happens if you're right, and we agree on what happens if I'm right, and if you structure the contract sensibly…”
Insight
Cain: Negotiators should propose 'deal makers' rather than threatening 'deal breakers'
“The cheesy descriptor of it is, I like to say, sell the deal makers, not the deal breakers. In other words, you don't say, give me EVP or I'm not coming, Ted. There's always some bargaining zone where there's the high ended and the low end of it. And people of…”
Insight
Cain: Winning great deals requires protecting internal champions from shopping risks
“And you need a champion like that to get some amazing deal, and what you're offering your champion is the security, a very important security, that if she burns her social capital to get this for you, oh my goodness, don't say no. Cause that's the worst is if …”
Opinion
Cain: Inexperienced negotiators do not walk away enough from deals
“I see two that ironically young, inexperienced negotiators don't walk away enough.”
Insight
Cain: Young professionals make the mistake of being too risk-averse in career choices
“The big mistake that my students are making is they're a little too risk-averse.”
Insight
Cain: Mid-career negotiations should prioritize org-chart progression over compensation
“It's naming your dream job, which is probably should be less about price and more about roles and responsibilities and progression through the org chart.”
