Strategic Connections: Short-Term Negotiation Tactics for Long-Term Success

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Slide. Text: Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series. Slide. A picture of a laptop on a desk; on its screen is text: Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series. A red mug sits next to it with the Travelers umbrella logo.

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JOAN WOODWARD: Hi there. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to Wednesdays with Woodward. I'm Joan Woodward, President of the Travelers Institute, and we're so excited you're here.

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Slide. Text: About Travelers Institute (registered trademark) Webinars. The Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) educational webinar series is presented by the Travelers Institute, the public policy division of Travelers. This program is offered for informational and educational purposes only. You should consult with your financial, legal, insurance or other advisors about any practices suggested by this program. Please note that this session is being recorded and may be used as Travelers deems appropriate. Travelers Institute (registered trademark). Travelers.

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Before we get started, as always, I'd like to share our disclaimer about today's program.

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Slide. Text: Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series. Strategic Connections: Short-Term Negotiation Tactics for Long-Term Success. Logos: Travelers Institute (registered trademark), Travelers, Master's in Financial Technology (FinTech) Program at the University of Connecticut School of Business, National African American Insurance Association (NAAIA), MetroHartford Alliance, University of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business, Big I (registered trademark), Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, Insurance Association of Connecticut.

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I'd also like to thank our partners for today, the Master's in FinTech Program at UConn, the National African American Insurance Association, the Risk and Uncertainty Management Center at the University of South Carolina School of Business, and the MetroHartford Alliance. We also have the Big I (the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America), and the Insurance Association of Connecticut.

All right, so let's get started. If you joined us before, you know that during every webinar, every single one, we ask you to fill out a survey so we can get your feedback, your suggestions for topics. And you know I read every single word.

One of the most requested topics that we've seen come up time and time again is about negotiation. Everything is a negotiation in life. We know this. People want to know how they can be more successful, effective negotiators.

And so we want to bring them more value and understanding professionally and personally what they can do about it. They ask us about how they can enter a negotiation with more confidence, and what are the useful strategies and tactics they can implement so they can achieve their goals in any negotiation.

Well, I'm happy to say to all of those who filled out those surveys and sent me notes about negotiation, we're going to spend the next hour talking about how we can achieve our goals through negotiation, while maintaining and growing the relationships that will deliver meaningful, long-term success. It is important to maintain and strengthen our relationships with those on the other side of our negotiation. Otherwise, the outcome won't be as successful.

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Slide. A photo of John Burrows. Text: Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series. Today's Speaker. John Burrows, Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy; Associate Fellow, Oxford University's Said Business School.

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So I'm really thrilled to introduce today's guest. Dr. John Burrows is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and an Associate Fellow at Oxford University Saïd Business School. He teaches leadership, negotiation, decision-making, strategy and organizational psychology.

John is a sought-after consultant for a client list that spans the globe and crosses multiple industries and sectors, including the United States Navy, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Civil Service Bureau of Hong Kong, and the Women in Insurance Leadership group, just to name a few.

We'll start out with a presentation from John, just a short presentation, then I'll join on the other side for a discussion and to take your questions. And those are really important to us. Just like filling out the survey, I love to read your questions. So if you want your name attached to it, you can do that or not, just put anonymous.

So John, welcome. We're so thrilled you're here today. We really are. And as you just heard, our audience very much seeks out help in negotiating. So we're really thrilled you're with us, and we want to hear everything you have to teach us. And hopefully we'll be very good students in absorbing it all today. So take it away, John.

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Slide. Text: Travelers Institute. Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series. Strategic Connections: Short-Term Tactics for Long-Term Success in Negotiation. October 2025. John G. Burrows, PhD. Senior Lecturer, Harris Public Policy, University of Chicago; Associate Fellow, Said Business School, University of Oxford. j [email protected] d u.

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JOHN BURROWS: Super. Lovely to be here, Joan, really is a thrill. So, thank you so much.

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Slide. Photos of a dentist looking at a patient's mouth, with a screen showing an X-ray; a crowd of people at a protest with a sign with text: No; a man holding a tablet and standing with a customer looking at doors; a family sitting on a couch watching TV with a bucket of popcorn; and a girl holding up a bowl of cereal with raspberries. Text: Everything is a negotiation.

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I will say my first slide, you stole some of my thunder, by making the very important point, and I'm going to reiterate that point, which is everything is a negotiation. I think I too often find myself in a room with younger students, but also not always younger students, more experienced folks who insist they don't negotiate.

And in their head, they're thinking of negotiations as big deal-making, consulting gigs, mergers and acquisitions. And I'm thinking, every time you talk to your 3-year-old about you must eat your green beans, that's a negotiation. Disputes around the South China Sea. Disputes around borders between countries. These are more consequential negotiations but aren't always thought of as such.

I have a negotiation every night with my wife when we sit down on the couch and say, what are we going to order on GrubHub tonight or DoorDash, or what are we going to watch on Hulu or Netflix? So I want to make the case and echo the point you made, that it's an important one is, we're all negotiating all the time, which means there's huge opportunity and upside to getting better at it.

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Slide. A drawing of two business people shaking hands as they sit at a table with two pieces of paper and a pen on the table. A thought cloud from one of them shows him holding up a sign labeled $150,000 and a different person standing with them looking up and pondering as he holds papers; There is a large question mark; Text: How Good Are You, Really?

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But then the question is, how good are you at negotiating? And the little wrinkle that is often ignored is you don't really know. We don't really know. The truth is, in the real world, we very, very rarely have hard data on how we performed in a negotiation. Sometimes, we may feel-- come out, feel like we can put our hands up and uncork some champagne, and maybe that's justified.

But the truth is, we're much more reliant on reactions to the negotiation and our feelings, which aren't necessarily a good guide to how we did. For instance, I'm in a job negotiation, imagine, and I'm a savvy negotiator, I think. And I go in and I'm going to-- I paid attention when I took a class on negotiation.

So I'm going to do my due diligence. I'm going to understand what this job likely pays. And I got a good sense that it may pay 120,000 maybe a bit more. But I'm not stupid. I'm going to go in and ask for a bit more because then we're going to have-- some haggling is going to ensue. They're going to beat me down a little bit, and I'll end up somewhere else.

So I wat 120, I think 120 is the right number. I asked for 140. They say yes. Did I win?

The truth is, you don't know. For good and bad, for our fragile egos, probably more good, no one pats you on the back of the end of that conversation and says, oh, by the way, if you'd asked for 180, we might have gone up to 160. The reality is, we often hold ourselves to fairly low bars, maybe overachieve, but that isn't the same as success. So I think one of the things I tell my students in class, where we've simulated negotiations, this is one of the few times in life you'll have actionable, hard data on how you performed relative to your peers.

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Slide. A photo of two circles, one with text: I win; the other with text: You lose; A photo of people grabbing slices from two different pizzas on a table. Text: What Game Are You Playing?

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So what game are you playing? Put differently, there are two kinds of negotiation. And, yeah, maybe I'm somewhat simplifying, but I'm a professor. I sometimes have to do so for pedagogical reasons. But I think we often think of negotiations as things that must be won. And in order to win, the person across the table must lose.

And the truth is, very few negotiations in life are of that nature. It's not that there aren't some. We call these distributive negotiations, zero-sum negotiations. This is when we're fighting over a fixed pie. Hence the image of a pizza.

And in those negotiations, yes, I can only win when you lose. Every dollar out of your pocket is a dollar in my pocket and vice versa. But the reality is, most negotiation we experience professionally, and I would argue also personally, are ones where the person across the table is, at least in part, a collaborator.

And, in fact, we ought to really think of the person across the table as someone we-- who is a colleague with whom we're going to jointly figure out how can we unlock value together. In some sense, how can we trade on our differences, grow the pie, create value. We can both be better off.

And I'm going to say a lot more about this, I'm sure, Joan, given there's some slides I have here and questions that will also come up. But we need to know which kind of negotiation are we in the midst of and act accordingly.

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Slide. A picture shows a hand drawing a triangle from three points, with the three sides labeled Time, Money, and Quality. Text: Trade, Don't Split.

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So what we want to do in negotiations is trade on our differences, which at a high level, the question might be, what do you mean by that, John? What I mean by that is we might value different things differently. And rather than distributive negotiation, where you want $1, I want $1, we value the dollar the same, in this instance, you may value certain things we're negotiating more and other things less. And I hopefully might value different things more and different things less, such that we can trade on these differences.

I can give up something that I don't think is as valuable as you seem to think it is, and in return, maybe you give something up that you don't think is as valuable as I think it is. And a good place to start, to kind of get the creative juices flowing, is to look at this slide that we see in corporate strategy classes. I'm sure everyone's seen some version of this slide, that there's this trade-off between time, money and quality.

And the idea here is you can want all three of those, but it's not very helpful. What you want to think about is, is one of those or two of those more important than the other. And hopefully, if we can identify either these exactly, or some analogs to these in a negotiation, then we've got the ability to trade on these differences and create value. I can give up one of them in return for another from you.

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Slide. A photo of a pasture with trees in the distance. Text: The Pasture Story.

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So this is actually a photo from-- my wife and I were fortunate enough a few years ago to buy a parcel of land in Southwest Virginia. And that's it, with winter wheat sat in it.

And one of the dilemmas I was having, as we were getting ready to close the deal, make the offer on the piece of land, was I have 10 acres of pasture, and I've never owned a parcel of land before. I've been a city guy and a suburban guy, but I've never had a parcel of land.

And it suddenly struck me, what's it going to cost me to pay a neighborhood kid to mow 10 acres of grass? Do neighborhood kids mow 10 acres? Am I going to need a tractor? What does a tractor cost?

Am I going to go to a farmer and what would a farmer charge to do this? And I said, John, you idiot. There are these people, farmers. They will actually pay you money to rent your land. They'll plant their crops in that land and take care of it.

So this is the kind of story we want to think through in our own lives. I thought I had to pay someone to take care of my land. In fact, I have a local farmer pays me to look after my land and put his crops in it.

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Slide. A picture shows a team with boxes of clothes. One of the teammates hands clothing to a woman. Text: Bundle the Ask.

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What's the right approach to take that might increase the probability of surfacing these trades? Well, what I'm going to suggest is we, in many negotiations, should avoid going issue by issue. We tend to take what we think is a logical approach.

There are eight things we need to negotiate. It's a complex deal. Let's go through them one by one. Let's quickly figure out which ones that we're in agreement and then fight tooth and nail over the remaining two.

What I want to suggest is the right approach is almost always to take a bundled approach to negotiation, which is to say something like, hi, Joan, welcome. Looking forward to having a conversation about, maybe we can hire you. Here are a couple of different bundles that I'm relatively indifferent to.

Do either of them work for you, this salary and this city and this bonus? What about this salary in this city with this bonus? Do either of these work for you?

What I'm doing is revealing some preferences in a somewhat masked way. But you perceive this as I'm sharing, I'm initiating. And you feel the urge, for reasons we'll perhaps explore later, to respond in kind. And you might say you know what, neither of those work for me, in all honesty, John.

I'm going to say, OK, let's have another attempt. This bundle and this bundle. And at some point, we're off to the races. At some point you say that works pretty well. I can iterate on that, weave through the back and forth, started to build a rapport, started to trust one another, and now maybe can drop the pretense of the bundles and start talking about the issues themselves.

Or can proceed, figuring out bundles and which encompass these trades. Because, obviously, each one of these bundles is a preference set among the three things that were perhaps being negotiated. How much you care about bonus versus salary versus the city in which you reside. So bundles, bundles, bundles.

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Slide. Text: Know Your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). Bullets: One of the best ways to protect yourself in a negotiation-especially if trust is shaky-is to have a strong BATNA. In plain English, that's your walk-away option. Knowing it gives you confidence. And knowing theirs gives you insight. Put more plainly: what situation would you find yourself in if you got up and walked away from the negotiating table? Remember: "The goal of negotiating is not to reach just any agreement, but to reach an agreement that is better for you than you would get without one." An all too frequent mistake is doing deals we shouldn't do because we get caught up in the situation and do what we believe we're supposed to do!

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Now, you've had others come on and talk about negotiations before. So I have to think many of your listeners have heard of BATNA. And I would argue perhaps it's the most important term in negotiations. There are lots of jargon, lots of acronyms, and I'm trying not to throw too many of them at you today, but this is an important one. Because a mistake that is often made is people don't fully understand what happens if they get up and walk away.

Literally, the BATNA is describe in a couple of sentences, if you've got to walk away from this negotiation, what situation do you find yourself in? Is it a good situation or is it a not very good situation? Knowing it, however, and ideally knowing it, or at least having an assessment of it for your counterparty gives you a very good sense of who has the power and leverage at the negotiating table, and enables you to assess more methodically, more accurately, are we coming to terms on an agreement that is actually better than my BATNA?

Because often what happens is people do deals because they get caught up in the moment, even though they actually might be better off walking away. And a BATNA is sort of a thing can be thought of as a flashing neon light, reminding you of what happens if you get up and walk away. I'm sure we will say more about this in the Q&A, Joan.

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Slide. A black-and-white photo of an anchor on a beach, a city skyline in the background; a photo of a satellite floating in space far above Earth; a photo of a person clutching their stomach in pain, the pain radiating in red. Text: Anchor The Conversation.

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So what are some techniques or tactics? Well, one that is often talked about, I actually read an X post a few weeks ago that infuriated me, was you guys who teach MBA negotiations classes, it's like Week 1 is anchoring and then all the other weeks are how silly anchoring is.

I was like, that's not how I teach it. And that's not how we should teach anchoring. Anchoring is incredibly powerful if it's used in the right conditions.

And so anchoring is the idea that we're trying-- our bodies physiologically, our brains are looking to resolve uncertainty. We sit down in a negotiation. We have some hopes of what the outcome might be in terms of price, perhaps what my salary might be. But I don't really know.

And then someone-- is it me or is it the person across the table-- speaks first, speaks confidently, names a high or a low number. That number exerts a gravitational pull on the subsequent conversation, much more so than it would if we were entirely rational actors. But sadly, we're not wired up to be entirely rational actors at all times.

So that person in the right circumstances, who speaks confidently, names that high number, doesn't necessarily get that number, right. But the goal of anchoring is not to get that number, but it's to ensure that the orbit of the conversation, a dialogue, occurs at an end of a range of agreement that is more favorable to me, rather than more favorable to you.

But the conditions must be met. It must be principally a zero-sum negotiation, and you must have pretty good information to go on.

I'm sure some of you are wondering, what does that stomach image represent? Here's what it represents, is I'm often asked, John, how do I know if I'm anchoring? How do I know if I'm anchoring aggressively enough?

Because a really bad decision you can make is you throw an anchor out and it's not aggressive enough and you get the thing you're asked for. My job example earlier, I asked for 140 and get it.

What we want to do when we anchor, if we've chosen to anchor, is we want the number we're thinking of throwing out to turn our stomachs. We literally want to feel a little bit queasy at that number. Not because the person across the table is actually going to get up, look at us in horror, and storm out of the room, but because we misjudge this. But if it doesn't turn our stomach, we're likely not anchoring.

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Slide. A photo of a man touching a newly installed window in a pre-drywall room. He wears a tool belt, and two ladders sit nearby. Text: The Fix Wasn't Legal. It Was Personal. Bullets: Multiple window deliveries, all the wrong size. Construction stalled, creating cascading delays across the project timeline. We went back and forth with reps, distributors, and customer service - nothing worked. We even discussed legal options, but progress was nonexistent. Then I found out the CEO had gone to Booth. I sent a direct, personal email, Booth to Booth. Forty-eight hours later: resolution, apology, and a clear path forward.

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My wife and I bought this piece of land in Southwest Michigan, and we eventually built a house, the house I'm now sat in. We are very privileged in the sense we got to build a custom home. But any of you who have built homes or done big DIY or big GC projects know that things go wrong.

And one of the things that went wrong was we ordered a lot of windows from a firm that will remain nameless. And the first set turned up and they didn't fit. Like, literally didn't fit where they were supposed to go. This was not a little problem.

I said, no problem. We'll rebuild a second set. Second set takes two months, during which time no more progress can occur on the house. Second set also doesn't fit.

And then the firm goes silent on us. We're working through the GC. We're working-- Customer service won't return calls. I'm thinking, oh my goodness, am I going to litigate? Is this house ever going to get finished?

And then I thought, what would I do if a student came to me with this problem? And I'd say, what about the relationships? Do you know anyone at this firm when it happened?

The CEO went to the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. I don't know him. Still don't know him. But I wrote him an email and I got a response, like, literally in like seven seconds.

It was a short response. It was like, I'm on this. I'm going to solve it. And the problem was solved within 48 hours.

They did a rush job. They built a third set of windows at a different manufacturing plant. And these windows fit and, so far, don't leak.

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Slide. A photo shows several people sitting at a long table, all with laptops and almost all wearing headphones, with a symmetrical amount of people. Text: Just Connect: (Making) Work Better with Social Capital. Connection is collapsing, even as connectivity grows. Hybrid work isolates. Teams are fluid. Trust and mentorship are fading. Social capital is leaking out of organizations. Knowledge, influence, and belonging are harder to build - and easier to lose. The cost? Worse decisions. Lost talent. Fragile culture. This book is a call to arms - and a practical playbook. It shows leaders how to rebuild the relationships that make work actually work. Simon Acumen, a Simon & Schuster Imprint, Publication November 2026, Authors John Burrows and Seth Rachlin.

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And then we can maybe save this till later, Joan, in the interest of time. But I wanted to plug that one of my-- I'm a behavioral scientist. My Ph.D.’s in behavioral science. I think brains matter. Much of what we talk about today will be about brains making decisions in negotiations.

But I think a bigger thing to think about is the organization in which negotiations are embedded. And I have another interest, which is how do we make organizations better? How do we make people happier and more productive in organizations?

And this is maybe-- I've got a book coming out next November with my co-author, Seth Rachlin, that is about-- it's called Just Connect, and it's about how do we think about solving the myriad problems we're all, I think, familiar with? Loneliness epidemic at work, social capital leaking out of organizations, challenges with identifying succession plans, and so on. So I think I've got some answers, and the answers are in that book from Simon & Schuster coming out next November.

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Slide. Two QR codes, one with a LinkedIn logo in the middle and the other with an X logo in the middle. A photo of John. Text: Wednesdays with Woodward (registered trademark) Webinar Series. Connect with John on X.com or LinkedIn!

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JOAN WOODWARD: Well, that is awesome. That is awesome. We are going to put up on the screen-- we just did-- how to connect with John, because I'm sure after that quick 10-minute kind of whirlwind of his thoughts, you're going to want to follow him. So there's his details right there for anyone to join him online.

So John, that was really terrific. And I love the very practical. Everyone on this call has probably negotiated their salary. So you went right to the heart of the most probably difficult negotiation for a lot of people, and certainly young people, as they are getting into their careers, not knowing what the right thing to do is and how to feel it.

I love the picture of the abdomen and if it makes you feel queasy. I've certainly been in that conversation a number of times.

But I want to talk first-- we're going to break out the different sections of the next 20 minutes or so, and then we're going to get to your questions. So drop them in the Q&A, folks. Let's talk about success and pitfalls.

So what are the most common misconceptions people have about what it means to win? Because when you talk about the guy saying, I really want 120, I'm going to ask for 140, and then they give him 140, and he's thinking, shoot, I should have gone to 160 or 180.

And so when are we satisfied? What does it mean to win. And what are some of the misconceptions around that?

JOHN BURROWS: Yeah, no, I think the key thing is we tend to bring this point of view that everything's distributive and everything is zero-sum. If I want high, you must be-- want low. If I want x, you must want y.

And the truth is, that's not how most negotiations play out. The reality is there are often a multitude of things, and we value them differently. So I mean, what we want to do is grow the pie, we grow the pie. We create more value by figuring out which things do you care more about, and which things do I care less about?

A job negotiation, maybe we can fixate on salary, but I'm often telling younger students, the value of your first manager, is extraordinarily important. I would give up a substantial chunk of salary to have a good manager. And that's an easy thing for a firm to give, if they've got good managers.

So we want to think about the-- add things into the mix and hopefully have both of us walk away with a set of things that are important to us. But also, we want to think about our reputation. How people talk about us when we're not in the room, ultimately is the real asset we're trying to build in negotiations.

The truth is, we negotiate with the same set of actors throughout our lives, again and again and again, much more so than I think earlier in lives we tend to think. We think the world is vast. We're going to negotiate with thousands and thousands of people.

The truth is we negotiate with the same people again and again, or people who know one another again and again, embedded in our broader ecosystem. So the relationship we build, are we seen as someone who's trustworthy, as credible, keeps their word, that's the outcome that really is the win.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, so talk to us about what are the characteristic or maybe principles that most successful negotiators have? What separates the truly successful negotiator from just an average person?

JOHN BURROWS: The things that are important to be good are an excellent listener. Lots of studies suggest the people who listen more, say less in negotiations tend to do well. I think that's an obvious one. Charisma and likability, both of which can be trained, to a degree, as they serve the end of building relationships.

But I would say the really excellent negotiators have a sense of their own strengths, but perhaps more importantly, their own weaknesses. So there's an assessment that is, you may have had other people talk about, the Thomas-Kilmann Instrument. Essentially, it's tapping into what are each of our styles in terms of how we approach high-conflict situations.

And without going too far down that rabbit hole today, the reality is there's five different styles we might each bring to the negotiating table, and some of us may be able to play two or three of those styles convincingly. But at a negotiating table, at a high-stakes negotiation, it's better to have five stars at the table on your side. It's like having a toolbox. Would you like a toolbox with five hammers or a toolbox with a hammer, a chisel, a tape measure and a wrench?

So good negotiators, the excellent negotiators know what they're good at. Am I good at being competing? Can I go for the jugular? But am I not so good at collaborating, at creating value? Am I not as good at reading the room, sensing energy levels, body language, nonverbal cues? If I'm not, they know to bring someone else with them.

I'd say the other piece would prep not just the numbers, but the people, the personalities. I would say the most sophisticated negotiators I teach and stay in touch with after they go back into the world, are the ones who think of the styles that they're bringing and putting on the table in a given negotiation. It's almost like which chess pieces am I putting on that match the team that I'm negotiating with?

The key observation is most negotiations aren't one-on-one. There are six people in your organization. I need to match six, eight people from my organization. Who do I match with whom and what combinations? And it's that kind of preparation that really distinguishes the extremely capable from the less capable.

JOAN WOODWARD: I love that. Can you say again the tool, the two?

JOHN BURROWS: Yes.

JOAN WOODWARD: Say it again, and we'll put it in the chat just so people--

JOHN BURROWS: So Thomas, like the name, and Kilmann. It's the Thomas-Kilmann Instrument, often abbreviated TKI. They are two professors at Harvard. There are cheap, low-cost versions of this instrument that you can complete, and it will tell you how you are arrayed across those styles.

The important observation is you can flex. One of the things I do early in the quarter when I teach my students is they do the instrument, but then their goal is now to try and get better, strengthen their capabilities in a style that they're not as comfortable. It doesn't mean we can all get good at all five.

Then it comes into well, I'm not so good at being aggressive. I'm just not that person. But then bring someone with me who is capable of going for the jugular, being cutthroat, being assertive. I want to have all styles at the negotiating table.

JOAN WOODWARD: Great. Perfect. I love it. All right. What's the biggest mistake someone can make in a negotiation?

JOHN BURROWS: Rushing. Rushing. Again, goes to that point I made earlier. Our bodies don't like uncertainty. We're looking to resolve it in all ways, at all times, in some sense.

Become more comfortable in ambiguity. Become more comfortable in uncertainty. Slow down, slow down. Don't rush to completion.

First of all, we negotiate successful outcomes with people with whom we've built a relationship. Relationships often take time to establish. There's a back and forth. There's casual interactions. We build them over time, even if that time is an hour of a negotiation. So give yourself enough time to build rapport.

I would say, going back to my bundles that I mentioned, a bundle-based approach to negotiation or using packages, not doing that is the big error, is the big error. The other one, rushing.

The other one is not knowing your line in the sand, not knowing what happens if I get up and walk away. This is why I flagged the importance of your BATNA, a best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

JOAN WOODWARD: Got it, got it. OK, so can you give us an example of maybe a negotiation that went wrong and the implications? And then, of course, one that went really successfully and just quickly on both of those.

JOHN BURROWS: So, I hope I'm not-- I can name a couple of firms that I worked at. So here's an interesting one. So, I'm involved in advising companies involved in mergers and acquisitions. I do more mundane things, but I'm also helping organizations think through M&A activity.

What often happens is firms focus too much on the numbers and not the broader people considerations. I've often heard the quip from M&A people that the numbers are easy, right? The real challenge is the people stuff. Executing through flesh-and-blood human beings is a lot harder in practice than the Excel spreadsheet suggests it might be.

But the big one I would say, is Oracle's acquisition of Siebel. So I was at Siebel Systems when Oracle acquired them. Larry Ellison, the then CEO, made some bold commitments to the capital markets in terms of how quickly we would see the synergies from the acquisition.

He then moved too quickly to lay people off in order to gain those efficiencies. Laid the wrong people off. And the people who were like, hang on a minute, why has he been let go? Why has she been let go? I think I'm going to punch out as well. Massive attrition.

A lot of these people landed at a company we've all heard of, Salesforce. Another group of them landed at Veeva. Essentially, Oracle was trying to compete against SAP by buying Siebel, and because of a blunder in this acquisition, lost top talent to Salesforce, which was a fairly modest company back then and set in progress the juggernaut that Salesforce later became.

Success. What would be a good success story? I think it's another firm, I won't name the firm this time, a client of mine, they were trying to break into China. And I think what they didn't fully appreciate is quite how important relationships are, and trust, in China. Asia more broadly, but in China, especially.

So they went over, hard charging, thinking it was all about numbers. It was all about hashing out the deal. We'll be there all week. We'll talk numbers, numbers, numbers and-- It had a happy ending, but that first week they spent an inordinate amount of time drinking and eating, drinking and eating.

They had a lovely time. They really did have a lovely time, but they thought they'd failed and came back to the U.S. kind of with their tails between their legs, as it were. And then they got called back and they said, we want you to come back to Shanghai.

I'm like, oh my goodness. This isn't working out. Can they just tell us that over the phone? Can they just write us an email? Why are we-- We haven't discussed any terms.

They flew back. They discussed terms almost effortlessly. The deal shook out very, very easily. Why? Because the first week was all about establishing trust. Once the Chinese counterparts felt they trusted these people, trusted the organization, the deal was, at this point, a mere formality.

So I think that's a happy ending, an awareness of cultural differences. And cultural differences don't just play out at the country level. I don't have to tell this audience that the norms of behavior in a negotiation in Manhattan are likely very, very different than Jackson, Mississippi. And an awareness of that at a more granular scale is very important to be successful.

JOAN WOODWARD: John, you spoke, just music to my ears because I've been in many situations, where I traveled the world in my previous job and getting to know the culture, having folks trust you that you're interested in their culture or their way of life or how they do business first, before you start talking the business numbers or the business at all. I was in that situation many times, and getting to know the person on the other side of the table before you talk anything about the business was one of those great pieces of advice I got early on. So I couldn't agree more.

And I think the Jackson, Mississippi, versus Manhattan is a terrific example. Or Southern California versus Chicago, kind of thing. And also, we have a lot of actually people on this line who have been through an M&A. A lot of our insurance industry brokers and agents have been in major transactions in the M&A world.

And I'm sure getting to know that small mom-and-pop shop before you buy it, as a larger broker, is critically important. And so I think this is, you're spot on. You're spot on.

OK. We got to move on. We're going to talk about how to get ready and prepare. So how do you best prepare for any negotiation?

JOHN BURROWS: Well, I'm going to lean into to the Asian sensitivity here because I think-- and I'm probably going to butcher the pronunciation, so I apologize to anyone who's Japanese who is listening. But there's a lovely word in Japanese called nemawashi. And it speaks to the bundle of roots around a tree.

And it's used in negotiation theory to make this point, that the best negotiators ideally negotiate before even sitting down in the negotiating room. In some-- we lay the groundwork. We have those corridor conversations. We essentially put everything in place before we even walk into the boardroom. So I think practice that.

Using a different language to make the same point is, who are the stakeholders? Think about who are the decision-makers? Are the people who are claiming to be the decision-makers, really the decision-makers? This is, I would say, perhaps the fundamental question in negotiation, and one that is not a matter of behavioral science, so doesn't typically get covered when you've got psychologists teaching this stuff, right?

Are you the right person, Joan? You tell me you are. You look like you might be. But you might not be, right? You might be someone who's puffing your chest up, who's looking to be seen as more important in an organization.

Maybe you just want me to buy you a nice lunch at a nice steakhouse, maybe fly you and your significant other to Pebble Beach for a nice round of golf. Some things that I've done in my former life as a sales rep at Siebel and Oracle. So there's a sense in which make sure the person you're talking to, or the set of people, are in fact, decision-makers.

I haven't used this term yet, but I would say adopt a scoring system, a scoring mechanism. One of the mistakes we all make in negotiations, those with a competing style more than others, but we all make it to some extent, is we overly fixate on the hard numbers.

Why? Predominantly because they're very salient. And we can assess whether we won or lost fairly quickly. More is more for me, less is less. I won.

And I would say the better negotiators recognize this and get ahead of it. So what they do is they come up with a scoring system, that may be very crude, that essentially is a simple weighting of how do you, literally you, or your team subjectively weigh the various things that are being negotiated? And then you attach a number to those.

So it could be dollars. You put everything into local currency, or points. I don't have a strong feeling about which. But what this means is when I'm weighing, is this bundle of things better than that bundle of things, I actually have numbers to assess the city this job might be based in.

And that city may not be simply a function of cost of living. It could be does your drunk uncle live in that city or not. Depending on how-- So it's like, well, don't want to move to Atlanta. I love Atlanta, but he lives there. So there's that sense. So you might value it on lots of different bases.

For instance, I might care about-- my kids are now in college, but when my kids were younger, I get a great offer to go move continents and take a job in Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong. I'm going to pull my kids out of suburban Chicago high schools to move to Hong Kong? Maybe I, as a family unit, want to weight my kids’ preferences around location.

So I think scoring systems are a big one. And then thinking about the order of play, the process, right? If anchoring makes sense, how aggressively to anchor. If it doesn't, so make the effort to speak first, speak confidently, speak assertively.

If I'm going to take a more bundle-based approach, what bundles to start with. I would say that would be-- I think that--

JOAN WOODWARD: I like the bundles; I like the scoring. Think about it more sophisticated than just like a pros and a con. The pros list and the con list of which I do my whole life. What's the pro of making this decision or not. But I like attaching a number to it because the weighted average of what's more important or not, I think that's brilliant.

I'll take the trip to Pebble Beach. If you're ever a sales guy again and you want to. No problem. I could go play golf any time in Pebble Beach. OK.

JOHN BURROWS: Oh sorry. I was saying my expense account at UChicago isn't what it once was as a sales rep.

JOAN WOODWARD: I got it. OK, so let's talk about you have a plan. You have a strategy. You got your scoring system; you got your bundles.

So you go into this negotiation, and things go off the rails and go in a different direction. You can't control it. How do you bring it back on the rails, or how do you nudge it in a direction that you're hoping to get with an outcome versus just having be a fish, kind of swimming with the tide wherever it takes you?

JOHN BURROWS: Look, I think the one answer to that is, in part, think of negotiations as sort of a jazz ensemble. There's a degree of improvisation. As I tell my students, it's not a simple decision tree that leads you to the right outcome. If it were, people who negotiate for a living and are good at it wouldn't earn what they earn, and they're typically well compensated.

But I would say, the real thing I would say, the real answer is actually maybe one that you might not expect, which is it's OK to pause. It's OK to ask for a timeout. It's OK to say, I'm not sure I know how to proceed right now, and I need a few minutes to think about this.

Or, actually, I think I need to talk to my team. Would you mind terribly if we interrupted our conversation? I'm very sorry, but maybe we can pick this up again tomorrow on next week.

I would say the biggest thing is be prepared to be thrown off but also be open to not let it derail the negotiation. If you've got some quick response ready to go, great.
But I'll give you an example. I had this, when I first got into speaking. This is a story that might bring us, put a smile on someone's face.

I was in Houston with one of my clients. I missed my flight. I was in a grumpy mood. And I answered my phone from a number I didn't recognize. I never do that.

And this guy says, hi, John, we got your number from, and it was the name of another client of mine in the medical sphere, a former president of the American College of Surgeons. So immediately got my attention.

And he said, do you do speeches? I'm like, truth is, I hadn't done many speeches at that time, but I was like, I think I could do it. I can teach in class. I can probably speak. Do you do speeches? Yes, I do.

He then says, are you available on this date in Chicago? Conveniently, I am. Can you do speeches on leadership? Yeah, I could talk about leadership.

What do you charge for that? I hadn't even thought through the answer to that. And I named a number, and I don't want to-- and that number was not-- it was thousands, but it was not many thousands. He said, yeah, that sounds great.

I turned up to give the speech, and it was a big keynote to a big event. I didn't know. He said the acronym of the NGO. It sounded like some little organization.

It wasn't a little organization. It was a big thing. I was a keynote speaker. It was televised.

I gave a great speech. He patted me on the back at the end, said John, that was one of the best keynotes we've had. Really high energy, really loved it, and by far the cheapest.

What I should have said is, you know what, let me get back to you. You caught me at a bad time. Figure out who I was talking to. Figure out what was the right price, or at least a directionally correct price. So there. Sometimes the best move is to step away temporarily.

JOAN WOODWARD: I like that. I like that a lot. So, let's talk about two things that I struggle with personally, which is being emotional. You get so connected to what you're trying to negotiate or it's very important to you, and it's highly emotional time because you want to be-- win, but you want to be right, but you want to keep that relationship. So, emotions in a negotiation.

Or is it better to, and I'm highly competitive, especially if you're going to play golf with me. I'm a competitive person. I want to win, win, win. And no matter what outcome, I want to win. Not at all costs, but I want to emerge the winner, right? Who doesn't want to be the winner?

So, how do you balance emotion versus being competitive in a negotiation, so as not to, in any way, offend the other person on the other side of the table, but again, to come out a winner.

JOHN BURROWS: No, no. Great question. So let me handle it in the two chunks and maybe surprise you with part of my answer. So, I think it's foolish, and likely impossible, to sidestep emotions entirely in negotiations, and likely counterproductive. And I have some evidence to support that, that I'll mention in a minute.

So, I think emotions should be treated as data. How you react, how I see you react. Is there the fire in your belly over something, or are you not so excited about other things? That's how I literally, literally, that's how I identify what things matter to you, more or less to how they matter to me.

So, in my class, I literally tell students, when you're trying to assess, there are three types of issue. We talk about distributive, compatible and integrative. Simply, zero-sum. Do we want the same? Often we do.

Or are these the possibilities of these trades? There are things that I might give up in return for something you value less, that I value more. So I need to figure out which of these buckets all the issues sit in. What's the best cue to that is your emotional response to me raising each of those.

Do you get a fire in your belly over one and you're relatively-- you want high on this other thing, but you don't seem to really care. Like you just feel like you got-- there's an element of the emotional passion isn't there. That's literally how I cue up the difference between is this a distributive issue versus an integrative issue that I can trade. So emotions are important.

Now, my students, as you might imagine, are using LLMs in their negotiations. So AIs, whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Gemini, and they're using them to prepare the negotiations. They're also using them to conduct the negotiation in part, whether it's literally agent against agent or I'm quickly asking ChatGPT what I should say in response to what you just said.

And what I found last quarter is on the complex, integrated negotiations, the ones where there was the greatest opportunity to create value, taking the emotions out destroyed tremendous value. Those students using LLMs did dramatically worse than students not augmented with LLMs. My working theory for now is taking emotion out does a disservice.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK. Can you just say what LLMs are for someone--

JOHN BURROWS: Oh, sorry. Sorry. Large language models. So when we talk about AIs, like ChatGPT, like Grok, collectively we refer to those as large language models, LLMs.

JOAN WOODWARD: Just wanted to make sure everyone on the call was level-set. This hour, it's flying by, so we got to cut to the chase here. I want to talk about tactics. And then we're going to get to some questions.
Should we always make that first offer and have that anchor be really high or is it better to react to the other party in the negotiation and let them go first? What do you suggest? Or does your advice on this change with different scenarios?

JOHN BURROWS: It's a great question and important one. The answer is fair, is simple in that I must-- if I'm going to speak first, the reason I'm doing-- and when I say speak first, I don't mean, hi, Joan, nice to meet you. I mean, here's my demand. Here's the number I need.

If I'm going to do that, it has to be a negotiation that is either exclusively distributive, which is to say we're just figuring out what the number is for the deal. How much the car is going to sell for, how much you're going to buy my used car from me At. So if that condition is met, it's distributive.

Or it's a deal that has other components, but overwhelmingly the value accrues to the distributive component of it. That's Condition 1. If that's met and Condition 2 is also met, which is I have pretty good information to know what it means to throw an aggressive anchor out, either sufficiently high that I kind of spook you a little bit, or sufficiently low that I spook you a little bit, then I want to speak first. I want to anchor.

But I'm going to say, the vast majority of negotiations that your audience are involved in are not of that kind. So it's not that anchoring is unimportant, but in most negotiations, I would come back to what I said before. Listen first, propose bundles. Act as if the negotiation is one where we value different things differently and proceed in that manner and explore that using bundles. Don't go in aggressive, don't anchor.

JOAN WOODWARD: OK. Rapid fire now. Let's assume the other party is operating in good faith and they are rational actors in negotiation. How can you figure this out? What are their goals and priorities?

What are the real goal in that negotiations? How do you figure that out?

JOHN BURROWS: Come back again. It can sound like I'm beating a dead horse. The bundles, right? You're going to be forced, in a polite way, Joan, do either of these bundles work for you? What's interesting is you're acting in good faith, and you're forced to respond to these two bundles in a way that it's not obvious lying can benefit you, right?

So you're being forced to be disclosing. We're building a back and forth. So use bundles.

Ask open-ended questions. If I'm going to ask questions, ask what matters most to you. Sophisticated negotiators know they're not going to win on everything, right? The question is, what's the must-have for you, Joan? And then, what are you willing to concede on?

I might go so far as even ask, Joan, what's something you might concede on that I've not even considered? That's an awfully disarming question. And one way, if you think I'm willing to reciprocate, or maybe I even lead with, I'm willing-- I've got some flexibility here that you may not fully appreciate.

That's a way to start to figure out what matters to each of us. Like, if you could only get one win, Joan, which is the thing that you got to get, right? Or take your must-win and my must-win out of the picture. Of the other things, which is more or less important to you?

JOAN WOODWARD: OK, so I love that. So if a young person comes to me and says, it's really, really important, Joan, that I go work in the Pittsburgh office, for family reasons. Like that's so important to me that I know. That's really important. So I'm going to try to accommodate that, if I can, to that person, and knowing what's really important versus what you say might be important. I love that.

We're getting to audience questions next. I apologize, audience. We only have 10 minutes here. We're going to have John back, by the way. As soon as his book is published, we'll give a bunch of copies, as we usually do.

First question, Camron Rafiee from HAI. We had a number of other people ask the same question. What strategies do you suggest for negotiating when you have less power than your counterpart?

JOHN BURROWS: Yes, yes. So one is ascertain precisely how much more or less power you have. What does that mean? Be clear of your BATNA and their BATNA. Then, can you creatively improve your BATNA before you even sit down at the negotiating table? Or potentially harm the other’s BATNA before you sit down at the negotiating table?

Let me give you an example. What might it mean to improve my BATNA? I am a student, so I really want to work at Travelers, and the student says, I really want Travelers, I really want Travelers. I'm like, that's great. Go and get a job offer from State Farm.

I know you don't want to work at State Farm, right? I know you don't want to work at Guardian Life. Go and get an offer from another firm in this space, that even if you don't take it, that gives you much more power in your conversation with Travelers.

That might be literally just psychological power. I now feel more confident, but it also means I've got some ability to negotiate with you. Because I really would love to join Travelers, but I don't want to go to State Farm, but boy, they made me a really generous offer and they were really flexible on this. So improve your BATNA.

Don't be an unemployed student. Get multiple offers.

JOAN WOODWARD: Got it. Love that, love that. OK. No one from State Farm call us, please. He made that up.

JOHN BURROWS: I love State-- nothing wrong with State Farm at all.

JOAN WOODWARD: I do too. All right. This is from Carter Collins from Burton & Company. What are the best questions one can ask to gain the trust of a prospect? Good question.

JOHN BURROWS: Thinking long term. Imagine where do you see this relationship in 12 months, both ours personally, but the professional environment that we're both in, our organizations. And then what does success look like to you and your organization? Focus on setting up the long-term framework, such before you dive into the minutia of the negotiation.

So, ask about what's gone wrong in past deals. What are lessons you've learned from past deals? These are the kinds of questions, I think, open people up to feeling like you're not behaving in a transactional manner. You're not just going to get the deal done and disappear. You're investing in a relationship.

JOAN WOODWARD: Great. I have a question here that's on a lot of people's minds, and this could apply to a lot of different cohorts. Kimberley Murray asked, why is it so hard, especially for women, to ask for a raise?

JOHN BURROWS: Oh good question.

JOAN WOODWARD: Or you can substitute, especially young people, especially older people, especially, whatever group you're thinking about. Some people just are very uncomfortable asking for a raise. So give us some tips.

JOHN BURROWS: Yeah no, I think the general thing is we think of things as not being negotiable. And we also think that negotiating is seen by the person on the other side as us being pushy, abrasive and not sufficiently respectful and deferential.

Let me provide the other story from the other side. I'm telling my younger students this all the time. You've got to negotiate. Always, always, always. Doesn't necessarily mean you'll get what you're asking for, but don't worry about whether you're actually going to get it.

It would be nice if you got it. It would be nice if you got some of what you're asking for. But trust me, I've been on the other side. Which is if I'm about to hire you as a young 22-year-old or someone older, and I'm putting you on my team, you're going to represent my organization to other stakeholders, I want to know you've got the gumption to go and advocate for not only yourself, but the broader set of stakeholders whom you represent.

And if you can't even negotiate and ask for a little bit more money or a slightly greater work-life balance, or whatever, or slightly more equity or whatever, or a slightly more senior title. If you can't do that, I'm actually going to judge you. I actually think less of you.

Because now I worry, did I make a mistake extending this offer to you? So I think it's learned that there are many fewer downsides and little but upsides. Almost no one doesn't get the job because they ask for more money.

JOAN WOODWARD: Got it. Absolutely love that. Ian Dries says John has great energy too. That also helps in negotiations. So I totally agree. I'm probably way too high-energy for-- ask anyone on my team, I'm always the optimist.

So this is from Eric Goldberg. What do you think of Chris Voss's approach to negotiation, which is never split the difference. Your approach sounds quite different, and I have to say, I'm a big believer in splitting the baby. When I negotiate to buy a house or a car, I'm always, let's split the baby.

And one of my team members says, now who's the baby? Like, what are you talking about? But is your approach different than splitting the baby here?

JOHN BURROWS: No. So I would actually say that Chris Voss and The Black Swan Group, more broadly, his firm, are very, very complementary. I would say he's more tactical. I'm providing a more meta framework to think about these things.

In fact, I am co-teaching with Black Swan in February for a mutual client of ours in the M&A sphere. So I think Black Swan recognized we're complementary, the organizational focus.

But to answer your specific question, Joan, or the audience member's question, I actually have a slide in my intro negotiation slide deck. I didn't show it today, but it's don't compromise. It's a compromise, it's a road sign, don't do it.

Chris Voss’s book is very well titled. It's a very clever name, and I 100% agree with him. What we are inclined to do in negotiations, and this speaks to a question you raised earlier about need to be competitive, is we often do what we think is fair, equitable, reasonable. We meet in the middle, we compromise. We split the difference.

No, what I want us to do is figure out which things we each value more and give the person at the table the one-- the thing that they value more than the other person. So in actuality, I would argue what he and I are saying is very, very much in alignment.

JOAN WOODWARD: Great. I love this question. Ian Fralich-- I apologize if I'm saying-- any insight we can get into the negotiation that took place to get John be a speaker on Joan's show would be really interesting to see how this jazz ensemble took place between the two people in front of us.

And I love that. And John, I'm going to let you tell the story because I cannot tell you how networking, relationship-building and nurturing relationship plays a big part of every single person I have on this show. That's No. 1.

But in this case, it was one of my just dynamic staff, Jesse Sugarman, assistant vice president here, has a relationship with you and convinced you, you have to come on the Wednesday show. And by the way, folks, we had almost 6,000 people register for this today, one of our highest. But, John, why don't you tell the story of how you're sitting in front of us?

JOHN BURROWS: Yeah. So, Jesse was a superstar student of mine at the University of Chicago.

JOAN WOODWARD: No doubt.

JOHN BURROWS: He completed the evening master's program at the Harris School of Public Policy, was an absolutely standout student in my class and, from my understanding, in many of the other classes he took at UChicago. And he and I built a relationship in that class that sustained beyond the class.

I enjoy staying in touch, I say, not with all my students, but many of them, the ones that I really have a rapport with. Jesse and I had a rapport. We stayed in touch. He landed in this role, gave me a call and said, would you do this? And it wasn't a tough decision.

It wasn't a tough decision because I knew him, I trusted him and there was no gamble. There was no risk because it was embedded in a relationship.

JOAN WOODWARD: I love that. And I have to say, our Chairman and CEO, Alan Schnitzer, recently had his professor from Wharton, from Penn, on and had-- gave away his book and talked to him at our Travelers Leadership Conference.

Professor Seligman, who taught Alan the power of positivity, and he wrote a book about-- and there's an insurance use case about the power of positive people. I think it was done at MetLife, and how much more successful they are as salespeople, being positive, than maybe fitting the box or that survey that new employees figure out how to be a salesman.

So I love those relationships. Keep them for life, everyone. If you meet someone like John in your daily living, you have to build that relationship and make it a priority to keep people like John and others in your life, and they'll come back and give you great joy your whole life.

Folks, I cannot believe we're at the end of this conversation. Two things. One, John's book is coming out next November. We will have him back and give out some copies after that.

But John, any last words from you? I want to close and talk to my audience about survey, the importance of filling out your surveys, and what's coming up in the next few months. John, anything else?

JOHN BURROWS: Yeah, I would say I echo the point that I perhaps should have made stronger earlier, which is we want to compete. Competing isn't bad in negotiations. Compromise is bad. Being too kind, too generous is often a failure.

We need a lobby. That's the orange story. We think both, two people want the orange. We think the right thing to do is cut it down the middle. You take half, I take half. Does that sound good?

Well, not if you wanted all the juice and I wanted all the skin. You wanted the juice because you thought you were getting sick. I wanted the skin because I'm baking a cake. I wanted the zest for the frosting.

JOAN WOODWARD: Love it.

JOHN BURROWS: It's a silly story, but it captures the wisdom of how we get better at negotiating. We lobby for what we want and give the other party what they want, and often can both do better than meeting in the middle, than compromising.

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JOAN WOODWARD: It's a win-win. John, it's a win-win having you on. Thank you so much for your time, your insights, and being so willing to share. We love all your practical advice and stories. Folks, fill out your surveys so we can bring more people to you on topics you're interested in.

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So just a quick note on programming. November 12, we're going to be joined by Angi Orbann and Dan DiMugno from Travelers for a deep dive into the property insurance marketplace. So back to insurance. Deep dive into property. Don't miss it.

The following week, we're going to have the CEO and co-founder of Spring Health, April Koh, with our Travelers' own amazing benefits guru, Greg Landmark, to talk about mental health in the workplace. Finally, for the year, we're going to wrap up on December 10. We're going to head back to our special Claim University for the third part in our series there, on the Travelers Risk Control Lab and Forensics Lab. Don't miss that.

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So, folks, we're going to see you in the next few weeks. And don't forget, of course, if you're playing a round of golf or laying on a beach, listen to our Travelers Risk & Resilience podcast, available on Apple, Spotify and Google.

John, thanks so much again. Truly grateful. It was a wonderful conversation. Everyone, have a great afternoon, and we'll see you in a few weeks.

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