Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi, everyone, U2C2 After Hours.
I'm Yang Neev. I'm Felix.
I'm Riley. And we have our friend Deepak Malhotra with us tonight.
Hi, Deepak. How are you doing?
Welcome. Thank you.
So Deepak is not only a dear friend, but he is a renowned professor of negotiations at HBS who's written several books.
But his latest book is so different from his previous work.
It's a novel, a science fiction novel that incorporates a lot of his ideas about negotiations and the resolution of conflict.
And as soon as I read it, I immediately called all of you and said, this is so cool what he's written.
We need to bring him on to the podcast.
And sure enough, it was nothing like what we had expected from you, really.
So we're going to spend some time using this as an excuse to talk about negotiations more broadly.
But then we have to dig into this new book that you've written, Deepak.
Sounds great. Fantastic.
Okay. So we're going to take advantage of the fact that we have someone who spends most of their professional life thinking about negotiations and the managing of conflict.
And it's a topic that we haven't had much of a chance to address on this podcast.
But if you think about it, so much of our lives are spent dealing with, managing or preparing for potential situations in which we have to negotiate.
Yeah, all the time.
An obvious example is preparing to negotiate for a raise.
Or negotiate within the family.
Like who does what, who has which shores.
That's a constant negotiation and renegotiation that seems never anything.
And war and peace and economic flourishing and foundering, like how the whole system functions as a result of very complex negotiation.
So the landscape is very, very broad.
I guess we'll start here.
So Deepak, how should we think about negotiations and what are some of the most common mistakes people make as they approach a particular negotiation?
Well, thank you, Yungmi, Felix and Ravi, for having the opportunity to talk to all of you and to the people that are listening to this podcast.
And I think the way you framed the question is really fantastic.
Because you started out by making it clear that negotiation is not something that we do once in a while when we're negotiating just dollars and cents or negotiating for a job or selling a house or some such thing.
Negotiation is having the opportunity to engage with other people in a lot of different domains.
And I think that's actually the first lesson that I think effective negotiators teach us.
Obviously, many of the people that we are educating and most of the situations we're dealing with are business negotiations of some kind.
But outside of HBS, I also do some work with governments that are dealing with armed conflict.
I do some work with physicians who are trying to find better ways of communicating with their patients so that the patient makes better health decisions.
And I think one of the things you come to appreciate when you negotiate, not just in different contexts and different cultures, but in entirely different domains of interaction, the thing you come to appreciate, or at least the thing that I've learned, is that at the end of the day humans are interacting
with each other and having conflict and negotiating in all these different domains.
And it looks like they're a whole different set of issues, but fundamentally negotiation is always about the same one thing.
It's not about dollars and cents.
It's not about deal terms.
It's not about lives lost or lives saved or seized fires.
Fundamentally, what negotiation is about is human interaction.
And the question we're always trying to answer as negotiators is how do we engage with other people who see the world differently from the way we do, who have different interests or a different perspective, how do we engage with other people in such a way as to achieve better understandings and better
agreements, whether or not that agreement's going to be written out on a piece of paper.
And I think when you come at negotiations with that lens, it brings to mind certain principles that make it more likely that you'll be effective in those endeavors.
Those principles are the things that I like to focus on, because the tactics can vary widely from negotiation to negotiation from context to context, but the underlying principles sort of cut across many of those areas.
The first point that you made, Deepak, is so interesting to me because I grew up, I guess, being used to seeing prices in stores.
And I always thought all these prices are fixed.
And that at some point in time, I got to know a friend who grew up in Peru.
And for him, there was no such thing as a fixed price.
People go into the supermarket and say, these eggs look actually really old.
I mean, who's going to buy them at a dollar, whatever?
And so your first point is really fantastic how sometimes I think about situations as just given when in fact, you know, it could be a negotiation if only I recognized it as such.
I agree with you. However, there are times you enter a negotiation, you actually have a particular objective in your head.
So let's say I'm negotiating, I think I deserve a raise.
I do too, by the way.
And so I walk in, and my boss agrees with me in principle and yet doesn't give me the raise.
That's not a satisfying outcome.
So on the one hand, it's about the interaction, but isn't it also about the outcome?
I mean, the objective is the outcome.
Now, we don't want to be too narrowly focused on one kind of outcome.
But I take your point, if you're going in there asking for a raise and you get a pat on the back, you understandably will be a little bit disappointed.
But I think what we often do when we walk into a negotiation, our perspective on negotiation is, okay, I know what I want, and I have four or five arguments for why I should get it.
And I'm going to go into the negotiation and I'm going to throw those four or five arguments at the other side, and hopefully two or three of them will be effective and they'll stick, and then I'll get some or much of what I want.
But that, while common, it's not the most effective way to negotiate.
Oh, man, that is what I do totally.
I keep talking, I'm taking notes.
Having some arguments, having some justifications, all of those things are important aspects of negotiation.
But often the thing that's most important before you even get to those is to really think about the interests and constraints and the perspective of the other side.
If you walk into the room and you think you do deserve it, and let's just even say you actually deserve it and you walk away not getting it, what you want to do is come up with, what's your theory of the case?
Why did I not get it?
And that can often lead to a set of other barriers you need to knock down before you're going to get what you want.
So, some years ago, I gave a talk on how to negotiate your job offer, and there's actually a video out there, it's for free, so if anybody wants to see it, it's at negotiateyouroffer .com, so it has a lot of advice.
But one of the things I point out is that there's almost like a checklist of things you want to audit before you sort of give up for not having gotten what you want.
For example, does the other side like you?
Nobody's going to go to bat for you if they don't like you.
Have you justified your ask?
Have you explained to them in language that they value and understand why you deserve something?
Now, already when you come up with these two ideas, they need to like you enough to fight for you, and they need to believe that you deserve it.
Already there's some tension because sometimes the more you're trying to convince somebody how great you are and how you deserve more than X, Y, or Z person, you might actually come across as less likable.
So, you said, okay, I've done both of those.
I think they like me.
That's all good. Well, then let's go to the next thing on the checklist.
Have you found a way to help them justify it internally?
How are they going to be able to do this for you without creating other problems in other aspects of their organization?
So, what are their constraints?
So, you mean like, they are thinking about fairness of pay, if I give someone a raise, what will other people say?
Those kinds of issues.
Or maybe just recently they said, notice someone's ask that was very similar to yours, how are they going to justify that?
So, you need to sort of understand that.
Yeah. And you say, no, no, that's not a problem either.
So, then you go down the checklist and you say, okay, what else could be standing in the way?
Sometimes, their hands are truly tied in the way that you want to be rewarded.
Maybe what you're asking for, they think you deserve.
But at the end of the day, they just don't have the freedom to give it to you right now.
So, sometimes, thinking about the different currencies in which somebody can reward you, the different currencies in which they can make your job better, gives them more ways of giving you the things that you value.
So, when you come in with a very specific ask, I want more money in salary today.
They may legitimately not be able to give that to you, but they might be able to give you something in some form either today or tomorrow.
So, Deepak, would you say, say I have a hierarchy.
Higher salary is what I really want.
But, you know, if I can't get that, I probably could live with more vacation.
Should I reveal everything I want, or should I just try for compensation if compensation fails?
I go to my next thing?
Like, what's the best tactic?
So, it'll vary, but here's a way to think about it.
If you're dealing with someone who you think is going to try to give you what you want because they do think you deserve it or they're on your side of the table, what you want to do is be as honest and as comprehensive about how you're seeing the situation and what you think would be the right way forward
and where you're flexible and where you're not flexible and what you really want and what you don't want so much.
And one of the reasons you want to do that, sometimes even when you don't trust the other side, is because if you're unclear about what you value more and what you value less, they might give you what you value less and think they've met you halfway.
So, to the extent, first order, you want to be as clear as you can be about your priorities and what you value most.
Now, there are situations where you're going to hold that information back in situations where you think they're going to hold it hostage.
If you think that you tell somebody what you really value, what you really care about.
So, Ravi said earlier, if you're dealing with an armed conflict, you're dealing with a situation of a lot of mistrust and a history of antagonism, in those situations, sometimes you need to hold some information back because the more information you reveal, yes, it allows them to give you what you want,
but it also allows them sometimes to use that as leverage against you.
And my hope is that most people in their work environments, my hope is, I'm not saying everybody is in that environment, but my hope is in most work environments, you're dealing with somebody who would love to find a way to make you happier if they think you deserve it.
Those are really interesting points, Deepak, and I wish you'd said some of these things 20 years ago.
I was thinking the same thing.
But it's really interesting, some of the observations that you've made about the overall approach and this idea that transparency, if you think someone has your best interests at heart, that's a really interesting idea.
And again, the same can be the case when you're dealing with someone again in a conflict where there isn't that level of camaraderie, even when the other person is out to get you, sometimes clarity is the best policy.
For example, if I'm going to make a threat of some kind about walking away, and I really am willing to walk away unless you do A, B, and C, if I'm unclear about that, if I'm vague about that, if I don't spell that out, you might not understand that there are certain lines you can't cross.
So it's not clarity and transparency always when things are good and nice and not otherwise, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but you want to layer in these other principles.
And I didn't realize, by the way, that likability was so important for this.
You seem concerned about that, Raul.
Like I'm super concerned.
No, but the reason the transparency part stuck with me a little bit, and I think one of the challenges with negotiating your professional life is always how much to reveal about yourself, particularly to people above you in the corporate hierarchy.
And I think race and gender play into that a little bit.
And yet what I loved about how you framed it was this notion that when you show people the multi -dimensional you, and they have a better sense of what you value, what you prioritize, to be able to kind of reveal some of that stuff to the people around you and not be damaged by having revealed that,
I think that's a very powerful thing to consider, because I could imagine those things backfiring, but I could also imagine everybody being able to respond to you in a much more nuanced way as a result.
And they absolutely can backfire.
So this is why what we try to do is to think about all the principles that should be guiding my decision and then leave the tactics to a little bit further down in the decision tree.
In your experience, Deepak, because you've done this so often and in so many different settings, is this something that is almost second nature to you?
Because I know myself, like sometimes I end up in negotiation situations and I haven't thought a second about because I didn't prepare or I didn't think it was necessary.
Like how much planning should go into negotiations?
So a lot of planning has to go into negotiation.
So anytime you're in a completely new environment, certainly you want to take the time to prepare.
So the best example for me is, you know, when I go into advise on a deal or a major conflict, those are the times where I'm a little bit more conscious about all these different aspects of negotiation.
Usually it sort of comes to you a little bit naturally because you're thinking about it all the time and you've been in hundreds of situations.
But you find yourself in a situation where the stakes are high, things are very complex, and you need to communicate to someone else what they should do.
The moment you find yourself in that situation, all of a sudden, it's kind of like you know how to drive, you don't think about it.
But if you had to tell your son or daughter how to drive, you would really have to be much more conscious about, in what order should I ask them to do this?
And then am I forgetting something?
Because what's natural to you becomes very unnatural when you're bringing somebody up to speed very quickly on these ideas, and then you end up thinking a little bit more deeply about them.
You know, I'm struck by the extent to which the characteristics that we associate with having high EQ, having empathy, having the ability to see someone else's perspective, the ability to really listen, I'm struck by the extent to which it plays out not only in say workplace negotiations, but also in the family
context that Felix was laying out.
You know, if you think about relationships with your partner, I mean there's an ongoing sort of hopefully loving set of negotiations that takes place year upon year.
Does this stuff also apply to the more geopolitical kinds of context that Rawi spends a lot of time thinking about?
I started a course last year called War and Peace, The Lessons of History.
Not that ambitious.
It's a modest title for the course.
Why wouldn't we call all the lessons from history?
Okay, so to be honest, it was much less modest even than I made it sound.
The actual title was, and is, and I announced this title before I'd built the course, but I thought I'd sort of set the bar high.
I said, War and Peace, The Lessons of History for Strategy, Leadership, Negotiation, Policy, and Humanity.
That was the title.
I mean, at that point, you're going to succeed or fail not on the margin based on the title.
And one of the things that's interesting is that a topic that comes up often in that course is when there's been a failure in some contexts to either avoid a war or to negotiate peace or something, we sort of discuss what was it because, was it a failure of leadership, of strategy, or negotiations?
We sort of treat these three constructs a little bit separately.
And we say, no, it doesn't help you if you think that the problem was that your strategy was wrong.
But what really is, a strategy was right, but the way you negotiated it at the table is where things fell apart, or you're blaming your negotiation, but really, you're missing the moral courage that the leaders needed.
So understanding what's really going wrong is important.
And in that, the word, young me, you just used, about empathy.
One of the things that students, I think, quickly grasped in that class is that, yes, you need a lot of different qualities, characteristics to be an effective leader or to be an effective strategist or to be an effective negotiator.
But that aspect of empathy cuts across all three of those.
Can you truly lead effectively if you don't have empathy, the ability to see the perspective of others?
Can you really strategize effectively if you cannot see how other people will react and what their interests are?
Can you negotiate effectively unless you understand other people?
And so, whether you're talking about dollars and cents at work or buying or selling a house or a car, or you're talking about armed conflict, ethnopolitical conflict, geopolitical conflict, and in those environments, perhaps even more so because usually we're dealing with people that we understand even
less. And we're dealing with situations that are much more complex than we are in the workplace.
So there, the level of empathy becomes even more important.
Let me ask an abstraction of a question about something that's going on in geopolitics right now.
So we've got these super complicated Iran nuclear negotiations going on.
There was a deal struck in 2015 and then President Trump left the deal and the United States and Iran are trying to restart the deal and there are multi -party negotiations going on because it's the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, Germany, the entire European Union, and Iran.
But if you're looking at something so complicated, where would you even begin to start to share thoughts about like these are the things the negotiators should have in mind?
So if I'm thinking about something like the Iran nuclear deal, one of the first things that comes to my mind, one of the first things that I would try to make sure that people walking into the room are thinking about and aware of is that a lot of their success or failure is going to be determined not by what they say
and do at the table.
It's going to be determined by the way in which they're setting up the negotiation in the first place.
So for example, what is the scope of the negotiation?
What are the things we are and are not even negotiating?
What is the process going to be?
Who's going to be at the table?
Who's not going to be at the table?
What kind of leverage will you and will you not be willing to use?
What is the frame of the negotiation?
If the frame that takes hold is the other side thinks you're desperate for this deal, the concessions that would otherwise have been there for the taking will no longer be on the table.
And how you set that frame depends a lot on not just the speeches you're making, but their understanding of your political situation, how far is the next election, has this been something you've made a big deal in your rhetoric?
The problem is too often in these complex negotiations, those decisions are being made in different silos.
Your political campaign is doing one thing, your domestic issues are moving in a different direction, the people in charge of the scope are being influenced by different sets of politicians, and there's nothing unifying your strategy as you walk into the room.
And if your sort of schema or script of what effective negotiation is about is you walk into the room and you are just awesome when you sit down.
And you know how to say things and you know how to push people's buttons, then you've probably missed 80 or 90 percent of what is going to impact success or failure in that kind of a deal.
It's like the negotiation before the negotiation is actually the more important negotiation.
The invisible negotiation that happens before the public negotiation.
Yeah, in fact, interesting you said before the public negotiation, in fact that's why many of these.
In fact, if you follow most negotiations that take place in very, very difficult international contexts, almost always there's been a phase that was behind closed doors when nobody knew about it until much later.
And the reason that's crucial, and this is coming from somebody who believes in transparency to keep people honest and to make sure there's no corruption, transparency is awesome for good governance.
It is not awesome for difficult negotiations because nobody on the other side is going to take the risks necessary to say I'm willing to negotiate with you if it's going to be made public too soon.
So sometimes you need that safe space to even get the ball rolling because otherwise too much attention, everybody is going to freeze up and nobody is going to take the risks.
The political risks, the risk to their life to do certain negotiations that could genuinely get them killed.
I'm curious Deepak, in situations where you're less of a negotiator negotiating on behalf of yourself or a particular party, in situations of conflict where you have more of a mediator role, how do these principles translate or not translate?
So say we're thinking about a work situation where there's two candidates for a promotion, but you have a sense both camps are super passionate about their position.
What do you do in those situations?
For me, one way to think about a mediator is somebody who's helping other parties negotiate more effectively.
That's the reason you're there.
In theory, you should not be needed except...
You are needed. They can't get along.
And so if you see the role of mediator as someone whose job is to help the other parties negotiate, well, to me, that's part of the job of any negotiator.
As an effective negotiator, you try to help the other side negotiate more effectively because in my experience, if I had to choose between negotiating against a great negotiator or a bad negotiator, I would pick a great negotiator every time because bad negotiators often get in the way of good deals.
They make the kind of mistakes that just destroy value, make it harder to reach a deal, they focus on the wrong things, they don't understand what might be a more effective process.
So as a mediator, a lot of the principles that you need to take with you overlap with the principles of effective negotiation.
The mistake you don't want to make as a mediator is to think that your job is fundamentally to be completely neutral.
And the reason I mentioned that, there's other mistakes you can make as a mediator, this is the one that I think too often is a belief people carry with them.
Every conflict is different.
Sometimes the person they need is someone who's neutral, but sometimes they need somebody who's going to come up with good ideas that they can't come up with themselves.
Sometimes they need somebody who is not neutral but has certain leverage over one of the parties.
So again, what you want to be thinking about as your role as a mediator, your job is to help people negotiate an outcome that's better for them.
What do they need me to bring to the table to help them do that?
Is it to educate them, is it to come up with ideas, is it to be neutral and be sort of a judge, or is it to actually impose some leverage?
The comment you made about if I had to negotiate against a good negotiator or a bad negotiator, I would take a good negotiator any time, I think it's so revealing because I think so many times you approach a negotiation looking for the weakness in the other side.
What you're saying is, no, no, no, no, no.
You need to approach this in a way of thinking we need to find the optimal outcome.
If I could find somebody on the other side who also has the same goal of reaching some kind of optimal outcome, then I'm better off because it might open up the range of possibilities that we begin to consider and it might create some new points of leverage for us to begin to use to get where we need.
I think that's very, very interesting.
I'm just wondering, does all of this negotiation expertise make you a more difficult father, a better father, and then thinking about all of these millions of negotiations we have with our children, have your children figured out how to be good negotiators or do you feel like you're still trying to
coach them into it?
You're the good negotiator and they're the bad negotiator and you're like, no, you don't see, your position really should be this and let me help you see how we can come to a deal.
How does this filter into your personal life as a parent?
I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that this is going to make your life any better at home, Rob.
None of this stuff works at home.
Are you kidding me?
There's a sign at the front door that says don't bring your work home.
But I will say this, I decided a while ago that at some point you have to limit the number of things you tell your children they need to do.
Because after a while it just starts sounding like noise.
If you're just constantly giving them advice, it's just a whole bunch of stuff.
So I decided that I'm just going to pare it down to two or three things.
And everything else, they'll figure it out.
So in my case, I decided that instead of anything else, I said, no, listen.
As long as you are being as hard working as you can be, like doing your best, and as long as you have a good attitude, I don't care about anything else.
The third one being sort of being a good person to other people.
But in terms of like, work, school, sports, anything, I don't care what grades you get.
I don't care if you fail a test or succeed.
As long as you think and I think that you tried your best, and you have a good attitude, whether you did well or poorly, if those two things are there, what possible complaint could I have?
So the reason that sort of came to me was I was actually in a much more complex negotiation.
And the other side essentially said to our side, listen, we just don't understand what you really want us to do.
And I remember that very clearly because at the same time I was dealing something at home and I said, you know what, this has to be happening here too, right?
We have too many demands to keep changing, do this, now do this.
So we got to simplify this.
So I'm using that as an example to say sometimes, you know, whether you teach strategy, whether you teach innovation, whatever you might teach, sometimes it gives you a lens with which to see what you're dealing with at home or anywhere else.
And some insights will come from that.
And I think that's something that we can all do.
You can be an engineer.
And you say, how would I engineer my family to be better?
And I think you'll come up with some interesting ideas.
I think everybody should do that.
The problem I keep having is I keep trying to use monetary policy to...
To child care. Print more money, Robbie, just print more money.
It seems to solve every problem.
Okay, Deepak, we have to talk about this book.
The book is called the Peacemaker's Code.
And just to give our listeners some context, you know, academics, we write books all the time.
And most of the books we produce are of a certain ilk.
This book is very different.
It is a science fiction novel that somehow manages to weave in thoughts about negotiations, conflict, war.
And it's all wrapped up in this very accessible science fiction thriller.
And when I read it, first of all, I didn't know that you had this in you and we need to talk about it.
How did you come up with this idea to write a science fiction thriller?
So, Yangmi, you said you didn't know that I was going to write it and you didn't know that I had it in me.
Well, because, I mean, we go to faculty meetings, Deepak, you sit next to me.
I sit there. We make a joke or two.
And Deepak's saying they're thinking about aliens, apparently.
We didn't know that.
I didn't know this.
So I didn't know it either is the big aha here.
So I'll be honest. I had no idea I was going to write this.
I had no idea. I had a fiction book inside of me in any way whatsoever.
And what actually happened was I had finished teaching the War and Peace course that was launched just last year.
It finished in March, and building that course had been the most exhausting and exciting thing I had done, maybe since I got to HBS in 2002.
And my plan was to then write a book on War and Peace, like a nonfiction book.
And then a week later, COVID hits and everything gets locked down.
The last meeting in my office before I go home for lockdown is with a guy named Zach, who runs a company in the Boston area.
And I happen to be on his board.
And we're talking about strategy stuff that he wanted to cover about things that they're dealing with.
And then in the last five minutes that we had together, he says, by the way, I have an idea for your next book.
Now I'm thinking, you know, he's going to say something like negotiation for entrepreneurs or something, the kind of ideas somebody might pitch to me.
And he says, so my co -founder and I, you know, Vinay and I were sitting up late last night at like two in the morning and we just started talking about all sorts of stuff.
And we said, you know what?
Imagine what would happen if an alien spaceship landed on earth and you knew nothing about it, except it's an alien spaceship, but you have no context.
You don't know what they want.
You don't know what's going on.
And you could only send in one person to talk to them.
Who would you send in?
And he said, Vinay and I decided we would send you and we would be really curious to know how you would think about it.
And so I thought, that's a really interesting idea, but I'm not writing that book.
So for the next four weeks, I could not get the idea out of my head.
And at the end of April, so about a month later, I just decided I had to start writing a few words.
And so one night I started writing what would become the first page, two page, three, five or six pages.
And then from that point on, for the next three months, I just kept writing.
And all of a sudden history and war and peace and strategy and negotiation, all those ideas got woven into the story in ways that I had not expected when I started writing the first page.
And just for our listeners, this is the plot.
The plot is there is a professor, Professor Kilmer.
He is a war historian and he is suddenly whisked out of his home and taken to Washington, D .C., because he's been asked to help the government think through the fact that an alien ship has landed on Earth and they need someone to begin negotiating with this alien race.
And one of the interesting parts of this negotiation between Professor Kilmer and his counterpart, and I don't want to give away too much because you have to go buy the book and read it, but there are these understandings that the human negotiator comes to which are all about empathy and constraints and making
sense of the constraints of his counterpart and the mutual empathy that they have.
And so when you were writing this, did you have a sense that you were trying to teach through your fiction prose?
So there was a moment about three weeks into this when I was well into writing it when I decided two things.
One, I'm going to finish this because I need to know what happens.
And the second thing I decided was that for the first time, whenever the choice is given to me, I will not pick education over entertainment.
The person who's going to pick up this book will be the person who wants to be entertained first and foremost.
They want a great story.
Now, is it a vehicle to talk about some interesting stuff?
I really think it is.
But to the extent that that can sort of come together in a synergistic way, I'm totally up for it.
That's the kind of book I want to write.
But in my view, it's in order to make the book and the story more interesting and sort of unique.
And I think that's right.
It pushes the story along.
It's not like let us pause to say, use empathy.
No, it's not a device.
It's part of the narrative.
That's right. And I think the reviews have been extremely positive and in fact, more positive than any book I've written so far.
So this might be the best book I ever write, which is great and de -spiriting at the same time.
But I do like the fact that a lot of different people will just point to that.
I mean, I started taking notes halfway through or the number of pages I have folded is just unbelievable.
Or, you know, I really took away this thing and I'm going to talk to my team about it.
So there's a lot of that going on, which I love, but I wanted that to be secondary for once in my life.
I have to tell you, one of the things that I love about what you've done here is the number of academics who are successfully able to communicate with the rest of the world is small.
And I think all of us have experienced times where we even as we're speaking, we can hear ourselves sounding like academics and boring the people who are listening.
No, not me. Those people have already stopped listening and me were safe.
People that are still listening are OK with this.
Promise is once I'm halfway through the paragraph and I know I'm being boring, I can't stop myself.
I just keep going. But I was really struck by what an elegant way it is to communicate insights that you have gleaned from your scholarship in a way that is just so readily accessible to someone who didn't start reading the book for that reason to begin with and doesn't create friction for the reader
as they're reading it.
I think for me, there's only a few people, relatively speaking, that'll ever walk into my classroom.
So if I think these ideas might be of value to other people, it's always worth thinking about how do you package them and what channels can you use to get them to other people.
And then this book is sort of the more extreme version of this.
I wouldn't have thought to do it if not for that random conversation that put the seed of the idea in my mind.
But it immediately resonated with me because it went to the extreme version of here's somebody who doesn't even know they want something on negotiation.
They're out there. They just want to be entertained.
But wow, wouldn't it be a nice sort of like little prize in the crackerjack box or whatever where they come in and they're like, wow, and it might bring to them some things that are of value to them that they weren't even looking for.
We all have ideas that are of value to somebody else.
And just lecturing them is not the only way to get them out there.
So why not sometimes put ourselves out there and see if there is another format in which we can share these?
And I really admire the boldness in that because it is a vulnerable activity to write in this new genre.
Well, I didn't realize how vulnerable it was making me until I had about a dozen to 20 people at various times reading earlier versions of this as I was writing it.
And one of them said to me early on, they said, wow, I don't think I could ever do this.
I mean, I've learned so much about you that I would never have known.
Immediately became rather self -conscious.
I said, I didn't think that was happening here.
I made this up. It's a fiction.
But even what you find funny comes through in this and how you see relationships comes through in this.
And all of a sudden I was like, oh, wow, there is some level of vulnerability that you're accepting when you do art.
So for our after hours listeners out there, the book is called The Peacemaker's Code.
It's available on Amazon.
And not only is it a really fun read, but along the way, they're just insights on every page about how to think about conflict and peacemaking and negotiation and empathy and all of the themes that we've talked about today.
So thanks for coming on the podcast.
We will come back with recommendations.
Okay, so picks. So Deepak, I did give you a warning that we were going to ask you for recommendations.
So did you bring in a recommendation?
I listened to your advice twice, so I brought in two recommendations.
Here's the negotiator at work.
That's right. I mean, if I fail with one, maybe the second one will offset it.
So the first is a book and the book I wanted to recommend is The Spy and the Trader by Ben McIntyre.
It's a really good book.
I even went on Amazon to make sure its reviews were really good, so it wasn't just something completely idiosyncratic to me.
Spy and the Trader by Ben McIntyre.
And then the second recommendation I decided would be something that I was sure nobody else would ever recommend on this show, but I still would believe is a good recommendation.
Ooh, okay. So it's a product.
It costs $5. It is the earphones you buy on JetBlue.
I love the earphones that they give you on JetBlue and they come in the really nice little bag that you can use for other stuff.
I own a bunch of these now.
I have used them throughout COVID.
They're very comfortable in your ear.
They never fall out.
Now they're not wireless, of course, at $5, but you're also paying like two and a half percent of what you would pay for, like, AirPods.
So if you're ever on JetBlue, just buy their $5 AirPods.
Sometimes they give them away for free if you ask nicely, I've found.
So I would recommend this.
Fantastic. Nice. I am super dubious because the earphones that they hand out in the airplane usually are really not very good.
That's why I said JetBlue specifically.
Okay, all right. They're really good.
Okay, Rowie. Yeah, so since Deepak got two, I'm going to decide that I'm really likable and therefore I deserve two.
Three. Three! But I'll be very quick.
So the first one is easy.
Like, obviously you should read Deepak's book.
You should buy it on Amazon.
You should review it thoughtfully.
And I'm sure that you will enjoy it and share your enthusiasm with all of us.
The book reminded me of a couple of other pieces of art that I really liked.
One is the movie Arrival, which has a different kind of nerdy professor showing up to talk to the aliens, but has some of the same kind of transcendent questions.
And that movie is based on a short story by Ted Chang called The Story of Your Life.
And so you could spend a great weekend with Deepak's novel and a short story by Ted Chang and a movie with Amy Adams, and you'd have like a great alien invasion weekend.
Yeah, very thematic weekend.
Exactly. That's a nice recommendation.
Felix, what did you bring?
So have you seen the United States versus Billie Holiday?
No, I have not. It's not a great movie, unfortunately, but Andra Day, who plays Billie Holiday, she is out of this world.
I did something that I literally cannot think I ever did in my life after I was done watching it.
I went back and I just watched individual scenes that same evening again.
Really? It's so riveting.
She's so amazing. And I have known her as a singer.
Rise Up, I think is probably the song that is most famous.
I didn't even know she's an actress and she is the vulnerability, the complications of Billie Holiday's life.
You look in her face and you get to live partially through some of the turmoil that Billie Holiday had to live through.
So don't expect a fabulous story or great character development.
Unfortunately, it's not that kind of a movie.
But boy, her performance is just unbelievable.
Sign me up for that.
That sounds beautiful.
Okay. My recommendation is, I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but it's called Neva .com.
It is a search engine that does not collect any personal data and has vowed to never ever profit from any of your behaviors on Neva .com.
So it's a search engine.
It's in beta right now.
And it not only searches the internet, but it also searches your email and the documents on your computer as well.
I'm sort of so obsessed with it that I have both browsers up on my screen, Neva and Google.
And whenever I have to search something, I search it on both because I'm just comparing results and I just want to see.
And I've just been so impressed with how thoughtful it is.
The idea I think eventually is to see if you can get people to pay a subscription, but for now it's in beta.
So you need to sign up.
You don't immediately get to use it.
But very quickly within a day or two, you'll get permission to access it and you can begin accessing it at least to the end of the year for free.
But I would encourage people to use it.
It gives you a little window into another world of search and navigating the web without having to relinquish your personal data.
So it's called Neva .com.
So that's my recommendation.
Cool. Once again, thank you, Deepak, for doing this.
Thanks to all of you for taking the time to spend with me on this.
Of course, we talked about stuff that I like.
So that's it for this evening.
As usual, a huge shout out to our sound engineer, Peter Linane.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
