Stuart recently shared some of his secrets for success with Deborah Bailey, a writer for the Secrets of Success: Women Entrepreneurs Radio Blog. This enlightening interview is excerpted below and you can read the whole interview here.
Deborah: What’s your book about?
Stuart: Getting More: How To Negotiate To Succeed in Work and Life shows that the conventional tools of negotiation, of dealing with others, don’t work very well: power, leverage, logic, win-win, threats, walking out, etc. Instead, finding and valuing the perceptions of the other party creates four times as much value – twice as many agreements, and each agreement is worth twice as much. Finding the pictures in their heads gives you a better starting point. Valuing the pictures in their heads gets others to more likely meet your goals. It is the opposite of the way most people deal with others today – from government to business to personal life.
Deborah: Who do you think will benefit from reading your book?
Stuart: Anyone who deals with other people: from country presidents to administrative assistants, women, men, children, workers, family members, shoppers, travelers, and so forth. The model comprises a different and better way of dealing with others. This month I am giving a keynote speech at the World Economic Forum in Korea on Women and Leadership: what makes great leaders.
Deborah: What do you feel makes your book different from others in your category?
Stuart: It deals with perceptions and emotions, first and foremost. Everything else is unimportant unless and until you make the human connection. Your logical arguments don’t matter. Your facts are irrelevant. Your “win-win” spreadsheets will fall on deaf ears. It is true whether it’s a world leader or my kid who wants an ice cream cone.
In addition to these collaborative tools, however, Getting More shows people how to deal with hard bargainers without getting stressed out. Simply find and use the other party’s own standards, their own criteria for making decisions – whether it’s a missed service appointment or how salary increases are distributed. People hate to contradict themselves. If you give people a choice between being consistent with their standards and contradicting their standards, people will most often be consistent. You must not make yourself the issue in doing this. You need to use tact and a nice tone. But it will make your world more fair to you.
For more tips for negotiation success, or to share your negotiation story with us, make sure to connect with Stuart on Twitter and Facebook.
I had the honor to deliver the keynote speech at the National Electrical Contractor’s Association (NECA) Convention earlier this month in Las Vegas, NV. I also had a great time. Excerpted here is a blog from NECA’s website that outlines some of the tools & strategies I imparted to the group. You can read the piece in its entirety 
My 90 year old mother in law has lived in an assisted living senior facility for the past 2 years. Due to the recessed economy, management recently announced a promotional room price of $1525 per month to stir up new business. 
Why Must We Hate Ourselves So?
Today I published a piece on the Huffington Post. It addresses our capacity for good and laments how that capacity is drowned out by our saddening society of conflict. You can read the blog below or at the Huffington Post.
We have created a society so broken that almost anyone can buy guns and kill the most defenseless among us, while adults go on national television and say gun control laws are fine.
We let children grow up seeing the most grotesque forms of violence in video games, cartoons and movies – beheadings, mutilations – and yet it causes a national uproar when for a few seconds an actress’ breast is exposed on TV, that is, the body part where mother’s milk comes from.
Whether on the sports field or on the street, trivial arguments wind up in fistfights or worse, and dozens join in. We speak horribly to each other in stores, in restaurants, in travel, and then wonder why our country drops to 7th in competitiveness because we no longer give each other our best ideas.
We solve our problems by conflict in almost every aspect of our lives – families, business, politics, social settings, and everyone seems to think it’s OK. “Tude,” for “attitude,” for being rude to others, is considered cool. There are whole TV shows about it. The most visible role models fight other people to vanquish them. And then we wonder why confused people think it’s OK to kill children.
We kick people off planes with odd clothes and accents but forget that most big crimes are committed by those who look and speak just like us, taught by our own culture of violence and conflict. We’ve killed or exploited so many innocent people abroad, and wonder why others retaliate against us. Trillions of dollars that could be used for our own progress is wasted on wars we could have solved in other ways.
It is not necessary for our enemies to beat us. We are beating ourselves. We cannot even agree on a set of national priorities that helps most citizens, and we cannot even agree on how to best spend our limited funds. We are going over a cliff and are too busy bickering about it to put on the brakes or swerve out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, rich people steal billions of dollars from those scraping by and financial institutions mislead us all and it’s treated as an intellectual exercise for policy discussion. In other words, hateful behavior might somehow be OK, or OK enough to debate about it.
We are capable of so much that is great, in the arts, in science, in human relations, but it is all but drowned out because we can no longer judge right from wrong. We tolerate a system that once would never have been acceptable. When the history of our civilization is finally written, it will say that we deserved what we got, we reaped what we sowed. Because, ultimately, when things went bad, there were not enough good men and women who stood up, at whatever personal effort, and said, ENOUGH!