CW 247: Improve Your Negotiating Skills with Stuart Diamond Author of 'Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals'

Whether you’re trying to get a raise at your job, solve a relationship problem, or deal with a stubborn child, negotiating is a daily part of our lives, and every human interaction is affected by emotion and logic or rationalization. Jason Hartman interviews Stuart Diamond, the author of "Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World" on improving negotiating skills and interactions with others in order to “get more.” Stuart stresses the importance of making the human connection and finding the pictures in people’s heads, knowing them better in order to better meet their needs, which gives a person a more competitive edge and adds tremendous wealth to any deal. Emotions play a huge part in all interactions. “Emotions destroy negotiations because they distract people from their goals,” says Stuart. When people get emotional, they stop listening, and it becomes a priority to find out a person’s emotional temperature before proceeding on any deal. Stuart talks about key points in how people should treat one another, stating how people today have a lack of trust in one another and have a tendency to demonize one another rather than using simple solutions to solve conflicts. “Fighting is the last choice; not the first choice,” explains Stuart. Stuart Diamond has taught and advised on negotiation and cultural diversity to corporate and government leaders in more than 40 countries, including in Eastern Europe, former Soviet Republics, China, Latin America, the Middle East, Canada, South Africa and the United States. He holds an M.B.A. with honors from Wharton Business School, ranked #1 globally by The Financial Times where he is currently a professor from practice. For more than 90% of the semesters over the past 15 years his negotiation course has been the most popular in the school based on the course auction, and he has won multiple teaching awards. He has taught negotiation at Harvard Law School, from which he holds a law degree and is a former Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He has directed a negotiation consulting firm in Cambridge, MA.