The Critical Moments: Navigating Power Plays, Outbursts, Ultimatums, and More

By Michael Wheeler

There’s a turning point that often happens in negotiation, a moment when you realize that if you choose one path, you’re forgoing another. These small moments can have profound effects that you may not notice until hindsight, and handling them well can spell the difference between “deal” and “deadlock.” What should you do in such moments?

In The Critical Moments, an audio course from Scribd Coach, Harvard Business School negotiation professor Michael Wheeler explores how you can handle these all-important moments in negotiation by learning to anticipate them and respond effectively to surprises. In the course, Wheeler explains how to develop an agile mindset to foresee unexpected dangers; how to handle emotional outbursts, from others or yourself; how to identify when the balance of power shifts in negotiation (and what to do about it); and how to navigate high-risk scenarios like ultimatum brinkmanship.

One of the most important parts of negotiation is coming prepared. The Critical Moments will help make you ready for almost anything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribd Coach
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781094444512

Michael Wheeler

Michael Wheeler is an award-winning professor at Harvard Business School who has taught negotiation to thousands of MBA students, executives, managers, and public officials from companies and organizations around the world. Wheeler is editor of the Negotiation Journal, published by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and co-chairs the board of the non-profit Consensus Building Institute. He lives in historic Gloucester, Massachusetts, his hometown.

Book preview

The Critical Moments

THE CRITICAL MOMENTS

Navigating Power Plays, Outbursts, Ultimatums, and More

MICHAEL WHEELER

SCRIBD COACH

Copyright © 2022 by Michael Wheeler

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781094444512

First e-book edition: September 2022

Scribd, Inc.

San Francisco, California

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Introduction

Hello, and thanks for joining me. I’m Michael Wheeler, and this is The Critical Moments: Navigating Power Plays, Outbursts, Ultimatums and More, a course from Scribd Coach.

So you’re heading into a negotiation. Hopefully, you’re going in well-prepared. You know about the people in the room, the nuances of the terms being discussed, your opening offer, and your own negotiation style. You’re feeling pretty good.

But then in the middle of the negotiation, there’s a turning point: a moment where you realize that if you choose one path, you’re forgoing another.

Let me give you an example. Imagine you’re thinking about making a firm and final offer in the course of a negotiation. Before you do so, you should think about the consequences if the other party refuses to accept it. You may be forced to leave the bargaining table. Or you may be forced out of your commitment to your offer, which could make you lose credibility going forward.

It’s that kind of moment that we’ll look at in this negotiation course. What do you do in such moments? Handling them well can spell the difference between deal and deadlock. And that’s true in any negotiation — whether it’s a big business deal or an everyday transaction, like renting an apartment or buying a used car.

Often, these small events can have profound effects that we typically only recognize in hindsight. That’s true in negotiation as well as life.

Let me tell you a story about two strangers in the 1940s who happened to bump into each other in a Manhattan nightclub. They fell into conversation and discovered that one was a composer and the other was a lyricist. From that chance encounter, we’ve had a wonderful history of musical theater, as one of them was Frederick Loewe, and the other was Alan Jay Lerner. They went on to write great hits, including My Fair Lady.

They almost certainly didn’t recognize this as a critical moment at the time. And it was pure luck that it happened in the first place.

But many of these critical moments can be anticipated, even if not precisely identified. Agile negotiators prepare for these things and are quick to respond when there are surprises. In this course, we’ll discuss how