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Negotiation - a basic skill
I have often wondered why we don’t equip ourselves and our staff with core negotiating skills. Whether we want to or not, realize it or not, are good at it or not, we are negotiating all.the.time. If it is such a frequent need, wouldn’t spending a little time getting better at it, be beneficial? It is not for want of excellent material - a little bit of study and intentional practice will go a long way to make certain aspects of negotiation a basic habit. And having a simple framework to help you prepare for difficult negotiations will ease your mind when you have to step into those situations. Here is my recap (from my notes from 20 years ago 😀 ) mostly derived from the Fisher, Ury, Patton classic.
The 7 key elements of win-win negotiations:
Identify interests - yours and theirs. Assert your interests, not positions.
Generate options - almost always, there are options for mutual gain.
Identify objective criteria - legitimacy through fairness, law, cost etc.
Establish BATNA - list your best alternatives to a negotiated agreement.
Examine commitments - a range of commitments exists (as outcome).
Effective communication - don’t forget the value of silence.
Examine relationship - current and future. Attack the problem not the person.
Everyone can get better at negotiations - and the workplace abounds in transactions which are inherently negotiations (if you only stop and thought about it for a second). So the next time you are planning an uncertain conversation - with your boss, team member, peer, external partner, (or your spouse on where to go on vacation) - do a mental checklist of the 7 key elements. For the really high stakes negotiations, sit down and write out the relevant details for each element - you will be glad that you did.
This week in AI
It is hard (impossible?) to keep up with the advancements in AI. A lot of interesting news came out but this particular one caught my eye - Google Deepmind’s announcement about AlphaGenome. While I understand very little of the underlying architecture and details described in the paper, the assertion in the paper about the predictive capabilities that it unlocks in disease understanding and synthetic biology is enough to make me want to learn more. While people decry reliability issues with LLM’s and folks waste time (and precious energy) doing silly videos, real advancements are happening at a rapid pace. Imagine the predictive power these could bring to understanding complex system behavior.
This week in Cyber
Like every other week in cyber news, iVanti did not disappoint. And of course they always gives us comforting news - “"We are aware of a very limited number of customers whose solution has been exploited at the time of disclosure," warns Ivanti.” The gift that keeps on giving.
And a mix of AI and cyber - the security aspects of AI will keep us up at night for a while. A recent report from neuraltrust.ai suggests a novel way to bypass some guardrails. The key findings regarding the Semantic Chaining attack are that current multimodal AI safety filters are reactive and fragmented, making them vulnerable to multi-stage attacks that exploit their "blind spots". A "semantic chaining" attack can bypass AI safety filters that evaluate prompts separately by using a sequence of instructions. This method can enable the generation of prohibited content, including text embedded within images.
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