Tag Archives: politics

I was recently talking with Bob Bontempo, a professor in the School of Business at Columbia University, about the art and science of negotiation. Bob teaches students how to negotiate, and as a result, he spends a fair amount of time studying negotiating techniques in the United States and around the world. (Full disclosure: Bob is also my brother-in-law.) Bob uses examples of public negotiation from the political arena to illustrate a central point about negotiation -- if you want to understand where a negotiation is likely to end up, you need to know each side's initial position. Most successful negotiations end up close to halfway between each side's starting position. Bob notes that historically, budget negotiations have reflected this pattern, as did the original negotiations over the Bush tax credits