This Sunday’s New York Times had a few thoughts I want to share with you. The first deals with negotiation. In an article about President Obama’s attempts to negotiate with Speaker Boehner, Richard Thaler was noting that Boehner just wasn’t in a position of sufficient power to deliver promises and wrote:

“A valuable principle of negotiation is to ‘never bargain with someone who does not have the powerto say yes'”

How true that is. Think of the mediations you may have attended where the defendant showed up with no real authority and the person in power wasn’t there. You might as  well go home.

In an interview by Adam Bryant with Dinesh C. Paliwal CEO who emphasized simplicity. He said his former boss had told him that he wanted him to write out the presentation or problem as many pages as  you want. Then reduce it to one page. Then write it as half a page. Present it as a simple three step process to accomplish the goal or solve the problem.

He also didn’t like PowerPoint. He said Where is the power and where is the point? If you cannot explain it to me without slides, you don’t understand the problem.

So, there’s my wisdom from the New York Times for  this week.