Markup View

Author: dalek955

Mar 7th 2016 at 8:39:58 PM

^And the choice involved is? (I know, but it's not an example unless it says.)

*In ''Literature/SixteenThirtyTwo'', Mike Stearns is fond of framing negotiations by offering his opponents the choice between amiably negotiating with good ol' him, or offending him and being handed off to a much harsher negotiator like Gretchen Richter.

For the Quotes page:
->''One of the negotiating ploys she'd learned from Mike Stearns was the value of giving your opposite number a choice between alternatives, one of which was so unsavory that it made the other look tasty even if it wasn't a taste the person would normally enjoy at all. A standard form of that maneuver was a choice between persons: ''Either make a deal with me or'' (here a finger would be pointed to a nearby ogre) ''you'll have to try coming to terms with that creature''. As often as not, Gretchen herself had been the ogre to whom Stearns had pointed. [...]\\
But there was a variation on the tactic that she'd also learned from watching Stearns. It was a more subtle version in which the opposite party was given a choice between personas rather than actual persons. In essence: ''Either make a deal with me when I'm in a good mood and we're discussing something mutually amenable, or we can wrangle over something that puts me in a really foul mood.
-->-- ''Literature/SixteenThirtyTwo''