Split The Pie: On Negotiating A Job Salary And The Art of Compromise

I enjoyed this LinkedIn Live feature: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-you-lose-job-offer-negotiating-salary-/ where the key takeaway for me was:

A job offer should benefit both parties, so treat the negotiation as more of a conversation than a debate.

Barry Nalebuff, “Split the Pie”

The basic idea is that there’s “extra value” created during a negotiation that should not be put aside as shared value. That’s the 6 extra slices in the figure below that reads “SPLIT THE PIE” where the pie has been made LARGER thru the negotiation process. And both parties are needed to access those 6 extra slices. In that case,

Alice has advantage (as the employer — which they should) and gets the power they’re looking for, but Bob also gets a lot of pieces as well. But they both share the extra slices down the middle and get what each other wants in terms of the value they’ve created together.

The “NO DEAL” situation doesn’t benefit anyone.

This reminds me a lot of what Obama said about compromise.