Many people think of negotiation as a fight, but it’s really about collaboration, Margaret Neale explains to me as we begin our walk. “What negotiation is, to me, is joint problem-solving. Let’s find a solution to a problem that we’re facing.”

Right now, the problem Neale and I face is how to get across the Stanford campus without getting soaked by an unseasonable shower. Where’s one of those famous covered walkways when you really need it?

Neale, a professor emerita of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, is an expert on negotiation and, to paraphrase the title of her book on the subject, how to get more of what you want. She’s found that the traditional approach to negotiation—two adversarial parties staring each other down over a table—doesn’t work all that well. “If you’re fighting, you’re not creating value,” she says. “You’re trying to dominate. Reframing it from battle to collaborative problem-solving opens up the opportunities for negotiation in such an amazing way.”

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