The Long Game (or, what you should never do in a negotiations class)
People, like elephants, remember, and their memories can cast a long shadow indeed. David, one of my classmates, learned this the hard way when he forgot about the Long Game during a negotiation exercise.
It happened a few weeks into the MBA. As part of a classroom exercise, we were asked to team up and negotiate a series of deals with an opposing team. The negotiation was an illustration of the so-called iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, which meant that you could get a better result by cooperating with the other team – but also that the opportunity to cheat them existed.
After the exercise was concluded, the professor gathered everybody in the classroom to discuss the results. And this is where David established an unfortunate reputation. David’s team had done excellently for themselves, getting one of the highest scores in the class, so the professor asked David, “So, what was your team’s negotiation strategy?”
With a big smile, David answered, “We didn’t have a strategy. We just thought it could be fun to screw the other team.”
That comment haunted David for the rest of the MBA. He was a nice guy to have a beer with, but with his behavior in the exercise, he inadvertently branded himself as a guy you should be careful about doing business with. People have a very strong memory for bad behavior, and whether it is part of a classroom exercise or not doesn’t really matter. It is never ‘just a game’; everything you do in the MBA, good or bad, becomes part of how people see you.
Later that year, as we were asked to do a similar exercise, I realised how powerful this effect was. In this second exercise, my team had decided to try to cooperate with our opponents – but to our great frustration, the leader of the opposing team refused to trust our good intentions. As a result, neither team got a very high score, so after the exercise, I asked him why they hadn’t been willing to trust us.
His answer: “I’m sorry, but we thought David was on your team.”
He wasn’t, but I couldn’t fault their logic. David may have won that first negotiation exercise, and maybe he got a good grade in the class as well. But there is a larger game being played, and in that, David certainly didn’t come out on top. That game is the Long Game, and we are all players in it. Even today, if David called me with a business proposal, I would think twice about saying yes. It’s worth remembering, should you ever feel tempted to screw somebody over, that the stakes may be higher than you think.
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