The Thinkers Behind the Tactics

Asymmetric information and adverse selection. When sellers know the quality of what they sell and buyers cannot tell, buyers will pay only for average quality, so owners of good goods withdraw and average quality falls. Using the used-car market as his example, Akerlof showed that such gaps in information can shrink a market and in the extreme make it collapse.

The progress principle. From nearly 12,000 daily diary entries by professionals working on complex projects, Amabile and Kramer found that making progress in meaningful work, even in small steps, is a major driver of motivation, positive emotion, and creativity at work. The book is written for managers.

External activity of teams. Interviews with new-product team managers, log data, and questionnaires from 45 teams showed teams engaging in vertical communication aimed at molding the views of top management, which the authors call ambassador activity, along with horizontal coordination and scanning of the technical and market environment. The type of external activity, as well as its amount, predicted performance, and teams with a comprehensive external strategy did best over time.

The sunk cost effect. The sunk cost effect is a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once money, effort, or time has been invested in it. In a field study, theater patrons who had paid full price for season tickets attended more plays than those given discounts; questionnaire studies found that people who had already invested rated a project's chance of success higher, and the authors trace the behavior partly to a wish not to appear wasteful.

The pratfall effect. Listeners rated a highly competent person as more attractive after he committed a clumsy blunder, spilling coffee, and rated a mediocre person as less attractive after the same blunder. The authors suggested that a small flaw makes a superior person seem more human and approachable. Caveat: The result is a single laboratory study and the effect is conditional: it depends on the person already being seen as highly competent, and the same blunder hurt the average performer.

Conformity to a unanimous majority. Subjects judging which of three lines matched a standard heard a unanimous group of confederates give the same wrong answer on most trials. About a third of responses on those trials went along with the majority, and about three quarters of subjects conformed at least once, though most responses stayed correct and about a quarter of subjects never conformed. Caveat: Textbooks often overstate the result; Asch's own emphasis included the independence most subjects showed. A meta-analysis of 133 line-judgment studies (Bond and Smith, Psychological Bulletin, 1996) found that conformity varies with culture.

The effect of a single dissenter. When one other person in the group gave the correct answer, conformity fell sharply. When that partner later switched to the majority, conformity rose again to the level seen with no partner at all.

Issue selling. Top management's time and attention are critical, limited resources, and issue selling is the process by which people below try to direct that attention to particular issues early in decision-making. Dutton and Ashford analyze it as upward influence, as claiming behavior, and as impression management.

Packaging, involvement, and process moves. Managers who sold issues successfully used packaging moves, such as making the business case and tying the issue to other goals the organization valued; involvement moves, bringing in peers and superiors through formal and informal channels; and process moves, such as preparing before pitching, choosing formal or informal channels, and judging timing. Caveat: The findings rest on retrospective accounts from managers in a single hospital.

Bootlegging. Bootlegging is innovative work that researchers carry out without formal authorization, usually on their own initiative and with discretionary resources. Augsdorfer studies how such work arises inside corporate research and development and how it contributes to innovation and learning under uncertainty.

Tit for tat and the shadow of the future. In computer tournaments of the repeated prisoner's dilemma, the winning strategy was tit for tat, submitted by Anatol Rapoport: cooperate on the first move, then do whatever the other player did last. Axelrod attributed its success to being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear, and showed that cooperation can emerge among self-interested players when the likelihood of meeting again, the shadow of the future, is large enough.

Outcome bias. Across five studies, people rated the same decision, made with the same information, as better thought out and its maker as more competent when the outcome happened to be good than when it was bad. Outcomes are used as evidence about decision quality even where they carry no such information. Caveat: A large preregistered replication of Experiment 1 (International Review of Social Psychology, 2023) reproduced the direction of the effect.

Omission bias. People judge harm caused by failing to act as less bad than the same harm caused by acting, even when intentions and consequences are the same, partly because they do not see omissions as causing outcomes. Baron and colleagues describe this as a useful rule of thumb applied where it does not belong. Caveat: A preregistered replication (Jamison and colleagues, 2020) reproduced the original result.

Networks of successful change agents. This Harvard Business Review article reports a study of 68 change initiatives in the UK National Health Service. Change agents who were central in the informal network did better whatever their formal rank; agents who bridged otherwise disconnected people did better with large changes; and close ties to fence-sitters always helped, because the ambivalent were reluctant to disappoint a friend, while close ties to resisters helped with small changes and hindered large ones.

The mythical fixed pie. Negotiators often assume that their interests are directly opposed, so that whatever the other side gains they lose. The assumption is often false and leads them to miss trades that would leave both better off; Negotiating Rationally treats it as one of the common mistakes of negotiators.

Contingent contracts. Parties who share an interest in a deal can deadlock because they expect different futures. A contingent contract makes some terms depend on how an uncertain event turns out, so the disagreement itself becomes the basis for a deal; the authors argue such contracts can also offset negotiators' biases and share risk between the parties.

Predictable surprises. A predictable surprise is a disaster that catches leaders off guard although they had the information to foresee it. Cognitive, organizational, and political biases keep foreseeable threats off the agenda, and the authors' remedy has three steps: recognize the threat, prioritize it, and mobilize support for preventive action.

Negotiating several issues at once. Discussing multiple issues together, and making package offers, lets each side trade what it values less for what it values more, which is how value is created when priorities differ. The book also discusses the post-settlement settlement, a search for a better deal after the first is signed. Caveat: The book's advice to make several package offers at the same time is described here from secondary summaries; the controlled research on multiple equivalent simultaneous offers is by other authors (the Program on Negotiation cites Leonardelli and colleagues).

Committing now to act later. In the Save More Tomorrow program, employees agree in advance to put part of their future pay raises into retirement saving, so take-home pay never falls. In the first implementation, 78 percent of those offered the plan joined, 80 percent of them stayed through the fourth raise, and average saving rates rose from 3.5 percent to 13.6 percent over 40 months. Caveat: The U.S. Department of Labor's Clearinghouse for Labor Evaluation and Research rated the study's causal evidence low, because the comparison of participants and nonparticipants used no statistical controls.

RAPID decision roles. Rogers and Blenko assign each role in an important decision a letter: recommend, agree, perform, input, and decide. The person who holds the D is the single point of accountability who commits the organization to action, and those with an agree role hold a veto that obliges them to offer an alternative or escalate; they argue that making these roles explicit removes decision bottlenecks.

Symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is prestige, honor, and recognition, which work as a resource because others acknowledge them as legitimate. It can be built from economic or cultural resources and converted back into them, and its power depends on its material basis going unrecognized as such.

Currencies of exchange. Cohen and Bradford build influence on exchange: people cooperate when they receive something they value in return, and each person trades in particular currencies. They group currencies as inspiration-related, task-related, position-related (recognition and visibility among them), relationship-related, and personal, and rest the model on a law of reciprocity.

Structural sources of influence. In a study of 140 nonsupervisory employees of a newspaper publisher, Brass found that people's positions in the workflow, communication, and friendship networks, including their centrality and their access to and control over others, were related to how influential colleagues judged them to be and to later promotions.

Structural holes and brokerage. A structural hole is a gap between people or groups who are not connected to each other. Someone whose network bridges such holes gains advantages of information access, timing, referrals, and control, because they see and can combine what the separate groups know.

Brokerage and good ideas. Because opinion and behavior are more alike within groups than between them, people connected across groups are exposed to alternative ways of thinking. In Burt's study of managers in a large electronics company, those whose networks spanned structural holes were more likely to express ideas, less likely to have them dismissed, and more likely to have them judged valuable.

External activity of teams. Interviews with new-product team managers, log data, and questionnaires from 45 teams showed teams engaging in vertical communication aimed at molding the views of top management, which the authors call ambassador activity, along with horizontal coordination and scanning of the technical and market environment. The type of external activity, as well as its amount, predicted performance, and teams with a comprehensive external strategy did best over time.

Disruptive innovation and separate organizations. Well-run incumbents fail against disruptive technologies partly because current customers drive how they allocate resources, and small new markets cannot meet a large company's growth needs. Christensen argues that incumbents succeed when they place the disruptive business in an autonomous organization sized to be rewarded by small wins and small customers, free of the parent's processes and values.

Reciprocity and reciprocal concessions. People feel obliged to repay what others give them, including favors they did not ask for. The 1975 paper showed a related move: after refusing a large request, people were more likely to agree to a smaller one, which the authors explained as returning a concession with a concession. Caveat: A direct replication of the door-in-the-face study (Genschow and colleagues, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021) reproduced the effect.

Commitment and consistency. Once people have taken a position, especially a public or written one, they feel pressure to act in line with it. Small early commitments can therefore make larger later ones easier to obtain.

Social proof. When unsure what to do, people look to what others like them are doing, and the more people seem to be doing something, the more correct it looks.

Authority and scarcity. People tend to defer to those who appear to hold legitimate expertise or position. They also value what seems rare, dwindling, or available only for a short time more highly.

Applying the principles at work. A practitioner article that pairs each of the six principles with advice for managers: uncover real similarities and offer genuine praise (liking); give what you want to receive (reciprocity); use peer power whenever it is available (social proof); make commitments active, public, and voluntary (consistency); expose your expertise and do not assume it is self-evident (authority); and highlight unique benefits and exclusive information (scarcity).

Liking. People are more easily persuaded by those they like, and liking grows with similarity and genuine praise.

Privileged moments and unity. What is focal in a person's attention just before a message arrives shapes how the message is received, so a communicator can create privileged moments in which an audience is more receptive. The book also adds a seventh principle, unity: people are more influenced by those they see as sharing an identity with them, being together or acting together.

Transaction costs and the boundaries of the firm. Using the market has costs, such as finding prices and negotiating and enforcing contracts. Firms exist because directing activity by authority is sometimes cheaper, and a firm grows until organizing one more transaction inside it costs as much as buying it in the market.

Bargaining and transaction costs. If bargaining were costless, the parties affected by a harmful activity would negotiate to the efficient outcome however rights were initially assigned. Because bargaining is costly in practice, who holds the rights and how expensive it is to negotiate determine what actually happens.

Currencies of exchange. Cohen and Bradford build influence on exchange: people cooperate when they receive something they value in return, and each person trades in particular currencies. They group currencies as inspiration-related, task-related, position-related (recognition and visibility among them), relationship-related, and personal, and rest the model on a law of reciprocity.

Control over zones of uncertainty. Where impersonal rules fix most outcomes in advance, people gain power by controlling the zones of uncertainty that remain. In the state-owned factory Crozier studied, production was tightly regulated, production workers were barred from repairing their own machines, and the maintenance men, who alone could deal with breakdowns, kept a large measure of parallel power.

The firm as a bargaining coalition. Because the firm is a coalition, its goals are set by bargaining among members whose priorities and information differ, and members are held in the coalition by side payments. The resulting goals are compromises that must all be met, following an implicit order of priority.

Organizational slack. Cyert and March describe the firm as a coalition of groups, such as managers, workers, stockholders, and suppliers, whose goals are compromises negotiated among them and whose bargaining is largely over the distribution of side payments. Organizational slack is the difference between the firm's total resources and the payments needed to keep the coalition together; it plays a stabilizing and adaptive role, giving the firm room to meet competing demands when conditions change.

Diffusion of responsibility. In an intercom study, students who believed others could also hear a fellow participant's apparent seizure were less likely to help, and slower when they did, than students who believed they alone could hear it. Darley and Latané explained this as diffusion of responsibility: each witness feels a smaller share of the obligation to act when others are present. Caveat: The case often used to introduce this research, the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese with "38 witnesses", was misreported, and The New York Times acknowledged in 2016 that its original account was inaccurate. A meta-analysis (Fischer and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2011) found the bystander effect real but weaker in clearly dangerous emergencies.

The crude law of social relations. Deutsch studied what makes a conflict turn out constructive or destructive. His summary, the crude law of social relations, holds that the characteristic effects of a relationship tend to elicit that relationship: cooperative moves tend to draw cooperation in return, and suspicious, competitive ones tend to draw competition.

Real options and the value of waiting. Most investments are at least partly irreversible and made under uncertainty, so a firm that can delay holds an option, and committing now gives up the value of waiting for better information. The book treats such choices with the tools of financial options, which is why it is usually cited as the founding text of real options analysis in economics.

Issue selling. Top management's time and attention are critical, limited resources, and issue selling is the process by which people below try to direct that attention to particular issues early in decision-making. Dutton and Ashford analyze it as upward influence, as claiming behavior, and as impression management.

Packaging, involvement, and process moves. Managers who sold issues successfully used packaging moves, such as making the business case and tying the issue to other goals the organization valued; involvement moves, bringing in peers and superiors through formal and informal channels; and process moves, such as preparing before pitching, choosing formal or informal channels, and judging timing. Caveat: The findings rest on retrospective accounts from managers in a single hospital.

Symbolic reassurance. Much of politics works through symbols, such as rituals, official language, and public gestures, which reassure or arouse the general public while tangible benefits often go to small organized groups. Edelman argued that many programs believed to serve a mass public in fact benefit relatively few.

Constructed problems, leaders, and enemies. Political problems, leaders, and enemies are constructed and interpreted for the public, and those interpretations tend to support established inequalities. The book devotes chapters to the construction and uses of social problems, of political leaders, and of political enemies.

A spectrum of reasons for failure. Edmondson argues that managers treat failure the wrong way by assuming it is always bad. She sets out a spectrum of reasons for failure, from blameworthy causes such as deliberate deviance and inattention to praiseworthy ones such as uncertainty and experimentation, and distinguishes preventable failures in routine operations from unavoidable failures in complex work. Most failures are not blameworthy, so organizations learn only if people feel safe to report and analyze them.

How fast strategic decisions are made. In an inductive study of eight microcomputer firms, executives who made strategic decisions quickly used more real-time information, considered several alternatives at the same time, relied on experienced counselors, resolved conflict actively, and integrated each decision with other decisions and tactical plans. The fast decision-makers also performed better. Caveat: The evidence is case studies of eight firms in one industry, and the model has not been comprehensively tested on a larger sample.

Consensus with qualification. Most fast teams tried to reach consensus by involving everyone; if they agreed, the choice was made, and if they did not, the senior executive decided, guided by the team's input. This kept conflict from stalling the decision.

Power as dependence. The power of one party over another rests on the other's dependence, and dependence grows with how much the other values what the first provides and how few alternative sources it has. Power is therefore a property of the relationship, and Emerson described balancing operations that change it, among them reducing dependence by finding alternative sources and extending one's network of relations.

Cognitive dissonance. Holding two cognitions that do not fit together, such as a belief and an action that contradicts it, produces an uncomfortable state that people are motivated to reduce. Often the easiest way to reduce it is to change the belief to fit what one has already done.

Insufficient justification. Subjects paid one dollar to tell another person that a dull task was interesting later rated the task as more enjoyable than subjects paid twenty dollars. With little outside justification for the lie, they brought their attitude into line with their behavior. Caveat: Results in this paradigm have been mixed since the 1960s. A 2024 multilab replication of a related induced-compliance study (Vaidis, Sleegers, and colleagues, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science) found attitude change regardless of whether participants had a choice, contrary to the dissonance prediction.

Social comparison. People evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves with others, especially when no objective standard is available, and they tend to compare with people similar to themselves.

Separate the people from the problem. Negotiators are people first, and the relationship tends to become entangled with the substance. Fisher and Ury advise dealing with perception, emotion, and communication directly and separately from the substantive issues, for example by discussing each side's perceptions and helping the other side save face.

Focus on interests behind positions. A position is what a party says it wants; an interest is the reason it wants it. Their example is the Sinai in 1978: Israel's interest was security and Egypt's was sovereignty, and an agreement that met both interests became possible once the talks moved below the opposed positions.

Invent options for mutual gain. Before deciding, the parties should generate several possible agreements, brainstorming separately and together, and look for options that meet shared interests or that trade on interests that differ but are compatible.

Insist on objective criteria. Negotiate on some basis independent of the will of either side, such as market value or precedent. The parties search for criteria jointly, keep an open mind about which apply, and yield to principle and never to pressure.

BATNA. A party's best alternative to a negotiated agreement is what it can obtain without negotiating. Knowing and improving it protects against accepting an agreement that should be rejected and is the main source of negotiating power when the other side is stronger.

Negotiation jujitsu and the one-text procedure. When the other side insists on bargaining over positions, Fisher and Ury advise declining to push back against them and redirecting attention to interests and options. One method is the one-text procedure, in which a third party drafts a single text, asks each side for criticism, and revises it round after round; their example is the United States drafting the Camp David texts between Egypt and Israel in 1978.

Underestimating compliance. In campus and field studies, people asking for help overestimated by about half how many people they would need to approach before someone agreed. Flynn and Lake attribute this to askers underestimating the social pressure others feel to say yes, and direct requests worked better than indirect ones.

Disciplinary power and panopticism. Foucault describes a shift from punishment as public spectacle to discipline, a form of power that works through observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. Using Bentham's design for a prison in which inmates can always be seen but never know when they are watched, he argued that power which is visible and unverifiable leads people to regulate themselves, so enforcement is rarely needed.

Managing your boss. Gabarro and Kotter define managing your boss as consciously working with your superior to obtain the best possible results for you, the boss, and the company. They treat the relationship as one of mutual dependence between two fallible people, which works when the subordinate understands the boss's goals, pressures, and working style, and is dependable and honest in return.

First offers as anchors. In three experiments, whichever party made the first offer, buyer or seller, obtained the better outcome, and first offers strongly predicted final prices. The advantage disappeared when the other negotiator focused on information inconsistent with the first offer: the opponent's alternatives, the opponent's reservation price, or his or her own target.

Impression management, front and back regions. Goffman treats social life as performance: people manage the impressions others form of them, and those performing together act as a team that shares an interest in the show succeeding. Performances happen in a front region before an audience, while preparation and contradicting facts are kept to a back region the audience does not see.

Cooling the mark out. Borrowing from confidence games, where a cooler stays behind to console the victim so he accepts his loss quietly, Goffman describes how organizations and groups help people who have lost a role or status accept the loss without making trouble. One common method is to offer a substitute status that lets the person save face.

Courtesy stigma. Stigma is an attribute that discredits a person in the eyes of others. It spreads by association: people close to a stigmatized person can be obliged to share some of the discredit, which Goffman called a courtesy stigma.

Frames and fabrications. People make sense of what is happening through frames, organizing principles that answer the question of what is going on here. A fabrication, in his definition, is the deliberate management of activity so that others form a false belief about what is going on.

The strength of weak ties. Close friends tend to know the same people and the same things, while acquaintances connect otherwise separate groups. Weak ties therefore act as bridges that carry new information and spread ideas across a network, more than strong ties do.

Threshold models. Each person has a threshold, the number or share of others who must act before he or she will join. The outcome of collective behavior, such as a strike, a riot, or the spread of an innovation, depends on the distribution of thresholds, so small changes in who goes first can produce very different results.

Powerless communication and asking for advice. Grant argues that speaking tentatively, asking questions, and inviting other views can win over skeptical audiences, provided competence is signaled elsewhere. Asking for advice is a form of influence for those without authority: the adviser takes the asker's perspective and becomes committed to the outcome.

The five-minute favor. Taking the phrase from the entrepreneur Adam Rifkin, Grant describes the five-minute favor: help that adds a lot of value to someone else at little cost to the giver, which over time builds a wide network of goodwill.

Leading with weaknesses and repeated exposure. Grant describes what he calls the Sarick effect: presenting the weaknesses of one's own idea first can disarm an audience, build trust, and leave listeners fewer objections to raise. He also draws on research on mere exposure to argue that unfamiliar ideas often gain acceptance only after people have encountered them several times.

Law 26: Keep Your Hands Clean. Greene advises keeping one's own reputation clear of mistakes and unpleasant work by having others do the dirty work and by finding scapegoats to take the blame.

Law 7: Get Others to Do the Work for You, but Always Take the Credit. Use other people's skill, time, and energy to advance your aims while taking the credit for the result.

Commander's intent. Under the principle of simplicity, the Heaths borrow the military idea of commander's intent: a short, plain statement of the goal that lets people act on and pass on a plan when the detailed instructions no longer fit.

Direct the rider, motivate the elephant, shape the path. The Heaths frame change as a conflict between the rational mind and the emotional mind. Their advice includes finding the bright spots, what already works somewhere in the system, and copying it; scripting the critical moves, because ambiguity breeds resistance; shrinking the change into steps small enough to take; and shaping the path by tweaking the environment so the desired behavior is easier.

Widening options, ooching, and tripwires. The Heaths offer a four-step process against common decision biases. It includes widening options and avoiding whether-or-not choices; ooching, running small experiments to test an idea before committing; and tripwires, signals set in advance that prompt a decision to be reconsidered.

Getting on the balcony. Heifetz and Linsky advise leaders to step back from the action, to get on the balcony, so they can see the larger pattern of what is happening, including their own part in it, before stepping back in.

Pacing the work. People can absorb only so much difficult change at once, so a leader who wants a change to last regulates how much is asked of people and when.

Thinking politically. Under the heading of thinking politically, they advise keeping the opposition close and working with opponents as well as allies, and accepting responsibility for your piece of the mess, acknowledging the leader's own contribution to the problem.

Sponsorship. Hewlett distinguishes sponsors from mentors: a mentor gives advice, while a sponsor uses his or her own standing to advocate for and advance a protégé. Sponsorship is an exchange in which the protégé supplies strong performance and loyalty.

Strategic contingencies. Subunits of an organization gain power over one another because the division of labor makes some of them control contingencies on which others depend. A subunit's power rises with its capacity to cope with uncertainty for others, its nonsubstitutability, and its centrality in the workflow; each condition is necessary and none is sufficient alone.

Managing a network. Hill and Lineback name three imperatives for managers: manage yourself, manage a network, and manage a team. Managing a network means understanding how power and influence work in the organization and building mutually beneficial relationships with the people a manager needs beyond his or her own team.

Exit and voice. Members dissatisfied with an organization can exit, by leaving, or use voice, by trying to change it from within through complaint, protest, or proposals. Exit signals that something is wrong; voice is more informative because it says what, and Hirschman treats voice as political by nature.

The interplay of exit, voice, and loyalty. Easy exit tends to undercut voice, since those who can leave rarely bother to complain. Yet Hirschman also argues that the effectiveness of voice is strengthened by the possibility of exit, and he treats loyalty as what holds back exit long enough for voice to work.

Source credibility and the sleeper effect. Hovland and Weiss gave subjects identical articles attributed to trustworthy or untrustworthy sources. Right after reading, the trustworthy source produced far more opinion change; a few weeks later the difference had largely disappeared, because people kept the content but stopped connecting it to the source, which they called the sleeper effect. Caveat: A meta-analysis (Kumkale and Albarracín, Psychological Bulletin, 2004) found that a sleeper effect appears only under particular conditions, such as strong initial impact of both message and discounting cue, so it should not be presented as a general rule.

The communicator's credibility. The Yale program led by Hovland studied persuasion as a matter of who says what to whom. One of its central findings is that the same message is judged differently depending on the perceived expertise and trustworthiness of the person delivering it.

One-sided and two-sided messages. In an Army experiment on a controversial question, a presentation that also gave the arguments on the other side was more effective for men initially opposed to its conclusion and for better educated men, while a one-sided presentation was more effective for men who already agreed and for the less educated. The authors offered the pattern as a hypothesis deserving further study, since some subgroups were small.

Managing conflict across units. Weiss and Hughes argue that conflict is a natural result of cross-unit work and should be managed: give people a common method for resolving conflict and criteria for trade-offs, use escalations as coaching opportunities, and establish and enforce a requirement of joint escalation. Under joint escalation, the parties present a disagreement to their bosses together, which gives the decision-maker every side of the dispute and removes the advantage of getting to one's own boss first.

Operational, personal, and strategic networks. Drawing on a study of 30 managers moving into leadership roles, this Harvard Business Review article distinguishes operational networking, aimed at doing one's current job well; personal networking, outside contacts for learning and advancement; and strategic networking, the ability to marshal information, support, and resources from one part of a network to achieve results in another. Many managers neglect the strategic kind.

Groupthink. In cohesive decision-making groups, the drive for agreement can override realistic appraisal of alternatives. Janis drew the idea from case studies of policy fiascoes such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and listed symptoms including an illusion of unanimity, self-censorship, direct pressure on dissenters, and self-appointed guardians who screen the leader from unwelcome information. Caveat: The evidence is mainly qualitative case studies. Kramer (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1998) reexamined the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam cases with later evidence and concluded the hypothesis overstates small-group dynamics and understates political calculation.

Remedies for groupthink. Janis proposed remedies, which he presented as hypotheses to be tested: assign every member the role of critical evaluator, have the leader withhold a preferred answer at the start, set up parallel groups on the same question, bring in outside experts to challenge the group, appoint a devil's advocate at each meeting, and hold a second-chance meeting to air remaining doubts before a final decision.

Loss aversion and reference dependence. People judge outcomes as gains or losses relative to a reference point, usually the current position, and losses weigh more than gains of the same size; the 1979 paper puts it as losses looming larger than gains. Because the reference point can be moved by how a choice is described, the same option can be made to look like a gain or a loss. Caveat: The often quoted figure that losses count about twice as much as gains comes from later estimates, notably a median coefficient of 2.25 in Tversky and Kahneman's 1992 paper, and is not a constant. Gal and Rucker (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2018) argue that the evidence for a general loss-gain asymmetry is weaker than usually assumed; reference dependence itself is less disputed.

Framing effects. Equivalent descriptions of the same choice produce predictable reversals of preference: in the best-known example, a public health program described in terms of lives saved draws risk-averse choices, and the same program described in terms of lives lost draws risk-seeking ones. The frame a decision-maker adopts is controlled partly by how the problem is put to them.

Availability and anchoring. People judge likelihood with a few mental shortcuts that are usually useful and sometimes badly wrong. Availability means judging how frequent or probable something is by how easily instances come to mind; anchoring means estimating by adjusting from a starting value, and the adjustment is usually too small.

System 1 and System 2. Kahneman describes two modes of thinking: System 1 is fast, automatic, and effortless, System 2 slow, deliberate, and effortful. Much judgment runs on System 1, and System 2 engages only when something demands effort, so people under time pressure or overload tend to accept the intuitive answer. Caveat: The book's chapter on priming relies on studies that have since failed to replicate, and it cites ego-depletion work; a 23-lab preregistered replication (Hagger and colleagues, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016) found an ego-depletion effect close to zero. The two-system description itself is a descriptive framework.

The inside view and the outside view. Decision-makers tend to treat each problem as unique: they isolate the current choice from future ones and ignore statistics from past cases. Taking this inside view, which anchors forecasts on the specific plan and its scenarios, produces bold, optimistic forecasts; the authors contrast it with an outside view that judges the plan by the results of a class of similar past cases.

Sources of managerial power. Kanter treats power as the capacity to get things done and locates it in a manager's position and access to resources, information, and organizational support. Positions that carry discretion, recognition, and relevance to central tasks confer power, as do connections with superiors, peers, and subordinates, while routine, rule-bound jobs leave people relatively powerless.

Corporate entrepreneurs and coalitions. Kanter studied innovation inside large American companies, carried out by managers she called corporate entrepreneurs. Innovators had to gather support, money, and information for their projects beyond their own authority, and organizations that innovated well were those whose structures let people build coalitions and teams across units to back and carry out new ideas.

Fair process. Drawing on their research into trust, idea sharing, and performance, Kim and Mauborgne argue that people will commit to a decision, even one they disagree with, if they believe the process that produced it was fair. Fair process has three elements: engagement (asking for people's input and letting them challenge ideas), explanation (making clear why the final decision was made), and expectation clarity (stating the new rules and standards once the decision is set).

The premortem. Before a project starts, team members assume it has already failed and each generates plausible reasons for the failure. The exercise makes it safe for knowledgeable people with reservations to raise them during planning, when the plan can still change. Kahneman discusses Klein's premortem approvingly in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), chapter 24.

Moves and turns. Alongside the negotiation over issues runs a shadow negotiation over how the parties will treat each other. When a counterpart makes a move that puts one down or off balance, Kolb and Williams describe turns that answer it: interrupting the exchange to reset it, naming the move openly, correcting the claim with another account of the facts, and diverting attention back to the substance. Caveat: The list of four turns was confirmed through a secondary account by a colleague of Kolb's; some summaries describe more.

How mediators work. Kolb's study of labor mediators, and the profiles in When Talk Works, describe, through close study and interview-based profiles of practicing mediators, how mediators actually go about managing disputes.

Agendas and networks. In his study of general managers, Kotter found that effective ones set agendas early and built networks of cooperative relationships with the many people their agendas depended on, inside and outside the formal chain of command, and then used those networks to get the agendas carried out.

Managing dependence. Managerial work is shaped by dependence on many people over whom the manager has little or no formal authority. Kotter argues that managers must therefore build power and influence beyond their formal authority to get things done.

The guiding coalition and short-term wins. Kotter sets out an eight-stage process for major change, built against eight common errors he observed. Its second stage is creating a guiding coalition with enough position power, expertise, credibility, and leadership that those left out cannot easily block progress; a later stage is generating visible short-term wins that sustain commitment to the effort. Caveat: The eight stages are a practitioner model drawn from Kotter's experience with change efforts.

See, feel, change. Kotter and Cohen argue that people change behavior more readily when shown something that makes them feel the problem than when given analysis alone. Their best-known example is Jon Stegner, who had one of each of the 424 kinds of gloves his company bought, each tagged with its price, piled on the boardroom table, which moved division presidents to act on purchasing.

Six approaches to resistance. Kotter and Schlesinger list six ways to deal with resistance to change: education and communication, participation and involvement, facilitation and support, negotiation and agreement, manipulation and co-optation, and explicit and implicit coercion. Each suits different situations and carries costs; negotiation offers incentives to active or potential resisters, and coercion is fast and suited to change agents with power, at the price of resentment.

Managing your boss. Gabarro and Kotter define managing your boss as consciously working with your superior to obtain the best possible results for you, the boss, and the company. They treat the relationship as one of mutual dependence between two fallible people, which works when the subordinate understands the boss's goals, pressures, and working style, and is dependable and honest in return.

Advice, trust, and communication networks. This Harvard Business Review article argues that much of the real work of companies happens through informal networks that cut across the formal chart. The authors map three of them, the advice network (who goes to whom for technical help), the trust network, and the communication network, by surveying employees, and show that the advice hubs and trusted people often differ from those the chart would suggest.

Giving a reason. People at a copying machine were asked to let someone go ahead of them, with no reason, with an empty reason ("because I have to make copies"), or with a real one. For a small request the empty reason worked almost as well as the real one; for a larger request it worked about as poorly as giving no reason, and only the real reason raised compliance. Caveat: Popular retellings say almost any reason works. The data do not support that for larger requests, a point made by Mark Liberman on Language Log; the study was also limited to one setting.

Diffusion of responsibility. In an intercom study, students who believed others could also hear a fellow participant's apparent seizure were less likely to help, and slower when they did, than students who believed they alone could hear it. Darley and Latané explained this as diffusion of responsibility: each witness feels a smaller share of the obligation to act when others are present. Caveat: The case often used to introduce this research, the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese with "38 witnesses", was misreported, and The New York Times acknowledged in 2016 that its original account was inaccurate. A meta-analysis (Fischer and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2011) found the bystander effect real but weaker in clearly dangerous emergencies.

Differentiation and integration. In a comparative study of firms in different industries, Lawrence and Lorsch found that units facing different parts of the environment develop different goals, time horizons, and styles (differentiation), and that high-performing firms matched this with strong integration, unity of effort across those units. The more differentiated the units, the more the firm needed dedicated integrating roles and effective ways of resolving conflict between them.

The integrator role. This practitioner article in Harvard Business Review draws on the same research to describe the integrator, a manager whose job is to coordinate specialized departments that pull in different directions. Secondary summaries report that effective integrators had a balanced orientation between the units they linked, were seen as expert, and drew influence from that knowledge more than from formal rank.

Creating and claiming value. Negotiation combines cooperation to create value, enlarging what is available through joint gains, and competition to claim value, securing a share of it. The two are linked and in tension: sharing information helps create value but exposes a party to having value claimed from it, which Lax and Sebenius call the negotiator's dilemma.

Setup moves: right parties, interests, and no-deal options. Beyond tactics at the table and the design of the deal, Lax and Sebenius describe a third dimension, setup: arranging before talks begin that the right parties are involved, in the right sequence, with the right interests and the right no-deal alternatives in play. Changing who is at the table, or what each side faces if there is no deal, can change the agreement that is possible.

Backward mapping. Start from the agreement you want and the party whose consent is hardest to get, then work backward: map the parties and their interests, judge how costly each is to bring on board, identify patterns of influence and deference, and decide which earlier agreements would make the final yes most likely. This yields the order in which to approach people.

Tournament theory. When output is hard to measure precisely, paying people by their rank among competitors can produce efficient effort; prizes are fixed in advance and go to whoever ranks highest. Effort depends on the size of the gap between the winner's prize and the others, so large rewards for a top position can be efficient even when the winner is only slightly better than the runner-up.

Self-disserving attributions. Content analysis of annual reports from 14 companies over 21 years found that companies that attributed negative events to internal, controllable causes had higher stock prices a year later. The authors argue that taking responsibility made the organizations appear more in control. Caveat: The study is correlational and covers 14 companies.

Pacing the work. People can absorb only so much difficult change at once, so a leader who wants a change to last regulates how much is asked of people and when.

Getting on the balcony. Heifetz and Linsky advise leaders to step back from the action, to get on the balcony, so they can see the larger pattern of what is happening, including their own part in it, before stepping back in.

Differentiation and integration. In a comparative study of firms in different industries, Lawrence and Lorsch found that units facing different parts of the environment develop different goals, time horizons, and styles (differentiation), and that high-performing firms matched this with strong integration, unity of effort across those units. The more differentiated the units, the more the firm needed dedicated integrating roles and effective ways of resolving conflict between them.

The integrator role. This practitioner article in Harvard Business Review draws on the same research to describe the integrator, a manager whose job is to coordinate specialized departments that pull in different directions. Secondary summaries report that effective integrators had a balanced orientation between the units they linked, were seen as expert, and drew influence from that knowledge more than from formal rank.

The inside view and the outside view. Decision-makers tend to treat each problem as unique: they isolate the current choice from future ones and ignore statistics from past cases. Taking this inside view, which anchors forecasts on the specific plan and its scenarios, produces bold, optimistic forecasts; the authors contrast it with an outside view that judges the plan by the results of a class of similar past cases.

Leaving blame to others. Princes "ought to leave affairs of reproach to the management of others, and keep those of grace in their own hands" (chapter 19). His example is Cesare Borgia, who put a harsh deputy, Remirro de Orco, in charge of pacifying the Romagna, then had him executed and displayed so the people would see that any cruelty had not originated with Borgia (chapter 7).

The fox and the lion. A ruler must know how to act like both beasts, the fox to recognize traps and the lion to frighten wolves (chapter 18). He should appear merciful, faithful, humane, and upright, while being ready to act otherwise when necessity requires.

On keeping subjects divided. Machiavelli reports the old practice of ruling subject towns by fostering factions among them and rejects it: "I do not believe that factions can ever be of use" (chapter 20), because divided cities are quickly lost when an enemy approaches. Caveat: Writers should not attribute "divide and rule" to Machiavelli as advice; in The Prince he argues against it.

Discovery-driven planning. For new ventures, where outcomes cannot be projected with confidence, McGrath and MacMillan propose planning around assumptions. The plan starts from what success must look like (a reverse income statement), lists the assumptions that must hold for it, and sets checkpoints at which those assumptions are tested before larger commitments are made, with funding released as milestones are reached.

Negotiating several issues at once. Discussing multiple issues together, and making package offers, lets each side trade what it values less for what it values more, which is how value is created when priorities differ. The book also discusses the post-settlement settlement, a search for a better deal after the first is signed. Caveat: The book's advice to make several package offers at the same time is described here from secondary summaries; the controlled research on multiple equivalent simultaneous offers is by other authors (the Program on Negotiation cites Leonardelli and colleagues).

The power of process. Malhotra presents framing, process, and empathy as three often-neglected tools for resolving deadlocks without money or force. Process covers how a negotiation is conducted, and he treats it as something the parties can themselves negotiate.

The firm as a bargaining coalition. Because the firm is a coalition, its goals are set by bargaining among members whose priorities and information differ, and members are held in the coalition by side payments. The resulting goals are compromises that must all be met, following an implicit order of priority.

Organizational slack. Cyert and March describe the firm as a coalition of groups, such as managers, workers, stockholders, and suppliers, whose goals are compromises negotiated among them and whose bargaining is largely over the distribution of side payments. Organizational slack is the difference between the firm's total resources and the payments needed to keep the coalition together; it plays a stabilizing and adaptive role, giving the firm room to meet competing demands when conditions change.

The garbage can model. Many organizations, which the authors call organized anarchies, have problematic preferences, unclear technology, and fluid participation. In them, problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities flow as largely separate streams, and a decision happens when they meet at a choice opportunity, so timing matters a great deal; solutions circulate looking for issues to which they might be the answer.

Fair process. Drawing on their research into trust, idea sharing, and performance, Kim and Mauborgne argue that people will commit to a decision, even one they disagree with, if they believe the process that produced it was fair. Fair process has three elements: engagement (asking for people's input and letting them challenge ideas), explanation (making clear why the final decision was made), and expectation clarity (stating the new rules and standards once the decision is set).

Keep a compelling scoreboard. The book's four disciplines are to focus on the wildly important, act on lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard, and create a cadence of accountability. The scoreboard discipline calls for a simple, visible record of progress that tells the team at a glance whether it is winning.

Discovery-driven planning. For new ventures, where outcomes cannot be projected with confidence, McGrath and MacMillan propose planning around assumptions. The plan starts from what success must look like (a reverse income statement), lists the assumptions that must hold for it, and sets checkpoints at which those assumptions are tested before larger commitments are made, with funding released as milestones are reached.

Tempered radicals. Tempered radicals are people who want to succeed inside their organizations and also want to change them, radical in their aims and tempered in their methods. They avoid open confrontation and work through quiet, persistent moves, and Meyerson describes the result as evolutionary change that builds through small wins.

Variable-term opportunism. Tempered radicals stay ready to seize unexpected short-term openings while also working deliberately toward longer-term change, so they can act when circumstances favor them.

Obedience to authority. Instructed by an experimenter to give what they believed were increasingly painful shocks to another person, 26 of 40 subjects in the first study continued to the maximum of 450 volts. In the 1974 book, Milgram reported many variations and argued that people acting under a legitimate authority come to see themselves as carrying out its wishes and no longer as responsible for their own acts. Caveat: Gina Perry's archival study, Behind the Shock Machine (2012), reports that experimenters departed from the script, that many subjects doubted the setup, and that obedience varied widely across the variations, with most subjects disobeying in many of them. The 65 percent figure comes from one condition.

The strategic candidates game. Mintzberg describes political games played inside organizations, and among those played to effect change, the strategic candidates game is the promotion of a proposed strategic change through the system by a sponsor or champion. Anyone with a candidate and some means of influence can play, and the game draws on alliances, expertise, budgets, and sponsorship.

The whistle-blowing game. In the whistle-blowing game, an insider, often low in the hierarchy, who sees behavior that violates a social norm or law uses privileged information to inform an outside party who can remedy it. Because the player bypasses the chain of authority and questions its legitimacy, retribution is a risk, so the contact is often made secretly.

The chasm and the reference customer. Building on Everett Rogers's adoption curve, Moore argues that a chasm separates early adopters, who are visionaries, from the early majority, who are pragmatists with different expectations. Pragmatists trust references from other pragmatists, so the way across is to dominate one narrow target segment, whose customers then serve as references for the next.

First offers as anchors. In three experiments, whichever party made the first offer, buyer or seller, obtained the better outcome, and first offers strongly predicted final prices. The advantage disappeared when the other negotiator focused on information inconsistent with the first offer: the opponent's alternatives, the opponent's reservation price, or his or her own target.

The garbage can model. Many organizations, which the authors call organized anarchies, have problematic preferences, unclear technology, and fluid participation. In them, problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities flow as largely separate streams, and a decision happens when they meet at a choice opportunity, so timing matters a great deal; solutions circulate looking for issues to which they might be the answer.

The collective action problem. Members of a large group who would all benefit from a common goal have little individual reason to contribute, since each gets the benefit whether or not he or she pays, so large groups often fail to act without selective incentives or coercion. Small groups organize more easily, which is why concentrated interests tend to prevail over diffuse ones.

Resource dependence. Organizations depend on others for the resources they need, and whoever controls a critical, scarce resource gains power over those who depend on it. Organizations and the people in them act to manage those dependencies, by reducing their own and creating others'.

Power as structural position. Pfeffer treats organizations as political systems in which important decisions are shaped by power as well as by analysis. Power comes largely from position in the structure: control of resources, information, and the decision process, and centrality in networks of dependence.

Managing with power. Getting things done in organizations requires diagnosing who has power, where it comes from, and whose support is needed, then building and using power deliberately. Pfeffer argues that managers need to learn these skills to get their decisions carried out.

Strategic contingencies. Power inside an organization goes to the subunits and people who can cope with its critical problems, so a legal department gains power when the company faces lawsuits. Once held, power tends to be institutionalized, as its holders shape structures and rules that keep it in place after the problems change.

Timing, analysis, and structure as tools of power. The book's later chapters treat the tactics of power: acting first lets you set a position others must accommodate, and delay, often by calling for further study, is one of the best ways to stop something (chapter 12); information and analysis are used selectively in political contests (chapter 13); and changing the structure can consolidate power by putting allies in control of resources and information (chapter 14). Representation on important task forces and committees is treated as a sign of a unit's power (chapter 3).

Building a personal power base. Pfeffer's 2010 book, written for a general business audience, advises choosing where to start with care, often in a powerful unit; standing out, including by asking powerful people for help and advice; and building a reputation that makes others prefer supporting you to opposing you.

Post-settlement settlement. After the parties have reached and signed an agreement, they look together for a better one, with the signed deal kept as the default and changes adopted only if both sides prefer them. Because the signed deal stands unless both sides prefer a change, neither side risks what it already has.

The region of validity. For debates, conflicts of ideas, Rapoport proposed that each side first restate the opponent's position to the opponent's satisfaction and acknowledge the region of validity in which that position holds, before offering criticism. The aim is to make the opponent willing to listen in turn. Caveat: The wording here comes from secondary sources and a 1979 study that trained people in the technique (Alexander, Journal of Conflict Resolution); the book's text was not available. The four-step "Rapoport's rules" are Daniel Dennett's later condensation in Intuition Pumps (2013).

The previous question. Section 20 explains that moving the previous question is in effect moving that debate now cease and the assembly immediately vote on the questions before it. The motion is not debatable, cannot be amended, and requires a two-thirds vote; if it fails, discussion continues.

Attributes that speed adoption. Rogers identified characteristics of an innovation that shape how fast it is adopted, named in later editions relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Innovations that can be tried on a limited basis, and whose results are visible to others, spread faster.

Opinion leaders. Adoption spreads through a social system largely by interpersonal communication, and opinion leaders, people others turn to for views on an innovation, have outsized influence on whether it is taken up; in his adopter categories, early adopters hold the most opinion leadership.

Tournament theory. When output is hard to measure precisely, paying people by their rank among competitors can produce efficient effort; prizes are fixed in advance and go to whoever ranks highest. Effort depends on the size of the gap between the winner's prize and the others, so large rewards for a top position can be efficient even when the winner is only slightly better than the runner-up.

Elimination tournaments. In a career ladder where contestants are eliminated round by round, extra weight must be placed on the top prize to keep survivors working hard at every stage. This helps explain why the rewards for the very top positions are so much larger than those one step below.

The fundamental attribution error. Ross named the fundamental attribution error: observers tend to explain other people's behavior by their personal traits and to underestimate the situation they were in, even when situational pressures are plain.

Role advantages in perceived competence. In a quiz game with randomly assigned roles, participants who wrote the questions were rated more knowledgeable than those who had to answer them, by the answerers and by observers, though the roles alone produced the difference.

Resource dependence. Organizations depend on others for the resources they need, and whoever controls a critical, scarce resource gains power over those who depend on it. Organizations manage those dependencies in several ways, among them co-opting the parties they depend on, for example by giving them seats on their boards.

The strategic-contingency model of power. Power inside an organization goes to the subunits and people who can cope with its critical problems, so a legal department gains power when the company faces lawsuits. Once held, power tends to be institutionalized, as its holders shape structures and rules that keep it in place after the problems change.

Status quo bias. In a series of decision experiments, people chose an option disproportionately often when it was framed as the status quo, and field data on faculty choices of health plans and retirement programs showed the same pattern. The authors attribute the bias to transition costs, loss aversion, and psychological commitment to past choices, among other causes. Caveat: A preregistered replication (Xiao, Lam, Piara, and Feldman, Meta-Psychology, 2021) found strong support in three of the four original scenarios it retested and little support in the fourth.

Credible commitment. In bargaining, the power to bind oneself can be a source of strength: a party that visibly removes its own option to retreat forces the other side to adjust. A threat works only if the other side believes it would be carried out, so making a threat credible often means giving up freedom of action in advance.

Focal points. People who must coordinate without communicating tend to converge on a solution that stands out to both, such as a famous landmark as a meeting place. Such focal points also anchor tacit bargains, which is why conspicuous, simple lines are easier to hold than arbitrary ones.

Salami tactics and compellence. A threat drawn as a line can be defeated by crossing it in slices, each too small to justify carrying out the threat. Schelling also separated deterrence, which aims to stop an opponent from acting, from compellence, a threat meant to make an opponent do something, and argued compellence is harder.

Tipping. Collective outcomes can differ sharply from what individuals intend. In his best-known model, mild individual preferences about neighbors produce strongly segregated neighborhoods, and once a threshold is crossed, a situation can tip quickly to a new state.

Six approaches to resistance. Kotter and Schlesinger list six ways to deal with resistance to change: education and communication, participation and involvement, facilitation and support, negotiation and agreement, manipulation and co-optation, and explicit and implicit coercion. Each suits different situations and carries costs; negotiation offers incentives to active or potential resisters, and coercion is fast and suited to change agents with power, at the price of resentment.

Creating and claiming value. Negotiation combines cooperation to create value, enlarging what is available through joint gains, and competition to claim value, securing a share of it. The two are linked and in tension: sharing information helps create value but exposes a party to having value claimed from it, which Lax and Sebenius call the negotiator's dilemma.

Setup moves: right parties, interests, and no-deal options. Beyond tactics at the table and the design of the deal, Lax and Sebenius describe a third dimension, setup: arranging before talks begin that the right parties are involved, in the right sequence, with the right interests and the right no-deal alternatives in play. Changing who is at the table, or what each side faces if there is no deal, can change the agreement that is possible.

Backward mapping. Start from the agreement you want and the party whose consent is hardest to get, then work backward: map the parties and their interests, judge how costly each is to bring on board, identify patterns of influence and deference, and decide which earlier agreements would make the final yes most likely. This yields the order in which to approach people.

Sequencing to build coalitions. The order in which parties are approached can decide whether a coalition forms. Sebenius advises studying who influences the hardest party and to whom that party defers, and securing the agreements that make its yes more likely; in his examples, an early endorsement from a respected party raised the value of later approaches.

Normative leverage. Shell defines normative leverage as the ability to apply general norms, or the other side's own standards and norms, to advance a position. It is strongest when the standards invoked are ones the other party regards as legitimate and relevant, because people want to appear consistent with their own stated principles.

Realistic group conflict. Two groups of boys, formed separately and then set to compete for prizes only one group could win, developed hostility and negative stereotypes of each other. Competition over scarce rewards was enough to produce intergroup conflict.

Superordinate goals. Simply bringing the groups into contact did not reduce hostility and sometimes made it worse. What reduced it was a series of superordinate goals, problems that mattered to both groups and that neither could solve alone, such as restoring the camp's water supply. Caveat: Gina Perry's The Lost Boys (2018) documents an aborted 1953 precursor at Middle Grove, in which the boys turned on the researchers instead of each other, and argues that heavy staff intervention shaped the Robbers Cave results.

Bounded rationality. Real decision-makers have limited information, time, and computing capacity, so they search among alternatives until they find one that meets an aspiration level, a procedure Simon called satisficing.

Decision premises. Simon analyzed organizations as systems of decisions in which individual choices are shaped by premises the organization supplies, such as goals, information, and procedures. Whoever controls those premises influences the decisions made from them.

The scarcity of attention. What information consumes is the attention of its recipients, so "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." In an information-rich world the scarce resource is attention, and most of the cost of information falls on the recipient.

Signaling. When employers cannot observe a candidate's productivity, candidates can communicate it through a costly action, such as education, provided the action is less costly for more productive people. The signal can separate types even if it adds nothing to productivity itself.

Escalation of commitment. In a simulated investment decision, business students committed the most additional money to a previously chosen course of action when they were personally responsible for its negative results. Staw interpreted this as self-justification: people invest more to show the original decision was right, and setbacks can start a cycle of further commitment.

Deception. "All warfare is based on deception" (chapter 1, Giles translation): appear unable when able, inactive when active, hold out baits, and attack where the enemy is unprepared. The text also warns against pursuing an enemy who feigns flight (chapter 7).

Winning without fighting. "Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting" (chapter 3). The best strategy defeats the opponent's plans and alliances before battle is joined.

Foreknowledge and spies. Victory depends on foreknowledge, which comes from people who know the enemy's situation, and the text sets out five classes of spies, including converted spies, the enemy's own spies turned to one's use, and doomed spies, one's own agents allowed to learn false information and carry it to the enemy (chapter 13).

Choice architecture and defaults. Choice architecture is the way options are presented, and it always influences choice, so there is no neutral design. A nudge is any feature of that design which predictably shifts behavior without forbidding options or materially changing incentives; defaults are the strongest example, because whatever happens when people do nothing is what most people end up with.

Availability cascades. An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process in which a belief gains plausibility the more it is repeated in public discussion. People partly learn from what others appear to believe and partly adjust what they say to keep social acceptance, and availability entrepreneurs deliberately feed the process.

Joint fact-finding. In joint fact-finding, as Ehrmann and Stinson's chapter describes it, stakeholders with differing viewpoints and interests work together to develop data, analyze facts and forecasts, and build common assumptions, then use that shared information to reach decisions. The parties agree on the experts and the questions, which keeps the analysis from becoming a contest between each side's own science.

Choice architecture and defaults. Choice architecture is the way options are presented, and it always influences choice, so there is no neutral design. A nudge is any feature of that design which predictably shifts behavior without forbidding options or materially changing incentives; defaults are the strongest example, because whatever happens when people do nothing is what most people end up with.

Mental accounting. People sort money into separate mental accounts by source and intended use and judge spending against the account it falls in, so money is less interchangeable in practice than standard economics assumes. The same sum can therefore feel trivial in one account and unacceptable in another.

The planner and the doer. Thaler and Shefrin model a person as an organization with a farsighted planner and a series of shortsighted doers who care about the present. Self-control problems arise because immediate rewards tempt the doer, and the planner must use rules and commitments to restrain it.

Committing now to act later. In the Save More Tomorrow program, employees agree in advance to put part of their future pay raises into retirement saving, so take-home pay never falls. In the first implementation, 78 percent of those offered the plan joined, 80 percent of them stayed through the fourth raise, and average saving rates rose from 3.5 percent to 13.6 percent over 40 months. Caveat: The U.S. Department of Labor's Clearinghouse for Labor Evaluation and Research rated the study's causal evidence low, because the comparison of participants and nonparticipants used no statistical controls.

Loss aversion and reference dependence. People judge outcomes as gains or losses relative to a reference point, usually the current position, and losses weigh more than gains of the same size; the 1979 paper puts it as losses looming larger than gains. Because the reference point can be moved by how a choice is described, the same option can be made to look like a gain or a loss. Caveat: The often quoted figure that losses count about twice as much as gains comes from later estimates, notably a median coefficient of 2.25 in Tversky and Kahneman's 1992 paper, and is not a constant. Gal and Rucker (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2018) argue that the evidence for a general loss-gain asymmetry is weaker than usually assumed; reference dependence itself is less disputed.

Loss aversion in riskless choice. The 1991 paper extends loss aversion from gambles to ordinary choices between goods: preferences depend on a reference point, and losses and disadvantages have greater impact than gains and advantages. This helps explain why people are reluctant to give up what they already have.

Framing effects. Equivalent descriptions of the same choice produce predictable reversals of preference: in the best-known example, a public health program described in terms of lives saved draws risk-averse choices, and the same program described in terms of lives lost draws risk-seeking ones. The frame a decision-maker adopts is controlled partly by how the problem is put to them.

Availability and anchoring. People judge likelihood with a few mental shortcuts that are usually useful and sometimes badly wrong. Availability means judging how frequent or probable something is by how easily instances come to mind; anchoring means estimating by adjusting from a starting value, and the adjustment is usually too small.

Separate the people from the problem. Negotiators are people first, and the relationship tends to become entangled with the substance. Fisher and Ury advise dealing with perception, emotion, and communication directly and separately from the substantive issues, for example by discussing each side's perceptions and helping the other side save face.

Focus on interests behind positions. A position is what a party says it wants; an interest is the reason it wants it. Their example is the Sinai in 1978: Israel's interest was security and Egypt's was sovereignty, and an agreement that met both interests became possible once the talks moved below the opposed positions.

Insist on objective criteria. Negotiate on some basis independent of the will of either side, such as market value or precedent. The parties search for criteria jointly, keep an open mind about which apply, and yield to principle and never to pressure.

BATNA. A party's best alternative to a negotiated agreement is what it can obtain without negotiating. Knowing and improving it protects against accepting an agreement that should be rejected and is the main source of negotiating power when the other side is stronger.

Negotiation jujitsu and the one-text procedure. When the other side insists on bargaining over positions, Fisher and Ury advise declining to push back against them and redirecting attention to interests and options. One method is the one-text procedure, in which a third party drafts a single text, asks each side for criticism, and revises it round after round; their example is the United States drafting the Camp David texts between Egypt and Israel in 1978.

Go to the balcony. Facing a difficult counterpart, Ury advises not reacting on the spot: step back mentally, as if onto a balcony overlooking the negotiation, keep your own interests and alternatives in view, take a pause when needed, and avoid deciding under pressure.

Build them a golden bridge. Make it easy for the other side to say yes by removing the obstacles to agreement: involve them in shaping the solution, offer choices, attend to intangible interests such as recognition and dignity, and help them save face so that agreeing does not look like giving in.

Yes! No. Yes?. A positive no has three parts: a yes to one's own underlying interests and values, a firm no to the request, and a yes that proposes another way forward and keeps the relationship intact. The book organizes this into stages of preparing, delivering, and following through.

Negotiating success with the boss. A new leader should hold five conversations with the boss: on the situation and how the boss sees it, on expectations and how success will be measured, on working style, on the resources needed, and on personal development. Watkins treats these as a negotiation that sets the terms on which the leader will be judged.

Learning before committing. Watkins advises new leaders to accelerate learning about the organization by talking with people across it before committing to a course of action.

Creating coalitions. A new leader needs the support of people outside his or her direct authority. Watkins's chapter on coalitions asks who the potential supporters, opponents, and convincibles are, who defers to whom on key issues, and how to sequence conversations so that early supporters help recruit others.

Predictable surprises. A predictable surprise is a disaster that catches leaders off guard although they had the information to foresee it. Cognitive, organizational, and political biases keep foreseeable threats off the agenda, and the authors' remedy has three steps: recognize the threat, prioritize it, and mobilize support for preventive action.

Small wins. Weick argues that framing a problem on a massive scale prevents action, because it overwhelms bounded rationality and raises arousal to dysfunctional levels. "A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance"; one may seem unimportant, but a series of them reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to later proposals.

Managing conflict across units. Weiss and Hughes argue that conflict is a natural result of cross-unit work and should be managed: give people a common method for resolving conflict and criteria for trade-offs, use escalations as coaching opportunities, and establish and enforce a requirement of joint escalation. Under joint escalation, the parties present a disagreement to their bosses together, which gives the decision-maker every side of the dispute and removes the advantage of getting to one's own boss first.

Moves and turns. Alongside the negotiation over issues runs a shadow negotiation over how the parties will treat each other. When a counterpart makes a move that puts one down or off balance, Kolb and Williams describe turns that answer it: interrupting the exchange to reset it, naming the move openly, correcting the claim with another account of the facts, and diverting attention back to the substance. Caveat: The list of four turns was confirmed through a secondary account by a colleague of Kolb's; some summaries describe more.

Asset specificity. Some investments are specialized to a particular relationship and lose much of their value outside it, such as knowledge of one firm's systems or customers. Once such investments are made, the parties depend on each other and each is exposed to the other taking advantage, so the choice of governance, from market contract to hierarchy, turns largely on how specific the assets are.

Opportunism and bounded rationality. Williamson's transaction cost economics rests on two assumptions about people: their rationality is bounded, so contracts are always incomplete, and some are opportunistic, which he defined as self-interest seeking with guile and later described as including incomplete or distorted disclosure of information. Organizations exist partly to safeguard transactions against these hazards.

The mere exposure effect. Zajonc reported that "mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it": people came to like words, shapes, faces, and other stimuli more simply from seeing them more often. Caveat: Bornstein's 1989 meta-analysis of 208 experiments found the effect reliable but modest; it typically peaks within 10 to 20 exposures, can decline after many more, is strongest for brief exposures to unfamiliar stimuli, and exposure to something initially disliked can deepen the dislike.

Ripeness and the mutually hurting stalemate. Parties resolve a conflict when they are ready to, which usually means they perceive a mutually hurting stalemate, a situation in which neither side can win and continuing will be very harmful to each, together with a sense that a negotiated way out exists. Ripeness is a matter of perception and is necessary for negotiation without guaranteeing it. Caveat: Ripeness theory has drawn criticism on substance and method, and Zartman's cases are international conflicts.

Status quo bias. In a series of decision experiments, people chose an option disproportionately often when it was framed as the status quo, and field data on faculty choices of health plans and retirement programs showed the same pattern. The authors attribute the bias to transition costs, loss aversion, and psychological commitment to past choices, among other causes. Caveat: A preregistered replication (Xiao, Lam, Piara, and Feldman, Meta-Psychology, 2021) found strong support in three of the four original scenarios it retested and little support in the fourth.