Works
- Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, 1999
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
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.
What it explains
Shell explains why holding a counterpart to standards it has already endorsed is often more persuasive than any outside argument. Refusing a proposal framed in one's own stated principles means appearing inconsistent.