Whenever I think of negotiating or trying to broker a deal, I think of an old episode of The Office. In this one particular episode, the characters Jan and Michael are planning to meet with a client. The original meeting location was to take place at a hotel. However, Michael changes the location to a Chili's, much to Jan's chagrin. Michael and the client bond over food and drinks, and in the end the deal is closed. 

What is it about food that helps with meetings? In an interesting study conducted by Lakshmi Balachandra, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College and a fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, it was found that "eating while deciding important matters offers profitable, measurable benefits through mutually productive discussions."

Why, though?

"There may be biological factors at work," Balachandra wrote on the Harvard Business Review blog. "When the negotiators in my first two studies ate, they immediately increased their glucose levels. Research has shown that the consumption of glucose enhances complex brain activities, bolstering self-control and regulating prejudice and aggressive behaviors. Other research has shown that unconscious mimicking behaviors of others leads to increased pro-social behaviors; when individuals eat together they enact the same movements. This unconscious mimicking of each other may induce positive feelings towards both the other party and the matter under discussion."

Please check out Balachandra's blog entry for more details of the study. And remember, lunch with another may just be the best business or career move you could make for yourself.

Very interesting find over on code site github--a post/manifesto by a professional speaker, for professional speakers and meeting professionals.

"Open Conference Expectations," by Paul Irish, itemizes what speakers reasonably expect from event planners and what planners should reasonably expect from speakers.

I love this.

Everything cited is based in common sense and, it appears, significant experience in the meeting/event industry. It's nice to see it spelled out, though.

Excerpts below, but you REALLY should read Paul's entire post.

Recordings: Organizers should prioritize recording all talks and sessions. Now, ideally this would involve video recording, but hey, we acknowledge that quality video recording is both expensive and time-consuming -- audio recordings paired with the slides is a decent compromise if video isn't possible. Recordings should be made available under a permissive license (CC-BY-*) within six months of the event, information can get too stale after that. (If you're worried that releasing video will depress ticket sales, other conference organizers will vouch that, to the contrary, recordings are an excellent tool for driving ticket sales in future years, and are also an excellent sponsorship opportunity.)

Lodging: Conferences will offer to obtain and pay for lodging for speakers for at least the night before and the night after a speaker's talk. Again, a speaker may opt out of provided lodging, and those saved costs can be put to good use.

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Image (CC) Kmeron

Planning to negotiate a raise? Don't discuss it with your boss in his or her office. So says a new study by an organizational behavior expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Parties who negotiate on their home fields can be expected to claim between 60 percent and 160 percent more value than the visiting party,” says Markus Baer, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Olin Business School. Baer’s latest study, “Location in Negotiation: Is There a Home-Field Advantage?” is among the first to empirically demonstrate that there is indeed a home-field advantage in negotiation. It appears in the March edition of the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Baer and his research partner, Graham Brown of the University of British Columbia, set out to test the generally accepted theory that a home-field advantage exists, not only in sports but also in business negotiations. They found that it does, but visiting-player confidence can go a long way in evening the playing field.

“There was surprisingly little systemic research examining whether location matters in negotiation,” Baer says. “And no study explains why it would matter. Do people in their own environments perform better, or do visitors to their offices perform worse? As a result, home-field advantage remains one of the least understood phenomena in negotiation.”

Baer and Graham set up a series of three experiments. In the first, students assumed the status of “resident” and were taken to a private office. They were given 20 minutes to make the office their own by choosing a chair, putting their name outside the office, choosing posters to put up, writing their schedule on a board and logging into a computer to check their email. They were also given a key to the office. They were then told they would be negotiating with a fellow student over the price of a pound of coffee.

Participants assuming the role of a “visitor” were told that they would be negotiating with a fellow student who had an office because he or she was entering data for a professor in the department thus leading them to believe that the “resident” party had a permanent claim to the office. The experiment showed that residents clearly outperformed visitors. 

By creating a third condition—a “neutral party” who was led to believe that the resident party did not have a permanent claim to the office but just happened to have arrived a little earlier—the authors were able to also show that the home-field advantage may be due both to a resident advantage and a visitor disadvantage. That is, residents did better than a neutral party, who, in turn, outperformed visitors.

The second experiment examined the role of confidence in explaining exactly why the home-turf advantage arises. It was designed exactly as the first, however before the negotiation, participants took a questionnaire designed to measure confidence. This experiment showed that the advantage of residents over visitors in distributive negotiations can at least partly be explained by the different levels of confidence residents and visitors are likely to have from knowing that they will be negotiating on their home fields or on someone else’s territory.

In the final experiment, visitors’ confidence levels were manipulated by having students provide answers to a fake assessment. They were told that based on the assessment, their negotiating skills were quite high and they should do well in the negotiation.The results of the experiment showed that boosting visitor’s confidence levels before the negotiation can help to eliminate the home field advantage.

“Our findings suggest that location is an important factor to consider when examining the forces shaping outcomes of distributive negotiations and, therefore, should be incorporated into existing approaches to negotiation,” Baer writes in the paper. 

However, Baer’s research also suggests one way of overcoming home-field advantage if the location of a negotiation cannot be changed. “Confidence plays a critical role in any negotiation, regardless of where it takes place,” Baer says. “Anything a person entering a negotiation can do to boost his or her confidence is a good thing. Something as simple as participating in negotiation training may work to minimize the disadvantage of negotiating on someone else’s home turf.”