For 17 years, Katherine Shonk has been the editor of Negotiation Briefings. The author of two works of fiction (The Red Passport and Happy Now?), she is leaving her post after this issue to devote more time to her next novel and other editing work. Katherine will continue to share negotiation lessons in blog posts for the Program on Negotiation. Brandeis University professor Alain Lempereur, the newsletter’s academic editor, spoke with Katherine about her tenure as newsletter editor.

Alain Lempereur: You didn’t start off as a negotiation expert. How did you become someone who shares negotiation advice month after month?

Katherine Shonk: Through good luck! Back in the early 1990s, I took an administrative-support position in the Organization Behavior Department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management so that I could enroll in fiction-writing workshops at NU in the evening at a significant discount. At Kellogg, I started providing editorial assistance to some of the professors studying negotiation and decision making, including Max H. Bazerman. I was a psychology major in college, so the topics were engaging to me and not completely foreign.

After I earned my master’s in creative writing from the University of Texas in 1999, I needed a job. Max had joined the Harvard Business School and Program on Negotiation (PON) faculty and was looking for an editor. In my first significant career negotiation, I successfully bargained to work remotely—back in the days of dial-up Internet—from the Chicago area, where I’m from. In 2003, PON hired me to edit Negotiation Briefings. I still edit for Max and for other professors. And I’ve worked remotely all these years.

AL: So, you learned about negotiation along the way?

KS: Yes, from editing books and research articles, asking questions when I didn’t understand, and reading foundational books, like Getting to Yes. As newsletter editor, I have kept up with the latest research and writing on negotiation, while staying on top of negotiations in the news. As a storyteller, I love researching complex negotiation stories, extracting useful lessons, and trying to share it all in an engaging way.

AL: Do you use your knowledge of negotiation in your daily life?

KS: I do notice opportunities for negotiation that I wouldn’t have noticed years ago, and I push myself to seize them. Negotiation research shows that women, in particular, are often uncomfortable advocating for themselves. I like to think that when I negotiate assertively for what I want or need, I’m not only benefiting myself but also contributing in a small way to changing societal norms around what is appropriate for women to ask for. I also try to encourage friends and family to negotiate for what they want rather than just accepting what they’re offered.

AL: You are very attentive to the world out there. What negotiation theories do you think professionals can leverage more often in their daily lives?

KS: I’ve written this over and over, but it bears repeating: We’ll move closer to our own goals when we try to help the other side meet theirs as well. Claiming value is important in negotiation, but as we’ve seen in recent years, negotiators who refuse to collaborate usually get terrible deals, whether they’re aware of it or not.

I also think we can all benefit from focusing on the ethical component of negotiation— “responsible negotiation,” as you call it. When negotiating, we need to consider how our decisions will affect people who aren’t at the table, Max has taught me. As we see every day in the news, people don’t do this naturally.

AL: What topics do you think deserve more attention in negotiation theory and research?

KS: I hope the Black Lives Matter movement will prompt more universities to accept PhD students and hire professors who are interested in researching and writing about the role of race in negotiation. We have a lot to learn about how bias and prejudice affect negotiation, and how organizations can become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. The burden shouldn’t be on people of color to negotiate effectively within biased systems.

We also need more practical, research- based advice for bridging our political, cultural, and class divides, which have become quite terrifying lately. We are starting to see more of this work, and

AL: Any final words?

KS: I’m so grateful to everyone at PON and on the newsletter team for their support, hard work, and creative thinking over the years. Many thanks to you, Alain, and to Susan Hackley (who reviewed every issue and caught lots of typos), James Kerwin, Guhan Subramanian, Kristy Hanstad, Gail Odeneal, Kathy Thorne, and our wonderful graphic designer, Becky Hunter. Thanks to all at BMD for their help. A special shout- out to Melissa Snyder, our eagle-eyed proofreader since the beginning: I don’t know what I would have done without you, Melissa!

For 17 years, Katherine Shonk has been the editor of Negotiation Briefings. The author of two works of fiction (The Red Passport and Happy Now?), she is leaving her post after this issue to devote more time to her next novel and other editing work. Katherine will continue to share negotiation lessons in blog posts for the Program on Negotiation. Brandeis University professor Alain Lempereur, the newsletter’s academic editor, spoke with Katherine about her tenure as newsletter editor.

Alain Lempereur: You didn’t start off as a negotiation expert. How did you become someone who shares negotiation advice month after month?

Katherine Shonk: Through good luck! Back in the early 1990s, I took an administrative-support position in the Organization Behavior Department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management so that I could enroll in fiction-writing workshops at NU in the evening at a significant discount. At Kellogg, I started providing editorial assistance to some of the professors studying negotiation and decision making, including Max H. Bazerman. I was a psychology major in college, so the topics were engaging to me and not completely foreign.

After I earned my master’s in creative writing from the University of Texas in 1999, I needed a job. Max had joined the Harvard Business School and Program on Negotiation (PON) faculty and was looking for an editor. In my first significant career negotiation, I successfully bargained to work remotely—back in the days of dial-up Internet—from the Chicago area, where I’m from. In 2003, PON hired me to edit Negotiation Briefings. I still edit for Max and for other professors. And I’ve worked remotely all these years.

AL: So, you learned about negotiation along the way?

KS: Yes, from editing books and research articles, asking questions when I didn’t understand, and reading foundational books, like Getting to Yes. As newsletter editor, I have kept up with the latest research and writing on negotiation, while staying on top of negotiations in the news. As a storyteller, I love researching complex negotiation stories, extracting useful lessons, and trying to share it all in an engaging way.

AL: Do you use your knowledge of negotiation in your daily life?

KS: I do notice opportunities for negotiation that I wouldn’t have noticed years ago, and I push myself to seize them. Negotiation research shows that women, in particular, are often uncomfortable advocating for themselves. I like to think that when I negotiate assertively for what I want or need, I’m not only benefiting myself but also contributing in a small way to changing societal norms around what is appropriate for women to ask for. I also try to encourage friends and family to negotiate for what they want rather than just accepting what they’re offered.

AL: You are very attentive to the world out there. What negotiation theories do you think professionals can leverage more often in their daily lives?

KS: I’ve written this over and over, but it bears repeating: We’ll move closer to our own goals when we try to help the other side meet theirs as well. Claiming value is important in negotiation, but as we’ve seen in recent years, negotiators who refuse to collaborate usually get terrible deals, whether they’re aware of it or not.

I also think we can all benefit from focusing on the ethical component of negotiation— “responsible negotiation,” as you call it. When negotiating, we need to consider how our decisions will affect people who aren’t at the table, Max has taught me. As we see every day in the news, people don’t do this naturally.

AL: What topics do you think deserve more attention in negotiation theory and research?

KS: I hope the Black Lives Matter movement will prompt more universities to accept PhD students and hire professors who are interested in researching and writing about the role of race in negotiation. We have a lot to learn about how bias and prejudice affect negotiation, and how organizations can become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. The burden shouldn’t be on people of color to negotiate effectively within biased systems.

We also need more practical, research- based advice for bridging our political, cultural, and class divides, which have become quite terrifying lately. We are starting to see more of this work, and

AL: Any final words?

KS: I’m so grateful to everyone at PON and on the newsletter team for their support, hard work, and creative thinking over the years. Many thanks to you, Alain, and to Susan Hackley (who reviewed every issue and caught lots of typos), James Kerwin, Guhan Subramanian, Kristy Hanstad, Gail Odeneal, Kathy Thorne, and our wonderful graphic designer, Becky Hunter. Thanks to all at BMD for their help. A special shout- out to Melissa Snyder, our eagle-eyed proofreader since the beginning: I don’t know what I would have done without you, Melissa!

In negotiation, a strong best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, is generally regarded as our best source of power. When we know we can walk away and get a great deal elsewhere, we’ll insist on an even better agreement at our current bargaining table. Our BATNA powerfully anchors our targets, first offers, and the deal we ultimately reach, research shows.

But what happens when a BATNA falls through? Imagine a job offer being revoked because you took too long to decide, or a house being swept out from under you. Rationally speaking, you’re now in the same bargaining position as someone who never had a viable BATNA, and that lost BATNA shouldn’t influence how you negotiate going forward. But in a new study, London Business School researchers Garrett L. Brady, M. Ena Inesi, and Thomas Mussweiler find that negotiators don’t sufficiently adjust to their changed circumstances after losing a BATNA.

Motivated by a nonexistent alternative

In their first study, the researchers asked participants in the United Kingdom to imagine they were selling their car, valued at £10,100, and were on their way to negotiate with an interested buyer, Taylor. Some participants were told they had received a nonnegotiable offer of £12,706 from another potential buyer, Brad, the week before. Others were not informed that they had a BATNA.

All participants then wrote down how they would approach the negotiation with Taylor. Next, those who had a BATNA from Brad were informed that he had called to say he no longer wanted the car. All participants were then asked how much they wanted from Taylor and how much they’d ask for. Those who had lost their BATNA, as compared to those who had no clear BATNA, said they would set higher aspirations and make more aggressive first offers. In other experiments, participants who’d been told about a BATNA they’d had and lost also set higher aspirations and negotiated better prices than those who weren’t told about a BATNA.

Toward more rational decisions

Although lost BATNAs were linked to superior performance in the negotiation scenarios studied, the researchers caution that the loss of a BATNA could also have the opposite effect. Given that poor BATNAs tend to harm negotiator performance, for example, the effects of a bad alternative could linger after it’s gone.

Moreover, Brady and colleagues also found that, despite their superior performance, negotiators who’d lost a BATNA were less satisfied with their results than those who didn’t have a defined BATNA. It’s a reminder that negotiator performance and satisfaction don’t always go hand in hand.

The main takeaway from the study is that we are all susceptible to anchoring irrationally on our BATNA—even when it’s gone. Because we can’t be certain whether this irrationality will help us or hurt us, we should strive to reach more logical judgments and decisions.

The researchers identified one effective strategy for doing so, known as “consider the opposite.” They asked participants in one experiment to generate reasons that they might be overvaluing their BATNA. After these participants learned that the BATNA had been withdrawn, they were better at moving beyond it and reaching more reality-based targets, first offers, and outcomes in another negotiation.

Source: “The Power of Lost Alternatives in Negotiations,” by Garrett L. Brady, M. Ena Inesi, and Thomas Mussweiler. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2021.

In negotiation, a strong best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, is generally regarded as our best source of power. When we know we can walk away and get a great deal elsewhere, we’ll insist on an even better agreement at our current bargaining table. Our BATNA powerfully anchors our targets, first offers, and the deal we ultimately reach, research shows.

But what happens when a BATNA falls through? Imagine a job offer being revoked because you took too long to decide, or a house being swept out from under you. Rationally speaking, you’re now in the same bargaining position as someone who never had a viable BATNA, and that lost BATNA shouldn’t influence how you negotiate going forward. But in a new study, London Business School researchers Garrett L. Brady, M. Ena Inesi, and Thomas Mussweiler find that negotiators don’t sufficiently adjust to their changed circumstances after losing a BATNA.

Motivated by a nonexistent alternative

In their first study, the researchers asked participants in the United Kingdom to imagine they were selling their car, valued at £10,100, and were on their way to negotiate with an interested buyer, Taylor. Some participants were told they had received a nonnegotiable offer of £12,706 from another potential buyer, Brad, the week before. Others were not informed that they had a BATNA.

All participants then wrote down how they would approach the negotiation with Taylor. Next, those who had a BATNA from Brad were informed that he had called to say he no longer wanted the car. All participants were then asked how much they wanted from Taylor and how much they’d ask for. Those who had lost their BATNA, as compared to those who had no clear BATNA, said they would set higher aspirations and make more aggressive first offers. In other experiments, participants who’d been told about a BATNA they’d had and lost also set higher aspirations and negotiated better prices than those who weren’t told about a BATNA.

Toward more rational decisions

Although lost BATNAs were linked to superior performance in the negotiation scenarios studied, the researchers caution that the loss of a BATNA could also have the opposite effect. Given that poor BATNAs tend to harm negotiator performance, for example, the effects of a bad alternative could linger after it’s gone.

Moreover, Brady and colleagues also found that, despite their superior performance, negotiators who’d lost a BATNA were less satisfied with their results than those who didn’t have a defined BATNA. It’s a reminder that negotiator performance and satisfaction don’t always go hand in hand.

The main takeaway from the study is that we are all susceptible to anchoring irrationally on our BATNA—even when it’s gone. Because we can’t be certain whether this irrationality will help us or hurt us, we should strive to reach more logical judgments and decisions.

The researchers identified one effective strategy for doing so, known as “consider the opposite.” They asked participants in one experiment to generate reasons that they might be overvaluing their BATNA. After these participants learned that the BATNA had been withdrawn, they were better at moving beyond it and reaching more reality-based targets, first offers, and outcomes in another negotiation.

Source: “The Power of Lost Alternatives in Negotiations,” by Garrett L. Brady, M. Ena Inesi, and Thomas Mussweiler. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2021.

Negotiators from Western cultures, such as the United States, tend to be trusting. They’re often open to sharing information with counterparts, and expect ideas to flow freely. But in many other cultures, negotiators tend to be less trusting and more cautious about sharing information about their interests.

Of course, there are many ways to build trust in negotiation, such as establishing rapport and verifying someone’s claims with outside sources. But such methods aren’t always available, or they might still leave one party feeling wary. When one or more parties are untrusting and unwilling to share information, is it still possible for negotiators to create joint gain?

The answer is yes, write researchers Jingjing Yao and Jimena Ramirez- Marin (IÉSEG School of Management, France), Jeanne M. Brett (Northwestern University), and Zhi-Xue Zhang (Guanghua School of Management, China) in a new study published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. They identified an effective strategy for generating joint gain in negotiation when trust is low: presenting multi-issue offers. As compared to a single-issue offer, such as “I’m asking $2,000 for my design services,” a multi-issue offer might be, “I’m asking $2,000, and I would like half the payment up front,” or “I’m asking $2,000, and I’d like half the payment up front. And would you be willing to push the deadline back to August?”

Single-issue offers tend to direct negotiators toward haggling over a single issue, typically price. As such, they can lead to defensive arguments, conflict, inefficient agreements, and impasse. By comparison, multi-issue offers reveal information about one’s preferences and can lead negotiators to identify tradeoffs across issues. For example, the designer’s potential client might respond to the three-issue offer, “I’m really hoping to get the site up and running by July 1, if that’s feasible. But up-front payment isn’t a problem. Would you agree to $1,600 if I paid 75% up front?” The exchange of offers could continue from there, with parties making tradeoffs based on their growing understanding of each other’s priorities. Yao and his team theorized that when trust is low, negotiators can use multi- issue offers to create value without having to disclose information that could be exploited.

Overcoming a trust deficit

In one study, the researchers had 100 Chinese managers engage in a sales negotiation simulation in which multiple issues were available for discussion. Before they negotiated, the participants’ base level of trust was measured. The results showed that untrusting negotiators were able to reach high joint gains by making multi-issue offers that generated insight into their counterparts’ priorities. This was especially true for untrusting negotiators who had a holistic mindset—an individual trait that appears to help negotiators integrate the various issues raised in multi-issue offers and make tradeoffs across them.

In another study, before being paired for a negotiation, 138 Chinese undergraduate students read statements designed to persuade them to view their counterpart as either highly trustworthy (high-trust condition) or as someone whose level of trustworthiness was unknown (low-trust condition).
The results showed that high-trust negotiators tended to develop insight into their counterparts’ interests and create joint gain by sharing information directly. Those in the low-trust condition were also able to reach high-quality agreements—not by sharing information, but by exchanging multi-issue offers, which gave them insights into their counterparts’ priorities. Both trusting and untrusting negotiators were able to create joint gains but used different strategies to do so.

Expanding your strategic toolkit

The team’s results highlight that negotiators who don’t trust each other enough to share information directly are still capable of reaching strong agreements that meet both parties’ interests by exchanging multi-issue offers.

In particular, the researchers identify three “sub-strategies” we can adopt when trust is low:

• Refuse to exchange single-issue offers, unless you can agree to leave each issue unresolved until later in the process. Instead, propose multi-issue offers and ask for them in return.
• Hold firm on issues of high priority to you, and gradually make concessions on your low-priority issues.
• Aim to take a holistic approach to understanding your counterpart’s priorities, based on their pattern of concessions across a set of multi-issue offers. To identify such patterns, you might track their offers in a spreadsheet or graph.

What about if you are trusting but your counterpart is not? Give traditional trust-building strategies a try, such as taking time to get to know each other or providing references, but be aware that direct information sharing might not get you very far. Instead, you might want to combine such sharing with offers that cover multiple issues.

Negotiators from Western cultures, such as the United States, tend to be trusting. They’re often open to sharing information with counterparts, and expect ideas to flow freely. But in many other cultures, negotiators tend to be less trusting and more cautious about sharing information about their interests.

Of course, there are many ways to build trust in negotiation, such as establishing rapport and verifying someone’s claims with outside sources. But such methods aren’t always available, or they might still leave one party feeling wary. When one or more parties are untrusting and unwilling to share information, is it still possible for negotiators to create joint gain?

The answer is yes, write researchers Jingjing Yao and Jimena Ramirez- Marin (IÉSEG School of Management, France), Jeanne M. Brett (Northwestern University), and Zhi-Xue Zhang (Guanghua School of Management, China) in a new study published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. They identified an effective strategy for generating joint gain in negotiation when trust is low: presenting multi-issue offers. As compared to a single-issue offer, such as “I’m asking $2,000 for my design services,” a multi-issue offer might be, “I’m asking $2,000, and I would like half the payment up front,” or “I’m asking $2,000, and I’d like half the payment up front. And would you be willing to push the deadline back to August?”

Single-issue offers tend to direct negotiators toward haggling over a single issue, typically price. As such, they can lead to defensive arguments, conflict, inefficient agreements, and impasse. By comparison, multi-issue offers reveal information about one’s preferences and can lead negotiators to identify tradeoffs across issues. For example, the designer’s potential client might respond to the three-issue offer, “I’m really hoping to get the site up and running by July 1, if that’s feasible. But up-front payment isn’t a problem. Would you agree to $1,600 if I paid 75% up front?” The exchange of offers could continue from there, with parties making tradeoffs based on their growing understanding of each other’s priorities. Yao and his team theorized that when trust is low, negotiators can use multi- issue offers to create value without having to disclose information that could be exploited.

Overcoming a trust deficit

In one study, the researchers had 100 Chinese managers engage in a sales negotiation simulation in which multiple issues were available for discussion. Before they negotiated, the participants’ base level of trust was measured. The results showed that untrusting negotiators were able to reach high joint gains by making multi-issue offers that generated insight into their counterparts’ priorities. This was especially true for untrusting negotiators who had a holistic mindset—an individual trait that appears to help negotiators integrate the various issues raised in multi-issue offers and make tradeoffs across them.

In another study, before being paired for a negotiation, 138 Chinese undergraduate students read statements designed to persuade them to view their counterpart as either highly trustworthy (high-trust condition) or as someone whose level of trustworthiness was unknown (low-trust condition).
The results showed that high-trust negotiators tended to develop insight into their counterparts’ interests and create joint gain by sharing information directly. Those in the low-trust condition were also able to reach high-quality agreements—not by sharing information, but by exchanging multi-issue offers, which gave them insights into their counterparts’ priorities. Both trusting and untrusting negotiators were able to create joint gains but used different strategies to do so.

Expanding your strategic toolkit

The team’s results highlight that negotiators who don’t trust each other enough to share information directly are still capable of reaching strong agreements that meet both parties’ interests by exchanging multi-issue offers.

In particular, the researchers identify three “sub-strategies” we can adopt when trust is low:

• Refuse to exchange single-issue offers, unless you can agree to leave each issue unresolved until later in the process. Instead, propose multi-issue offers and ask for them in return.
• Hold firm on issues of high priority to you, and gradually make concessions on your low-priority issues.
• Aim to take a holistic approach to understanding your counterpart’s priorities, based on their pattern of concessions across a set of multi-issue offers. To identify such patterns, you might track their offers in a spreadsheet or graph.

What about if you are trusting but your counterpart is not? Give traditional trust-building strategies a try, such as taking time to get to know each other or providing references, but be aware that direct information sharing might not get you very far. Instead, you might want to combine such sharing with offers that cover multiple issues.

On Valentine’s Day, 1945, Matilda Genevieve Scaduto, the 20-year- old granddaughter of Sicilian immigrants, was working the elevator at a Milwaukee hotel when she met a traveling violinist named Boudleaux Bryant. He started calling her Felice, saying it suited her better than Matilda because she was happy all the time, according to American Songwriter magazine. The name stuck.

“Now we’ve got to do something about that name Scaduto,” Boudleaux said to Felice a few days later.

“What suits you?” she asked.

“Bryant,” he said.

They ran off together—Felice was estranged from her first husband— and married as soon as her divorce came through.

The Bryants’ story is the story of a happy marriage, but it is also the story of a legendary creative and business partnership. And it’s the story of how one woman negotiated for her voice to be heard in a man’s world.

An ache to create

The newlyweds toured the country for a couple of years while Boudleaux played in bands. After they settled in Georgia, Felice, cooped up in their small home while her husband worked at dance halls, grew bored. As a child, she had written her own lyrics to traditional Italian songs, pouring her pent-up emotions into verse, according to a BMI Music press release. Now she started writing songs of her own.

Her husband took an interest and pitched in. The two collaborated on words and melodies, while Boudleaux wrote the harmonies. “We had so much fun that he couldn’t wait to get home at night to see what the heck we were gonna come up with,” Felice said in a Grammy Foundation interview. They jotted down songs on whatever scraps of paper were at hand, frequently misplacing them.

After they’d written 80 songs, Felice declared them to be at least as good as what they heard on the radio. Boudleaux started shopping the songs around to friends. In 1948, singer Little Jimmy Dickens recorded their song “Country Boy,” which climbed to the Country Top 10. The Bryants became known for writing songs that were complex but unpretentious, spoken right to the heart. To get closer to the action, they moved to Nashville, Tennessee, becoming the country-music capital’s first professional nonperforming songwriters. A community grew up around them.

Too good to be left out

In Nashville, the couple negotiated an unusual songwriting deal with legendary music producer Fred Rose, co-owner of Acuff-Rose Music Publishing: They agreed to give away their songs for free, as long as the rights would revert to them after 10 years. Rose persuaded the Bryants to start writing down their songs in accounting ledgers so they wouldn’t keep losing them.

In 1957, Boudleaux met the Everly Brothers and sold them a song that the country duo Johnny and Jack had rejected, “Bye Bye Love.” It was the Bryants’ big break.

One day, Felice heard Boudleaux picking out “Wake Up Little Susie” on the guitar in another room. “Uh-oh, this sounds too good to be left out [of],” she thought, running to help. The song was a little risqué, “which is not what I thought the Everlys should be about,” she said in the Grammy Foundation interview. She changed the lyrics to put the hapless couple in the song “at a drive-in movie falling asleep” rather than somewhere more compromising.

With their string of hits for the Everly Brothers, the Bryants broke out of country and into mainstream pop. When the rights to each song reverted to the couple after 10 years, producer Rose “wasn’t happy,” according to blog The Musical Divide.

The pasta scam

In the early days, Boudleaux and Felice were expected to travel to meetings to pitch songs to artists. “The men would talk over her, only to him,” Bobbie Malone, who co-wrote a biography of the Bryants with her husband, told American Songwriter. “It hurt her that she wasn’t taken seriously by the good old boys in Nashville.”

So the Bryants began inviting artists over to dinner. When they arrived, Felice would ply them with wine and spaghetti, topped with her famous sauce. The authentic Italian home cooking she was raised on—“good olive oil and vinegar, lettuces and charred peppers, fresh-baked bread”—was exotic in Nashville in those days, the Bryants’ son Del told American Songwriter.

Bellies full, the artists would be primed to “hear a song and maybe agree to record it,” according to American Songwriter. Felice and Boudleaux jokingly called it their “pasta scam,” Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum vice president Brenda Colladay told Nashville Scene.

If they wanted a song from the Bryants, artists learned, they’d need a much-coveted invitation to dinner. Felice “wouldn’t let the ledgers out of the house,” said Malone. “They would have to come to her territory and deal with her.”

Felice always made sure the table was fully set for an irresistible negotiation. “I’ve seen my dad sit in a chair for 24 hours and write 12 songs,” Del told American Songwriter, “because someone was coming over for spaghetti, and he was to have a lot of songs that might fit that singer.”

Love is like a flame

The Bryants weren’t satisfied with simply selling a song to an artist: They wanted to make sure it was a hit. Boudleaux helped with arrangements in the recording studio. Then he and Felice would go on the road to try to persuade radio programmers to play the song, according to American Songwriter.

When their contract with Acuff-Rose ended in 1966, the couple started their own songwriting company, House of Bryant Productions. They ultimately co-wrote about 1,500 songs, including the frequently covered ballad “Love Hurts.” The Bryants sold songs to artists ranging from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead to Dolly Parton, Tony Bennett, and R.E.M. Among the most revered songwriters of the 20th century, they won dozens of awards.

Boudleaux may have been the trained musician, but Felice was the duo’s driving creative force. “Mother had to write, and Dad had to keep her amused,” Del told American Songwriter. “She wanted it more than Dad, and Dad wanted Mother more than anything.”

Negotiation can be something we do by rote, dutifully deploying familiar tactics to meet a business goal. But as the Bryants—and especially Felice—showed, negotiation can also be the instrument of our deepest dreams and ambitions. A burning passion, a yearning to be heard, might drive us headlong into canny decisions: A move that puts us closer to the action. An unheard-of reversion clause. A more fitting lyric. An invitation to dinner. A commitment to mutual success.

After her husband’s death in 1987, Felice’s songwriting tapered off. She died in 2003. Her recipe for pasta sauce, written in her hand on yellowed notebook paper, is displayed in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, along with the Bryants’ 16 songwriting ledgers.

On Valentine’s Day, 1945, Matilda Genevieve Scaduto, the 20-year- old granddaughter of Sicilian immigrants, was working the elevator at a Milwaukee hotel when she met a traveling violinist named Boudleaux Bryant. He started calling her Felice, saying it suited her better than Matilda because she was happy all the time, according to American Songwriter magazine. The name stuck.

“Now we’ve got to do something about that name Scaduto,” Boudleaux said to Felice a few days later.

“What suits you?” she asked.

“Bryant,” he said.

They ran off together—Felice was estranged from her first husband— and married as soon as her divorce came through.

The Bryants’ story is the story of a happy marriage, but it is also the story of a legendary creative and business partnership. And it’s the story of how one woman negotiated for her voice to be heard in a man’s world.

An ache to create

The newlyweds toured the country for a couple of years while Boudleaux played in bands. After they settled in Georgia, Felice, cooped up in their small home while her husband worked at dance halls, grew bored. As a child, she had written her own lyrics to traditional Italian songs, pouring her pent-up emotions into verse, according to a BMI Music press release. Now she started writing songs of her own.

Her husband took an interest and pitched in. The two collaborated on words and melodies, while Boudleaux wrote the harmonies. “We had so much fun that he couldn’t wait to get home at night to see what the heck we were gonna come up with,” Felice said in a Grammy Foundation interview. They jotted down songs on whatever scraps of paper were at hand, frequently misplacing them.

After they’d written 80 songs, Felice declared them to be at least as good as what they heard on the radio. Boudleaux started shopping the songs around to friends. In 1948, singer Little Jimmy Dickens recorded their song “Country Boy,” which climbed to the Country Top 10. The Bryants became known for writing songs that were complex but unpretentious, spoken right to the heart. To get closer to the action, they moved to Nashville, Tennessee, becoming the country-music capital’s first professional nonperforming songwriters. A community grew up around them.

Too good to be left out

In Nashville, the couple negotiated an unusual songwriting deal with legendary music producer Fred Rose, co-owner of Acuff-Rose Music Publishing: They agreed to give away their songs for free, as long as the rights would revert to them after 10 years. Rose persuaded the Bryants to start writing down their songs in accounting ledgers so they wouldn’t keep losing them.

In 1957, Boudleaux met the Everly Brothers and sold them a song that the country duo Johnny and Jack had rejected, “Bye Bye Love.” It was the Bryants’ big break.

One day, Felice heard Boudleaux picking out “Wake Up Little Susie” on the guitar in another room. “Uh-oh, this sounds too good to be left out [of],” she thought, running to help. The song was a little risqué, “which is not what I thought the Everlys should be about,” she said in the Grammy Foundation interview. She changed the lyrics to put the hapless couple in the song “at a drive-in movie falling asleep” rather than somewhere more compromising.

With their string of hits for the Everly Brothers, the Bryants broke out of country and into mainstream pop. When the rights to each song reverted to the couple after 10 years, producer Rose “wasn’t happy,” according to blog The Musical Divide.

The pasta scam

In the early days, Boudleaux and Felice were expected to travel to meetings to pitch songs to artists. “The men would talk over her, only to him,” Bobbie Malone, who co-wrote a biography of the Bryants with her husband, told American Songwriter. “It hurt her that she wasn’t taken seriously by the good old boys in Nashville.”

So the Bryants began inviting artists over to dinner. When they arrived, Felice would ply them with wine and spaghetti, topped with her famous sauce. The authentic Italian home cooking she was raised on—“good olive oil and vinegar, lettuces and charred peppers, fresh-baked bread”—was exotic in Nashville in those days, the Bryants’ son Del told American Songwriter.

Bellies full, the artists would be primed to “hear a song and maybe agree to record it,” according to American Songwriter. Felice and Boudleaux jokingly called it their “pasta scam,” Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum vice president Brenda Colladay told Nashville Scene.

If they wanted a song from the Bryants, artists learned, they’d need a much-coveted invitation to dinner. Felice “wouldn’t let the ledgers out of the house,” said Malone. “They would have to come to her territory and deal with her.”

Felice always made sure the table was fully set for an irresistible negotiation. “I’ve seen my dad sit in a chair for 24 hours and write 12 songs,” Del told American Songwriter, “because someone was coming over for spaghetti, and he was to have a lot of songs that might fit that singer.”

Love is like a flame

The Bryants weren’t satisfied with simply selling a song to an artist: They wanted to make sure it was a hit. Boudleaux helped with arrangements in the recording studio. Then he and Felice would go on the road to try to persuade radio programmers to play the song, according to American Songwriter.

When their contract with Acuff-Rose ended in 1966, the couple started their own songwriting company, House of Bryant Productions. They ultimately co-wrote about 1,500 songs, including the frequently covered ballad “Love Hurts.” The Bryants sold songs to artists ranging from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead to Dolly Parton, Tony Bennett, and R.E.M. Among the most revered songwriters of the 20th century, they won dozens of awards.

Boudleaux may have been the trained musician, but Felice was the duo’s driving creative force. “Mother had to write, and Dad had to keep her amused,” Del told American Songwriter. “She wanted it more than Dad, and Dad wanted Mother more than anything.”

Negotiation can be something we do by rote, dutifully deploying familiar tactics to meet a business goal. But as the Bryants—and especially Felice—showed, negotiation can also be the instrument of our deepest dreams and ambitions. A burning passion, a yearning to be heard, might drive us headlong into canny decisions: A move that puts us closer to the action. An unheard-of reversion clause. A more fitting lyric. An invitation to dinner. A commitment to mutual success.

After her husband’s death in 1987, Felice’s songwriting tapered off. She died in 2003. Her recipe for pasta sauce, written in her hand on yellowed notebook paper, is displayed in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, along with the Bryants’ 16 songwriting ledgers.

In crisis negotiations, we typically face a number of difficult decisions. Should we try to negotiate on our own or team up with others with shared goals? Should we take time to drive a hard bargain or try to wrap up talks as quickly as possible? How can we account for uncertainty and risk in our negotiations?

These questions and others have been front and center of government negotiations with vaccine manufacturers. Although luck has played a significant role in governments’ success at rolling
out vaccines, the difficulty the European Union (EU) has had negotiating and receiving doses in a timely manner points to lessons we can apply to our own crisis negotiations, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Off to a slow start

In May 2020, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands teamed up to negotiate vaccine purchases from manufacturers. But the EU believed a more unified approach was needed. When the pandemic devastated Italy months earlier, France and Germany had clamped down on exports of personal protective equipment, behavior contrary to the EU’s spirit of solidarity. A united approach to vaccine negotiation and rollout was expected to lessen tensions and, more importantly, offer Europeans better protection from the virus.

In June, the European Commission (EC), the Brussels-based administrative arm of the Union, launched negotiations to secure vaccines for the 450 million residents of its 27 member nations, the New York Times reports. Given that the United States and Britain had started negotiating vaccine deals months earlier, the EU was already well behind in the race to lock up vaccine doses.

Intent on wrapping up deals as quickly as possible amid the worsening pandemic, the United States, Great Britain, Israel, and other countries didn’t spend much time pushing manufacturers hard on price and other issues. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country rolled out vaccines quickly because “we didn’t quibble about the price of vaccines,” according to the Times. By comparison, the EC negotiated hard on price and also insisted that manufacturers accept liability in the event their vaccines caused harm, writes Sylvie Kauffmann in the Times. The haggling ate up critical time. The EC’s need to get input from member states further lengthened negotiations.

An upsetting surprise

In November, the EU closed a deal to purchase 200 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine from U.S. drug manufacturer Pfizer and German firm BioNTech, with an option to buy another 100 million doses. On December 21, the EU approved the vaccine, which had proven highly effective in clinical trials. The vaccine was shipped in five-dose vials to EU member states, which began administering it within days.

On January 8, the EU’s drug agency ruled that because Pfizer’s vaccine vials were overfilled, six doses could be extracted from each one to vaccinate more people. A week later, Pfizer announced it would be reducing vaccine deliveries to the EU until the end of the month, saying it needed to focus on overhauling production at a plant in Belgium.

The EC and EU nations were outraged. Pfizer argued that if six doses were obtained from every vial, it was technically meeting its obligations, according to the Wall Street Journal. It had agreed to provide a certain number of vaccine doses, not a certain number of vials.

The Italian government reportedly considered suing Pfizer. The German state of Hamburg said it hadn’t been able to procure enough of the special syringes required to squeeze an extra dose out of the vials. German health minister Jens Spahn called Pfizer’s announcement “annoying” but said nations had no legal recourse because of the EU ruling.

A second setback

The EU was lagging behind other wealthy nations in vaccinating its residents even as a new, more contagious coronavirus variant was causing cases to spike in several European countries. The Pfizer/ BioNTech delays were a setback, but EU nations were optimistic about the arrival of a vaccine from British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca and the Uni- versity of Oxford. The EC had agreed to purchase up to 400 million doses of the vaccine, which was cheaper and easier to store than Pfizer’s. To deepen its relationship with AstraZeneca, the EU agreed in October to pay the company $300 million to scale up its production.

EC and national officials began to suspect that AstraZeneca had diverted vaccine doses meant for the EU, manufactured in Belgium, to Britain. AstraZeneca denied the allegation, saying that it had produced Britain’s supply within that nation.

But just as the EU was about to approve the vaccine, AstraZeneca revealed on January 22 that it was slashing its initial deliveries to the EU from 80 million to just 31 million doses, citing problems at a manufacturing facility in Belgium. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca was fully meeting its vaccine commitments to Great Britain, according to Politico. When EU and national officials angrily grilled AstraZeneca leaders about the shortfalls, they were met with “lack of clarity and insufficient explanations,” according to a tweet by EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides.

EC and national officials began to suspect that AstraZeneca had diverted vaccine doses meant for the EU, manufactured in Belgium, to Britain. AstraZeneca denied the allegation, saying that it had produced Britain’s supply within that nation. Moreover, the company noted that it had signed its deal with Britain several months before its agreement with the EU. The EC claimed AstraZeneca had made specific delivery guarantees, but AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that his company had promised only to do its best.

“Trust has been severely shaken,” an EC official told Politico.

In response to AstraZeneca’s announcement, on January 25, the EC said it would require drug manufacturers to seek EU approval before shipping vaccines internationally, including across the Irish border into Britain. The move would delay shipments of the Pfizer vaccine from Belgium to Britain.

Britain, Ireland, and the World Health Organization were furious. In the recently concluded Brexit negotiations between the EU and Britain, keeping the border between Europe and Ireland open had been a key sticking point for Ireland and Northern Ireland. Now the EU appeared to be reneging on its Brexit commitments. Facing severe criticism, EC president Ursula von der Leyen backed down from the plan, calling it a mistake.

It’s all relative

Residents of Germany, France, and other large EU nations watched with envy as vaccines rolled out relatively quickly and smoothly in Britain. By early February, only 3% of EU nationals had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, as compared to 17% in Britain and 9% in the United States.

“Of course, the question arises: Why is the United States faster, why is Israel faster, why is the United Kingdom faster?” German chancellor Angela Merkel told public broadcaster ARD in early February. She didn’t offer an answer.

But whether the EU negotiations have been a failure may depend on where you’re standing. “Bigger, richer countries like Germany and France . . . saw their vaccine campaigns delayed by the more cumbersome joint effort, while smaller [EU] countries wound up with better supply terms than they were likely to have negotiated on their own,” write Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Melissa Eddy in the Times.

Most small and developing nations have been shut out of vaccine negotiations with pharmaceutical companies entirely. As reported in our January issue, the nonprofit COVAX alliance of 190 nations is buying vaccines to distribute to developing countries for free or at low cost, but has purchased only a small fraction of the doses that will be needed.

A negotiating advantage

As reflected in the EU’s setbacks, during disease outbreaks, vaccine makers commonly have the upper hand in sales negotiations with governments. In many cases, companies have demanded and received development grants and no-interest loans, flexible delivery schedules, patent protection, and immunity from liability, write Matt Apuzzo and Selam Gebrekidan in the Times. Many also explicitly prohibit wealthy countries from donating or selling vaccines to poor countries, in part due to liability concerns.

Although drugmakers often receive huge taxpayer investments—the U.S. government gave Moderna $1 billion in grants to develop its successful vaccine— they typically retain full ownership of their patents. This allows them to set prices and keep generic vaccines that could save many more lives off the market, according to the Times.

Pharmaceutical firms typically also insist on confidentiality regarding the details of their agreements—including the price paid per dose, the rollout schedule, and the amount paid up front. This gives them a further negotiating advantage, as governments remain in the dark about what their “competitors” are paying. Confidentiality agreements also make it difficult for governments to hold firms accountable for failing to meet commitments.

Preparing for crisis negotiations

There’s often not much time to prepare for crisis negotiations, but we will typically benefit from pausing to think through several key choices.

• Consider the costs and benefits of joining a coalition. The EU saw real value in negotiating with pharmaceutical companies as a coalition: enhanced buying power, a more efficient rollout of vaccines, reduced infighting, and the knowledge that its smaller member nations wouldn’t be left behind. At the same time, the team approach likely slowed down talks. Negotiators often gain bargaining power by joining a coalition, but you should expect to face coordination challenges and delays.
• Remember that haggling takes time. The EU likely achieved better deal terms in its negotiations with pharmaceutical companies than Britain, the United States, and Israel did. But the lengthier process moved the EU further back in the line for vaccine doses. In competitions for scarce resources, keep in mind that extensive haggling can backfire by delaying agreement.
• Prepare for setbacks. Even in good times, negotiators tend to be overoptimistic that partners will meet their targets and fulfill their commitments. In the worst of times, our overoptimism is particularly unwarranted—and dangerous. It’s always wise to envision worst-case scenarios and try to prepare for them. You might be able to lessen the risk of a busted contract by negotiating contingencies and by striking deals with multiple partners.
• Factor in previous commitments. Suspecting that AstraZeneca was putting other partners first, the EC tried to prevent history from repeating itself by imposing export restrictions. In doing so, it made a mockery of its Brexit commitments and angered close trading partners. We always need to weigh our options in negotiation through the lens of our ongoing obligations and partnerships.

In crisis negotiations, we typically face a number of difficult decisions. Should we try to negotiate on our own or team up with others with shared goals? Should we take time to drive a hard bargain or try to wrap up talks as quickly as possible? How can we account for uncertainty and risk in our negotiations?

These questions and others have been front and center of government negotiations with vaccine manufacturers. Although luck has played a significant role in governments’ success at rolling
out vaccines, the difficulty the European Union (EU) has had negotiating and receiving doses in a timely manner points to lessons we can apply to our own crisis negotiations, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Off to a slow start

In May 2020, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands teamed up to negotiate vaccine purchases from manufacturers. But the EU believed a more unified approach was needed. When the pandemic devastated Italy months earlier, France and Germany had clamped down on exports of personal protective equipment, behavior contrary to the EU’s spirit of solidarity. A united approach to vaccine negotiation and rollout was expected to lessen tensions and, more importantly, offer Europeans better protection from the virus.

In June, the European Commission (EC), the Brussels-based administrative arm of the Union, launched negotiations to secure vaccines for the 450 million residents of its 27 member nations, the New York Times reports. Given that the United States and Britain had started negotiating vaccine deals months earlier, the EU was already well behind in the race to lock up vaccine doses.

Intent on wrapping up deals as quickly as possible amid the worsening pandemic, the United States, Great Britain, Israel, and other countries didn’t spend much time pushing manufacturers hard on price and other issues. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country rolled out vaccines quickly because “we didn’t quibble about the price of vaccines,” according to the Times. By comparison, the EC negotiated hard on price and also insisted that manufacturers accept liability in the event their vaccines caused harm, writes Sylvie Kauffmann in the Times. The haggling ate up critical time. The EC’s need to get input from member states further lengthened negotiations.

An upsetting surprise

In November, the EU closed a deal to purchase 200 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine from U.S. drug manufacturer Pfizer and German firm BioNTech, with an option to buy another 100 million doses. On December 21, the EU approved the vaccine, which had proven highly effective in clinical trials. The vaccine was shipped in five-dose vials to EU member states, which began administering it within days.

On January 8, the EU’s drug agency ruled that because Pfizer’s vaccine vials were overfilled, six doses could be extracted from each one to vaccinate more people. A week later, Pfizer announced it would be reducing vaccine deliveries to the EU until the end of the month, saying it needed to focus on overhauling production at a plant in Belgium.

The EC and EU nations were outraged. Pfizer argued that if six doses were obtained from every vial, it was technically meeting its obligations, according to the Wall Street Journal. It had agreed to provide a certain number of vaccine doses, not a certain number of vials.

The Italian government reportedly considered suing Pfizer. The German state of Hamburg said it hadn’t been able to procure enough of the special syringes required to squeeze an extra dose out of the vials. German health minister Jens Spahn called Pfizer’s announcement “annoying” but said nations had no legal recourse because of the EU ruling.

A second setback

The EU was lagging behind other wealthy nations in vaccinating its residents even as a new, more contagious coronavirus variant was causing cases to spike in several European countries. The Pfizer/ BioNTech delays were a setback, but EU nations were optimistic about the arrival of a vaccine from British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca and the Uni- versity of Oxford. The EC had agreed to purchase up to 400 million doses of the vaccine, which was cheaper and easier to store than Pfizer’s. To deepen its relationship with AstraZeneca, the EU agreed in October to pay the company $300 million to scale up its production.

EC and national officials began to suspect that AstraZeneca had diverted vaccine doses meant for the EU, manufactured in Belgium, to Britain. AstraZeneca denied the allegation, saying that it had produced Britain’s supply within that nation.

But just as the EU was about to approve the vaccine, AstraZeneca revealed on January 22 that it was slashing its initial deliveries to the EU from 80 million to just 31 million doses, citing problems at a manufacturing facility in Belgium. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca was fully meeting its vaccine commitments to Great Britain, according to Politico. When EU and national officials angrily grilled AstraZeneca leaders about the shortfalls, they were met with “lack of clarity and insufficient explanations,” according to a tweet by EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides.

EC and national officials began to suspect that AstraZeneca had diverted vaccine doses meant for the EU, manufactured in Belgium, to Britain. AstraZeneca denied the allegation, saying that it had produced Britain’s supply within that nation. Moreover, the company noted that it had signed its deal with Britain several months before its agreement with the EU. The EC claimed AstraZeneca had made specific delivery guarantees, but AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that his company had promised only to do its best.

“Trust has been severely shaken,” an EC official told Politico.

In response to AstraZeneca’s announcement, on January 25, the EC said it would require drug manufacturers to seek EU approval before shipping vaccines internationally, including across the Irish border into Britain. The move would delay shipments of the Pfizer vaccine from Belgium to Britain.

Britain, Ireland, and the World Health Organization were furious. In the recently concluded Brexit negotiations between the EU and Britain, keeping the border between Europe and Ireland open had been a key sticking point for Ireland and Northern Ireland. Now the EU appeared to be reneging on its Brexit commitments. Facing severe criticism, EC president Ursula von der Leyen backed down from the plan, calling it a mistake.

It’s all relative

Residents of Germany, France, and other large EU nations watched with envy as vaccines rolled out relatively quickly and smoothly in Britain. By early February, only 3% of EU nationals had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, as compared to 17% in Britain and 9% in the United States.

“Of course, the question arises: Why is the United States faster, why is Israel faster, why is the United Kingdom faster?” German chancellor Angela Merkel told public broadcaster ARD in early February. She didn’t offer an answer.

But whether the EU negotiations have been a failure may depend on where you’re standing. “Bigger, richer countries like Germany and France . . . saw their vaccine campaigns delayed by the more cumbersome joint effort, while smaller [EU] countries wound up with better supply terms than they were likely to have negotiated on their own,” write Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Melissa Eddy in the Times.

Most small and developing nations have been shut out of vaccine negotiations with pharmaceutical companies entirely. As reported in our January issue, the nonprofit COVAX alliance of 190 nations is buying vaccines to distribute to developing countries for free or at low cost, but has purchased only a small fraction of the doses that will be needed.

A negotiating advantage

As reflected in the EU’s setbacks, during disease outbreaks, vaccine makers commonly have the upper hand in sales negotiations with governments. In many cases, companies have demanded and received development grants and no-interest loans, flexible delivery schedules, patent protection, and immunity from liability, write Matt Apuzzo and Selam Gebrekidan in the Times. Many also explicitly prohibit wealthy countries from donating or selling vaccines to poor countries, in part due to liability concerns.

Although drugmakers often receive huge taxpayer investments—the U.S. government gave Moderna $1 billion in grants to develop its successful vaccine— they typically retain full ownership of their patents. This allows them to set prices and keep generic vaccines that could save many more lives off the market, according to the Times.

Pharmaceutical firms typically also insist on confidentiality regarding the details of their agreements—including the price paid per dose, the rollout schedule, and the amount paid up front. This gives them a further negotiating advantage, as governments remain in the dark about what their “competitors” are paying. Confidentiality agreements also make it difficult for governments to hold firms accountable for failing to meet commitments.

Preparing for crisis negotiations

There’s often not much time to prepare for crisis negotiations, but we will typically benefit from pausing to think through several key choices.

• Consider the costs and benefits of joining a coalition. The EU saw real value in negotiating with pharmaceutical companies as a coalition: enhanced buying power, a more efficient rollout of vaccines, reduced infighting, and the knowledge that its smaller member nations wouldn’t be left behind. At the same time, the team approach likely slowed down talks. Negotiators often gain bargaining power by joining a coalition, but you should expect to face coordination challenges and delays.
• Remember that haggling takes time. The EU likely achieved better deal terms in its negotiations with pharmaceutical companies than Britain, the United States, and Israel did. But the lengthier process moved the EU further back in the line for vaccine doses. In competitions for scarce resources, keep in mind that extensive haggling can backfire by delaying agreement.
• Prepare for setbacks. Even in good times, negotiators tend to be overoptimistic that partners will meet their targets and fulfill their commitments. In the worst of times, our overoptimism is particularly unwarranted—and dangerous. It’s always wise to envision worst-case scenarios and try to prepare for them. You might be able to lessen the risk of a busted contract by negotiating contingencies and by striking deals with multiple partners.
• Factor in previous commitments. Suspecting that AstraZeneca was putting other partners first, the EC tried to prevent history from repeating itself by imposing export restrictions. In doing so, it made a mockery of its Brexit commitments and angered close trading partners. We always need to weigh our options in negotiation through the lens of our ongoing obligations and partnerships.