“Even if I wasn’t the fastest. Like I said, I knew how to shut down rumors—all I had to do was confront it straight on. Confront and shower.

You cannot win this as an incumbent,” he [Michael] said. “You cannot win on the defensive. It’s only about the future. It’s not about the past.

People opened useful messages for extrinsic reasons; they had something to gain or lose. They opened the other messages for intrinsic reasons; they were just curious.

I also didn’t appreciate that if you ask ten questions and make ten suggestions, people may take them less seriously, even if they’re all equally good. If you have only two issues or questions, people will take your two more seriously than they may take any of your ten. During my first hundred days in the Harvard presidency, I could have had things I identified as success and could have signaled that it was a new day without dissipating as much goodwill capital, if I had been smarter.” - Lawrence Summers.

You are the customer of the supplier,” I said. “Why doesn’t the same principle apply?”

“Well, we recently renegotiated our lease agreements with the mall operators and owners,” he said. “We went in with a Win/Win attitude. We were open, reasonable, conciliatory. But they saw that position as being soft and weak, and they took us to the cleaners.”

“Well, why did you go for Lose/Win?” I asked.

“We didn’t. We went for Win/Win.”

“I thought you said they took you to the cleaners.”

“They did.”

“In other words, you lost.”

“That’s right.”

“And they won.”

“That’s right.”

“So what’s that called?”

When he realized that what he had called Win/Win was really Lose/Win, he was shocked. And as we examined the long-term impact of that Lose/Win, the suppressed feelings, the trampled values, the resentment that seethed under the surface of the relationship, we agreed that it was really a loss for both parties in the end. If this man had had a real Win/Win attitude, he would have stayed longer in the communication process, listened to the mall owner more, then expressed his point of view with more courage. He would have continued in the Win/Win spirit until a solution was reached they both felt good about. And that solution, that Third Alternative, would have been synergistic—probably something neither of them had thought of on his own.