Who is the author of The Bartering Mindset?

The author of The Bartering Mindset is Brian C. Gunia.

Communication Skills

The Bartering Mindset Book Summary - The Bartering Mindset Book explained in key points

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Name: The Bartering Mindset
Rating: 3.9 (70 reviews)
Author: Brian C. Gunia

Brian C. Gunia

A Mostly Forgotten Framework for Mastering Your Next Negotiation

3.9 (70 ratings)

18 mins

Brief summary

The Bartering Mindset by Brian C. Gunia is a business book that explores the advantages and limitations of bartering as a negotiation technique. It provides practical tools and insights for achieving win-win outcomes and building strong relationships in business and beyond.

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Skills Negotiations

Table of Contents

The Bartering Mindset
Summary of 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Become a master negotiator by adopting a mostly forgotten mind-set.

Whether we’re buying lunch or a new car, money is almost always what we use to get the items that we want and need in life. While this is highly convenient, as it makes the trading of goods and services a whole lot easier, our modern monetary economy has some negative psychological implications. Psychologists have long known money has the power to influence the way people think. We can call this the monetary mind-set. And when it comes to negotiation, the monetary mind-set leads us to narrow-minded solutions.

But there is a better way: the bartering mind-set, which is used in bartering economies and tends to result in more creative solutions to problems. These blinks will teach you not only what this mind-set is, but how to adapt it to our monetary economy through a five-step process. Once you do, you’ll find yourself thinking up win-win solutions that you might never have imagined otherwise.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why negotiation books have failed to make us better negotiators;
what approach you should use next time you want to ask for a raise; and
how to establish trust with negotiation partners.

The monetary mind-set leads to a narrow-minded approach to negotiation.

If you’ve ever read a book on negotiation, then you might be familiar with the concept of distributive behavior. The term refers to employing competitive tactics when negotiating, like using persuasion or making sure that you’re the first to make an offer. Most negotiators rely on distributive behavior, in part because it achieves results: statistically, people who make the first offer are more likely to get the better deal in their negotiations.

But if we look more closely, we can see that people also rely on distributive behavior because of their monetary mind-set, which intrinsically lends itself to this kind of strategy.

When you come to the negotiation table with the monetary mind-set, you bring a set of assumptions with you. For one, you see yourself as one side of a conflict between parties with opposing objectives. You also assume that a better deal for one party inherently means a worse deal for the other. In most cases, this leads buyer and seller to seek a compromise, which helps avoid conflict but also means each party takes a smaller slice from a smaller pie.

A good example of distributive behavior as the result of a monetary mind-set is US President Donald Trump’s behavior when he demanded that Mexico finance a border wall between the two countries. Mexican President Enrique Peña rejected Trump’s plan, and it quickly became clear that the two men saw their positions as mutually exclusive. That made compromise necessary if both parties wanted to avoid further conflict.

But what if we didn’t have to compromise when we negotiated? That’s where integrative behavior comes in. Integrative behavior aims to appease opposing parties’ mutual interests by using strategies such as trust building or information exchange. Using integrative behavior, we can widen the scope of our negotiations so that each party gets more rather than both parties meeting in the middle.

Research has shown repeatedly that successful negotiators use both integrative and distributive behaviors to achieve optimal results. Yet research such as that published in the 2013 Forbes article “Negotiators Still Aren’t Getting to Yes” shows that even people well-versed in negotiation techniques still aren’t employing integrative behaviors. Though incorporating integrative behaviors is clearly the best practice, our monetary mind-set leads us to negotiate distributively.

If we want to become skilled negotiators, we need to adopt a mind-set that lends itself to integrative behavior. As we’ll see, the bartering mind-set does just that. Follow it and all parties involved will get a bigger slice from a bigger pie.

We can observe the bartering mind-set in an idealized bartering economy.

Chances are, you’ve bartered at some point in your life. Perhaps you traded toys with a friend, or mowed your neighbor’s lawn in return for a favor. Still, bartering is far from the norm when it comes to daily transactions. So before we look at applying the bartering mind-set to our monetary economy, we need to understand what bartering really feels like.

Like a person with a monetary mind-set, a barterer comes to a negotiation with a set of assumptions. To understand these, imagine a farmer who lives with his family on a prairie; let’s call him Keith.

The first step a negotiator with a bartering mind-set takes is to define needs and offerings.

If you were to ask your current boss for a raise, how would you go about it? Most people would request a meeting with the boss, at which they would discuss their performance and finally ask for a raise. They might even ask for a higher number than what they really want, assuming that they’ll have to compromise anyway. But if you were to approach the same problem with a bartering mind-set, you might find that you don’t have to compromise at all. To find out how, let’s take a look at the first step you’ll take in cultivating a bartering mind-set: defining both your needs and your offerings deeply and broadly.

Defining your needs deeply means not only stating what you need, but also understanding why you need it. If you’re asking for a raise, for example, do you need more money to cover commuting costs?

Define the full spectrum of your transaction partners and identify their potential needs and offerings.

In step one of cultivating the bartering mind-set, you came to a more complete understanding of your needs and offerings. But you’ll also want to get a thorough understanding of your partners.

That brings us to the second step: defining the full spectrum of your potential transaction partners. Here, once again, you’ll want to get creative to widen the scope of your possibilities.

Identify power partnerships by assessing relationships and the costs and benefits of trades.

You now have a detailed map of the needs and offerings of your potential partners. Step four to cultivating the bartering mind-set is combining this information with your map of what you need and offer and using that to predict the most powerful partnerships across the market.

There are three stages to predicting the power of relationships. The first stage is translating the needs and offerings that you’ve mapped out into specific trades. You can do this by making a chart, noting in one column how a partner will fulfill your needs with their offerings and in a second column how you could fulfill their needs with your offerings. So in the first column, you might note the possibility of increasing revenue by advertising before movies at the local theater. Then, in the second, note that your café could distribute fliers featuring the theater’s current program.

Step five in cultivating a bartering mind-set is to seek out the most powerful potential partnerships.

Once you’ve identified the most powerful relationships you can cultivate, you’re finally ready to negotiate. But before you start making any offers, remember that at this point you’re not trying to secure a deal or even necessarily pave a path for one. Instead, you’re trying to uncover information in order to understand your partners and the market as a whole.

Think of it like this: You want to test your assumptions about your partners without burning any bridges if you decide not to pursue a deal. You can do this using a five-step process: introducing yourself, bringing up your needs, meeting the other party’s needs, meeting your needs and concluding.

Bridge the bartering mind-set with the monetary mind-set by using Multi-Issue Offers (MIOs).

As soon as you’ve decided which power partnerships you want to pursue, you’re ready to move into the value-claiming phase of your negotiation. That means transitioning back to a monetary mind-set. But be careful! Transitioning too abruptly by aggressively pushing one issue could disrupt the work you’ve just done.

Instead, integrate the bartering and monetary mind-sets smoothly; the simplest way to do this is with a multi-issue offer (MIO). Unlike single-issue offers (SIOs), in which you propose one issue at a time, MIOs address all negotiable issues at once. In your negotiation with the grocer, for example, the pastries, window signage and coupons would all be presented together in a single offer.

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What is The Bartering Mindset about?

The Bartering Mindset (2019) details a method for negotiation that applies the mind-set of bartering economies of the past, in which people traded goods and services to get what they needed, to today’s monetary economy. By breaking down the bartering mind-set into a five-step process, these blinks will help you cultivate a more sophisticated approach to negotiating.

The Bartering Mindset Review

The Bartering Mindset (2021) by Brian C. Gunia is a compelling exploration of the power of negotiation and bargaining in our everyday lives. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Packed with real-life examples and practical strategies, it equips readers with the tools to negotiate effectively and achieve win-win outcomes.
By combining research findings, psychological insights, and personal stories, the book offers a comprehensive understanding of the art of bargaining.
The author's engaging writing style and relatable anecdotes ensure that the book remains captivating and far from boring, making it an enjoyable journey through the world of negotiation.

Who should read The Bartering Mindset?

Professionals looking for a new approach to negotiation
Psychologists and economists
Historians and anthropologists interested in an interdisciplinary look into bartering

About the Author

Brian C. Gunia is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. His research focuses on how people can help their careers through ethical behavior, effective negotiation and sufficient sleep. His work has been published in journals including Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Applied Psychology.

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