This post was originally published on this site
Few topics have dominated the headlines recently as much as President Trump’s efforts to renegotiate trade relationships with other countries. There are good reasons for the attention they get: The outcomes affect the prices of so many of the goods that make up our economy—and, in turn, businesses, their employees and our retirement accounts.
There is another reason for us to follow trade negotiations, though. They present—in real time and in a grand scale—lessons about the practice of negotiating, which we can define as the means through which conflicts are resolved when we are not appealing to some formal authority, like laws and courts, to do that for us. It’s something that the HR function has to do almost every day.
Negotiations 101
There are two main types of negotiations. The first is “zero-sum,” which means we cannot make things better for both of us, whatever I gain comes at your expense and vice versa. Trump is well-known for thinking about conflicts and their resolution in this manner—perhaps because many of his business deals were that way. Think of this like buying a house from someone you do not know and are unlikely to see again.
The other type is
