Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
134 Teaching Minds
our wives and children and friends and co-workers all the time.
It is possible to teach negotiation, of course. My team once built
a course on negotiation, working with a Harvard Law professor’ who
taught negotiation. The course worked by having people negotiate.
The situations were artificial so there is some question as to how valu-
able lessons can be learned from negotiating when nothing important
(except ego) depends on it. What I found most interesting about that
course were the stories that the expert told from his life as a profes-
sional negotiator. I can’t say that I was ever able to personally make
use of the lessons that those stories taught, but other people’s experi-
ences are interesting to think about. In the end, what we really know
about negotiation is what has worked well for us in the course of our
lives when we were negotiating. Coaching can help, of course, which
implies that the best way to teach negotiation would be with a men-
tor watching you do it for real and offering tips. Psychologists perform
this service in couples counseling, and presumably real estate agents
perform this service for homebuyers and sellers. Just-in-time advice is
always helpful.
There is a famous quote: “I apologize that this letter is so long—I
lacked the time to make it short.”8 As long as people have been talk-
ing, they have had to learn to talk well. When they learned to write,
they had to learn to write well. Communication is a very big part of
living in a society and those who communicate well gain all kinds of
advantages. It is difficult to attain public office without speaking well,
or to become an important academic without writing well, or to make
sales or convince anyone of anything without making your case well.
This takes practice and coaching, and there is no substitute for ei-
ther. One also has to have something to say, so this means one has to
have had experiences to talk and write about. Further, it helps if one
is writing about something that one is passionate about. Asking kids
to write about their summer vacations doesn’t necessarily make them
into good writers. Asking kids to give speeches about George Washing-
ton fails for reasons of lack of passion. People need to learn to describe
well what is most important to them. And, they must be doing this
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023880