Working Notes: Current Working Notes These notes are the contents of a whiteboard in Tinderbox that I'm using to map out my (more . . .)

More than prediction: Finishing up Toulmin's Foresight and Understanding, I reread his attack on prediction several times. He asserts that there must be (more . . .)

Steven Strogatz, Sync: The emerging science of spontaneous order: Steven Strogatz has been one of the leading figures in the mathematics of biological systems. While synchronization of independent elements (more . . .)

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My personal website is at ODBlog . I write about decision theory at my site On Deciding . . . Better . This site is a hyperlinked set of essays using Tinderbox.

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Two general business strategy books have continued to resonate with me over the last several years. I've had trouble understanding why a book on negotiating, "Start with No" by Jim Camp and a book on career management, "Fire your Boss" by Stephen Pollen should seem so important. What principles do they share?

Camp's approach to negotiating relies on developing an attitude that one can desire an agreement, but the agreement itself cannot become the goal. If you work for the deal, you are no longer negotiating, you are compromising. The message of "Start with No" is that you can want the deal, but you should never need it.

I've found the approach powerful in the way it shifts the balance in a negotiation. If you feel you can openly reject any offer or, on the other hand, make offers that can be rejected, then much of the emotional barriers to effective negotiation evaporate. It is easier to be fully present and rational in the discussion about the deal. Personal acceptance and rejection don't matter.

If you need the deal, you are enslaved to its outcome. It's personal and you're desperate for approval. Starting with no provides a platform for autonomy and personal power over the world.

"Fire your Boss" also urges the reader to move to a place of personal strength where a particular employment situation is by choice, not by necessity. Pollen's idea is to turn outward, away from career and seek satisfaction from life outside the job. Rather than sacrifice income to be creative, look at employment as a way to pay the bills and seek the personal fulfillment of creativity elsewhere. He also advises continuous job fishing, preferably to always have an offer of alternative employment elsewhere.

If satisfaction with life comes from outside the workplace, then the job is less entangled with personal identity. You don't need the job for emotional validation. Similarly, having a choice about whether to stay in a job or go provides personal autonomy and detachment from the situation.

The common principle is to embrace wanting but avoid needing. If one can live life needing nothing but wanting everything, the world is opened but can't dominate. The self can enjoy power over the world only by not needing it. Once there is need, there is a loss.

There's a puzzle, a seeming contradiction, in being simultaneously engaged with the world and yet detached. Its the balance of the material and the spiritual. Desire is the driver: once it crosses from want to need, desire can enslave.

Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov