politics in business

* the other day i mentioned my negotiations lecturer - kathleen reardon - and some of you seemed kinda interested in her work. I mentioned that she has a blog - she also has another here. I haven't had a chance to check them out much - but if you are interested, as a starting point, there's a recent interview here (mp3 - 40 min) about some of her thoughts on 'politics in business.' (theres some annoying background noise at the beginning, but that improves). it's not particularly groundbreaking - but it might be of interest as some background. (I've asked her if she can point to some interviews that might be of specific interest - i'll pass any suggestions on, obviously).

Kathleen's work (at least the stuff that I'm familiar with) is largely about interpersonal negotiations - rather than politics per se - but a lot of it scales-up really well into the political environment. Firstly because politics is inherently about negotiation - even in BushWorld where they refuse to 'negotiate' with Dems, or the Russians, or the Palestinians, or the Chinese, or the Iranians, or Jeebus, or anyone. In the world according Kathleen (and i agree), *everything* is negotiation - including 'not negotiating'. The other reason that kathleen's stuff scales up to the political level is that negotiation (i think she actually calls it 'negotiation and persuasion') includes basically 'anything that can be perceived' - so wearing a nice suit to a job interview scales to Bush arriving at an event in a military helicopter, for example. And masterful use of repetition has most americans believing that saddam flew the planes into the WTC, and masterful appropriation of ostensibly independent and credible expertise has condi and cheney pointing to judy miller in the NYT etc etc. These guys used every trick in kathleen's playbook.

In any case, if you are interested, check out her stuff, and hopefully she'll be able to point us to some other stuff that might be of particular interest.