Posts Tagged ‘Pat Schroeder’

Think about personal needs as a strategic tool if you want to speed up decision making:

Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr, rarely holds meetings anymore. But when she did, she writes in this month’s Inc. magazine,  everyone would stand, and they talk only after everyone drank 16 ounces of water. The agenda would be discussed, decisions would be made, “and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.”

That reminded me of a tip Former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder offered when she was interviewed for The Good Girl’s Guide to Negotiating. She confessed to “cutting off bathroom privileges” if she was trying to wrap up a particularly tough negotiating session.

Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion also may come into play. So ignore these needs if you want meetings to end sooner rather than later, or attend to them if you want the discussion to take a more leisurely course.