Hello, my friends, and welcome to our practice session. In our practice sessions, we invite our featured

guests to show off their negotiation and conflict resolution skills in a realistic scenario. In this

session, I want you to pay attention to what our guest does and not to what I do, because while

they are trying to show off their skills and teach you, I'm trying

to frustrate their efforts in different ways through things like aggression, annoyance,

emotionality, or awkwardness. And then after the practice session, we debrief and talk about

what worked, what didn't work, and what you can use in your next difficult conversation.

Welcome everybody to our sparring session. This is going to be a fun one. Again, our guest is

Hamilton Chan and he will get us started by outlining the situation and then we'll jump into it.

Awesome. Well, Kwame is great to be back and thank you so much again for having me. I object

to calling it a sparm session

because I think this is just going to be a getting to know you session. But yeah, let's start off

with fictitious scenario. We'll say that I am the CEO of a company called Smart Mugs. Smart Mugs

makes a coffee warmer that basically will allow you to place a mug on an intelligent hot plate and it will

keep that mug at the same temperature throughout a four-hour period. And what's great about this is

it makes the coffee taste better and it please as customers. We'd love to get our product on the shelf

at Starbucks.

And you are the big, huge company.

You are the executive VP of merchandising.

I'm lucky to even get this meeting with you.

I have presumably low negotiating leverage.

I'm just a startup.

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