The Power of Knowing Your Bottom Line

The Playbook With David Meltzer

David Meltzer, Entrepreneur.com

Careers, Entrepreneurship, Business

4.9 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode, I sit down with Kwame Christian, the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute, for a conversation about what negotiation really is and why most people misunderstand it. We talk about recognizing when you’re actually negotiating, knowing your timing and risk tolerance, and understanding the difference between convincing and conveying your value. Kwame shares how he built his confidence from being a people pleaser to becoming a leading voice in the field, along with a powerful story about protecting his bottom line during a major media deal. His perspective on fairness, leverage, and long-term reputation reframes negotiation entirely.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Entrepreneur's Playbook. This is David Meltzer, and I'm here with Kwame Christian. He is the CEO of the American Negotiation Institute, but most importantly, he's a Buckeye. That means this is here in Columbus, Ohio, the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes, O-H-I-O. Let's get right to it. Thank you for joining me, Kwame. Amen. Thank you for repaying the favor. You were on my show. I really appreciate it.
0:22.8	Oh, blessed to be on your show. I'm always blessed to it. Thank you for joining me, Qua. Amen. Thank you for repaying the favor. You were on my
0:21.5	show. I really appreciate it. I'm blessed to be on your show. I'm always blessed to share with a community
0:26.4	and our communities have so much in common. The interesting thing about my career is most people,
0:32.2	because I ran the most notable sports agency in the world, they think my expertise or subject
0:37.4	matter preference is negotiation.
0:40.4	Yeah.
0:40.8	And I have a unique perspective of negotiation, not like Lee Steinberg, who's known for that
0:46.8	type of negotiation.
0:48.5	In your opinion, being the expert in the space, right, in the American Negotiation Institute,
0:54.0	what role does negotiation
0:56.1	play today? And are there certain aspects that you believe are missing from negotiation?
1:01.3	Yeah, for sure. So negotiation is everywhere. So I think it's good to start with the definition.
1:05.6	Please. Because a lot of times we just focus on negotiation as this really like backroom deal
1:10.7	type of really intense
1:12.1	interaction yeah competitive very competitive and very transactional right but I like to
1:17.4	redefine negotiation so the way I think about it is a negotiation is anytime you're in a
1:21.7	conversation and somebody wants something so what almost every conversation every
1:25.9	conversation humans every conversation right right and so Every conversation, right? Right, right.
1:28.3	And so it broadens our perspective because one of the biggest mistakes people make is that they don't recognize when they're negotiating.
1:34.3	And when they don't recognize they're negotiating, then they don't have that signal to use the skills that we're going to talk about today.
1:40.3	Do you believe in a negotiation part of the problem is people don't know what they want?
	...

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