Excerpt: Successful Negotiating for Women
Aug. 6 -- Women who are headed back to the work force after a break need to sharpen their negotiating skills before they go for their first big interview. Read an excerpt from A Woman's Guide to Successful Negotiating: How to Convince, Collaborate, & Create Your Way to Agreement by Lee Miller and his daughter, Jessica Miller.
Lee Miller, co-author of A Woman's Guide to Successful Negotiating: How to Convince, Collaborate, & Create Your Way to Agreement, gave a mock interview on Good Morning Amerca to three woman looking to re-enter the workplace.
The following is an adaptation of an excerpt from the book he wrote with his daughter, Jessica Miller.
Women who have succeeded in all walks of life share what they have learned with a father-daughter team to produce a woman's guide to successful negotiating.
Davia Temins, President of Temins & Co. and former head of Corporate Marketing for General Electric Capital Service, remembers the exact moment she realized "almost everything is negotiable if you see it that way." When she got out of business school, she accepted her first job as Assistant Director of Development at the Columbia Business School without really negotiating. She saw the offer as a choice, not a negotiation: you either took the job or you didn't. It never crossed her mind that she could negotiate the offer.
While working at Columbia, however, she saw something that changed her view of the world. She had always assumed that when you applied to business school you either got accepted or you didn't. If you didn't you went to another business school or did something else. A few students, however, when they were rejected sought out the Dean of Admissions and asked her what they could do to change her mind. To Davia's amazement, the Director of Admissions did not send them away. She told them if they took four semesters of Advanced Calculus and Statistics and got an A in each, she would admit them. A handful of students actually did and were admitted. At that point Davia realized that "way more things were negotiable than she had previously thought." So she decided to learn how to negotiate.
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