Everyone wants a deal. I’ve seen it as I’ve worked booking speeches for decades, and it’s more stressful as the terms become closer to what both sides want and even more so as the deadline looms.
For example… if a service is $35,000 and an entity wants to acquire that service for $10,000, that’s an easy “no.” But if the entity wants it for $30,000, it means you roll the dice. Do you want to risk $30K for another $5K when you could end up with a blank? If the date of the service is far in advance, you hope another entity will acquire it before the deadline. But if the deadline is right around the corner, the stakes are higher.
When you have multiple instances of this type of situation going on at the same time, it’s a lot of pressure to make the right choices. I spent a good deal of my work life looking like my grandmother in the old photo above. (She’s the one on the bottom left looking like she needs an exorcism.)
youtube TV vs NBC — and democrats vs republicans…
At the core, both are high-stakes negotiations with a deadline, where each side tries to hold out for better terms while avoiding getting blamed for the disruption. We — as the public and consumers — only know what each side of the negotiations wants us to know, and we may align with the entity who is the best at media manipulation.
So here we are on October 1, and unlike my negotiations — which have a very specific and defined end date of all or nothing — these challenges are shaking out a bit differently. We’re now in a partial government shutdown, and youtube TV reached a last minute, short-term extension to avoid a blackout while negotiations continue.
At this point in my life, even thoughts of negotiating anything — including what I’m going to cook for dinner — is more than I can tolerate. It’s not that I don’t care about the outcomes, it’s that I have an ongoing invasion to deal with right now. 🙂
Now you know: When James Dean first met Alec Guinness he asked him to take a look at his brand new Porsche Spyder. Guinness told Dean: “If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week.” This encounter took place on September 23, 1955, seven days before Dean’s death.