Contract Rights Under Assault

Barack_Obama_pledges_help_for_small_businesses_3-16-09In 1789, as the inchoate American government was climbing out of the mountainous debt left over from the Revolutionary War, a thorny political problem emerged.  While most of the chattering class was consumed with the debate over whether the states’ war debt should be federalized, another far more visceral controversy arose.  Because the Continental Congress lacked funds during the war, the Revolution was funded partly by wealthy private citizens who invested in bonds.  As a result of the lack of governmental money, many American soldiers were given worthless IOUs at the end of the war, as states scampered for a way to give the patriots their back pay.  Many of these soldiers panicked, and sold their IOUs to speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar.  The problem was, once the federal government began repaying the debt, the value of the bonds soared.  So who should get the money: the patriots who fought bravely for their country and only sold the IOUs because of fear they would get nothing from their government, or the speculators?

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Can Guys Teach Gender?

Yes . . . and they should! Coming back from the works-in-progress conference this past November at Harvard, one of the most interesting conversations was a late-night one between several professors — men and women — about teaching gender in a negotiation class. Now that the new semester is starting up, I wanted to bring this topic up again.

As others have noted to me, the vast majority of gender and negotiation research, and public presentations on gender, tend to be by women. Debbie Kolb would point out that everyone has gender — not just women — and yet there is clearly something about teaching gender that make at least some male professors uncomfortable. And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not for lack of thinking it’s important; it’s more that they don’t want to be patronizing or make the situation worse by raising stereotypes that they themselves do not believe in. At least one male professor hoped that by avoiding teaching gender, and teaching general negotiation effectiveness, everyone would get the message that people should not be defined by their gender. But, as he noted, that does not, in the end, necessarily serve either the male or female students in our negotiation classes. 

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Lessons from my Grandmother

It has been ten days since my grandmother’s funeral and I have been, if not enjoying this past week, definitely enjoying telling stories about her life and her influence on her grandchildren.  She died at age 99, laying down to take a rest because she did not feel well — the Torah writes that those who die in their sleep are Tzadek, truly righteous, and I know she belongs in that category.  I popped in last week to talk to my dean briefly and proceeded to tell him the following:  I made it all the way through law school before I believed at all that perhaps, perhaps, women were not quite as assertive as men in negotiations when I found, in the year that I taught negotiation at Stanford, more of the women needed some work on being more assertive and more of the men needed some work on listening.   Now, that has not been the case in every class that I have taught over the years and it was a pretty simplistic view of each student’s skill sets at the time but . . . the point was that it did not even occur to me that there were gender differences in levels of assertiveness because I never saw any in my family. (Just ask my brother, husband, or brothers-in-law!)   I had read about these so-called gender differences in my negotiation class.   I just did not buy it — no one I knew would ever have been subject to that description.  And, with Mama’s passing, I realize how indebted I am to her for my understanding of negotiation. 

Over the past 15 years in particular, as I have led an “adult” life — marriage, kids, career — I also started to view my grandmother as a three-dimensional adult and not just the relatively limited view that grandchildren tend to have of their grandparents, particularly when we are children. 

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