Hi Reader, We recently had Pri Upadhyay, the talented product management coach behind "Product with Pri", on the Gentle Power Podcast (YouTube | Spotify | Apple). Pri spent 18 years in tech, including time at Google and Salesforce, then built a coaching and training business for product managers, helping senior PMs, directors, and VPs navigate job searches and transitions. Pri is a career coach who's come to believe negotiation is one of the most underrated skills in her field. Her clients...
4 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, Imagine you prepared for your negotiation carefully, picked your moment, and framed the ask cleanly. And they still said no. Most people walk away from that thinking they did something wrong. They second-guess their phrasing, timing, the numbers that were discussed, maybe they shouldn’t have pushed so hard. That instinct is understandable. It’s also a reasoning error that many people tend to miss or discount called “resulting.” 1. What “resulting” actually is Resulting is when you...
8 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, We recently had Jim Lose on the Gentle Power Podcast (YouTube | Spotify | Apple). Jim is a former Marine Corps officer and CEO of The Military Veteran, a recruiting firm that places veteran executives into high-growth, venture-funded and private equity-backed companies. Jim spent the early part of his career as a battalion intelligence officer and built extensive experience working with senior military leadership, including leading regular briefings to the Commandant of the Marine...
13 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, A screenshot went viral recently. Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill Gates, was negotiating a paid collaboration with a creator who’d asked for $4000. Phoebe counter-offered at $400. That’s 10% of the ask. The creator was offended enough to leak the conversation. Unsurprisingly, the deal didn’t happen. Screenshot shared by the creator who negotiated with Phoebe Gates We actually think Phoebe made some smart moves here. But she also made a few avoidable mistakes that cost her the deal...
15 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, This week on Gentle Power, we reacted to a short video from Alex Hormozi on negotiations. It's about a line you can use when a buyer asks you for a discount, and it's been shared a lot. We watched it live on the episode and then picked it apart. To be fair, there’s a real negotiation principle buried in it, but there’s also a few assumptions that subtly undermine it. Alex also shared a story about his most embarrassing moment, which illustrates why using this line is risky. Listen...
19 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, Something exciting happened last week: Gerta was featured in Business Insider! link to article This article covers the negotiation myths in comp negotiations that we see most often, including ones that most career coaches still repeat. The reason Gerta's take is different is that she spent years on the other side of the table at Salary.com, advising hundreds of companies on how to pay their employees. She's seen what the data actually says, and more importantly, she's seen how...
22 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, This week on the Gentle Power podcast (GentlePowerPodcast.com), we hosted Tallulah Le Merle. Tallulah spent seven years as a management consultant at Kearney, has done fractional COO and advisory work with AI scale-ups, and is now a partner at a conscious-tech investment firm called Fifth Era. She also has a book coming out called The Case for Hope in the Age of AI. The thread running through all of it is a deep, practical fluency in human dynamics. This turned out to make for one...
26 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, Today we're diving into one of the most common points people give ground before they even realize it: early compensation questions. The tactics here aren't complicated. But we’ve seen in our client work that when the pressure's on, even the most experienced and senior professionals start second-guessing the basics. Be careful with early compensation questions Sharing your preferred salary number will never help you, except in very rare edge cases. Imagine that negotiations are like...
30 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, This week on Gentle Power (GentlePowerPodcast.com), we had Surina Diddi on the podcast. Surina and Gerta are Wellesley classmates, and it turns out they also took a graduate class on negotiations together at MIT, which we learned a few minutes into recording. Surina spent nearly a decade in finance: equity research, investment banking, then private equity in the renewable energy space. She understands long sales cycles, institutional bureaucracy, and the art of building...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read