Finding the right job for you and getting the salary you want is not that easy. One must master the art of negotiation and learn how to show up properly if they’re going to pull that off. Melanie Parish sits down with David Johnson, who aims to combine his professional experiences as a lawyer with design. He shares the most important strategies when chasing job opportunities on both entry-level and C-Suite ranks, focusing on showcasing your value and facing every challenge of ambiguity. David also talks about how one can hone and experiment with their negotiation skills just by asking the right questions and having the proper level of courtesy.

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Listen to the podcast here

David Johnson On How The Art of Negotiation Can Lead To Great Job Opportunities

I’ve been thinking about leadership and the idea of collaborative negotiation like opening up to others as we try to find solutions even if there’s money or time involved. How do we not see everything as a contentious process? How do we start to smooth the edges and move toward common goals? It’s important to approach things, seek information and also reveal more. The more opening, the better these negotiations go. In a client relationship, what’s your budget for that? Try to diminish the lack of unknowing so that I can help to meet the need of a client instead of trying to guess what the need is and trying to fill it or everybody trying to get the best for themselves as opposed to a collaborative solution. I like collaboratively written RFP responses. When you work with the organization to write a response, what they’re looking for is to get feedback along the way and to keep feedback loops open. I wonder where you could infuse more collaborativeness into a more contentious part of your life?

I’m here with Dave Johnson. He began his career as a trial lawyer in the courtrooms of Miami. After a decade, he came to Stanford to study design, tech and environmental law. He worked for several Silicon Valley companies with an increasing focus on teaching. First, at Stanford Law School and then at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford AKA the d.school. His articles are Design for Legal Systems to be published by the Singapore Academy of Law in 2021 and Designing Online Mediation: Does “Just Add Tech” Undermine Mediation’s Ownmost Aim? published in 2019. Dave lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Rebekah and their puppy-in-law, Buster. He’s writing a book on design and climate activism.

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David, I am excited to have you on my show.

Melanie, thanks. I appreciate the opportunity.

I love talking with leaders like you and knowing what they’re up to in their own lives. Tell me about how you’re experimenting and what you’re up to in your work.

I’m going to go at that from 2 or 3 levels. At a macro-level, I’ve been practicing law most of my career. I stopped practicing a few years ago in part because my wife and I went to Asia for her job for a couple of years. I decided that was a good time to put a pause in my work and turned to writing. I’ve been in the process of shifting over from practice to academics and teaching. I teach negotiation and advanced negotiation at the law school. I also teach Applied Design Thinking for Negotiators at the Institute of Design, what we call the d.school at Stanford.

Experiment number one is injecting my 30-year legal experience into the world of design and design thinking, trying to blend law and design. In fact, the article that I wrote in Singapore was called Design for Legal Systems. It came out the Singapore Academy of Law Journal. That’s what I’ve been thinking about at a high level. The second level is the course that I’ve been teaching for a couple of years now at the d.school, Applied Design Thinking for Negotiators. A lot of those students come from law school. What we’re trying to do is bring some of the elements of the designer mindset, a different way of seeing and solving problems, coupled with the fundamental tool of design which is a human-centered approach and an empathic approach to looking at problems.

Art Of Negotiation: The negotiator who does a better job of managing the process is the one who has the better chance of having a better outcome for themselves.

I’m super curious about this whole idea of design and negotiation going together. Can you pull that apart for me? Help me understand what that might look like.

When I went to law school, they didn’t even teach negotiation or as far as I know, anywhere else in the university. I started law school after T-rex died. Let’s put that back into history. Negotiation became a popular and fairly important subject to teach in law schools and business schools, probably starting several years ago. The tendency was to simply teach strategy and tactics. Here’s what happens when you’re at the table and you’re negotiating this kind of deal or that kind of deal. The good academics teachers we’re starting to look at how to manage the negotiation process.

Michael Watkins, in particular, wrote a book about managing a negotiation process from an engineering point of view. Engineering is shot through with the design. I grabbed hold of that book and I teach from that book and started thinking about applying the designer’s approach to negotiation, which is to say, “Our job as a lawyer or even as a non-lawyer negotiator is on behalf of ourselves. Usually, our company, to go get the best deal possible with somebody who also wants the best deal possible.” Oftentimes, those two interests are competing.

It turns out that there are good studies and feedback that say, “The negotiator who does a better job of managing the process of a negotiation including managing the available information in the negotiation is the one who has the better chance of having a better outcome for themselves.” We dove into pulling design tools into negotiation and a lot of it having to do with listening skills, empathy skills, managing emotion and managing communication in a way that develops trust and still controls the negotiation space in our self-interest.

I’ve hired people, watched people negotiate and I’ve negotiated at different times. The longer I coached through that and the longer I’ve experienced that, the more collaborative I want that process to be. I’m having this moment where I’m like, “All those things I’m learning intuitively, you might have learned intentionally,” which happens from time to time. If you get to the end of the negotiation and it comes down to money or whatever the last things you’re negotiating are, I always think a collaborative conversation at that point is powerful.

It’s all the empathy and stuff you’re talking about. I always want you to stand on the same side with the person you’re negotiating with and say, “Is there any way there’s any more money in this budget for me?” It’s not a fight to the death because that harms the relationship down the road also. Often, the person who’s doing the negotiation doesn’t even have a horse in the race. Their money is in a budget that’s not going to affect them personally. If they like you, they can open that budget more for you.

You’ve touched on many things that we talk about. Let me see if I can unpack it this way. One of the big frameworks that we approach negotiation with is the difference between a zero-sum negotiation. What we call a distributive negotiation, buy-sell a car, usually a one-off. A $1 in my pocket is $1 out of your pocket and vice versa. We are all familiar with that. The other kind of negotiation is what we call integrative or non-zero-sum expanding pie negotiation. This is one where the collaboration comes into play where the parties develop trust, share information and look for opportunities to create more value in the space of what they’re negotiating about. There are opportunities for what is a true win-win.

I consider it a misnomer the phrase win-win is bandied about a lot as if every negotiation where two people agree to a deal is a win-win. That is not true. You have a zero-sum negotiation. If you get two people to agree to the negotiation then you have a win-lose situation. This was discussed back in the ‘60s when the term bubbled up. A win-win is where the parties have created more value and then in a certain way, shared between themselves the value that they created as a result of their negotiation. This tends to happen in more complex negotiations. It also tends to happen in negotiations for transactions. For example, deals, licensing intellectual property, making an acquisition of a company. There’s enough complexity that you can find new assets.

What’s curious about this is in doing that kind of negotiation. You have to be able to collaborate to find access, identify and quantify the value but you also then have to be able to compete and claim your share of the value that’s being created. A good negotiator can both collaborate and compete, knows when to do which in order to both get their share of the expanded pie but also not bruise the relationship when they’re going to have to work that with that person going forward.

I want to switch because I can feel the depth of knowledge. I’m starting to go, “Let’s make this practical, David.” I have clients who are in Silicon Valley, who get recruited in Silicon Valley. They get job offers or brought in to talk about a job. They’re trying to figure out their own value in the marketplace and, “What does it mean that I get this salary now? What should I be asking for in the future?” What light can you shed on that process? I know there are people who are new to the workforce, in the first few years then there are more senior people. I think of them as the shiny stars that can command huge salaries because they’re unique in some way. They are creating that win-win because of their presence in an organization. I’d love to talk about all three of those.

This is going to be my personal point of view and it’s not shared by everyone, that’s for sure. Let me talk about three buckets that you’ve identified. The first one I want to address and then put aside right away is entry-level. I’ve been through this and most of us have been through this. Even B-School students ask me about negotiating their first job out of B-School. My fundamental approach is, you should negotiate with your employer when you receive an offer but you should do so fairly carefully.

Don’t overreach because, in most entry-level jobs, they have a stack of resumes unless the job market skews towards the candidate. Most companies will have a stack of resumes that have already passed muster and are acceptable, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 people for one job. You don’t want to press too hard at the entry level. At the same time, particularly if it’s a business job, they probably expect you to negotiate a little bit so there’s an acceptance of a counteroffer.

In tech where offers often come, if not always, with cash and equity components, my view is each individual has to make their own decision on which value is more important. Most companies, particularly early-stage startups are more willing to give more equity than they are willing to give more cash. The more mature the company is, the more willing they are to put a little extra cash on the table, say a signing bonus, moving expenses or setting the first-year bonus up higher. They’re less willing to move equity because they already have a structured equity scenario.

As you talk about that, they’ve got those buckets, signing bonus, equity and salary but often are constrained in one of them so they can’t give you what you want. In my experience with clients who are negotiating, they can get crazy offers. They won’t get what they asked for but they’ll go up high in another one. One organization might not be able to do salary but they can do a huge signing bonus. If you let them solve their own problem in the negotiation, they can have some wacky numbers that can throw at you. Even though they can’t meet the salary, you might end up with a ton of equity or a ton of signing bonuses. It depends on how much they want you. If they want you, you can keep going back a few times. I certainly find, with a recruiter, you can go back the most because the recruiter is taking the brunt of the relationship but I might have a different idea about that.

Art Of Negotiation: Most companies, particularly early-stage startups, are more willing to give more equity than to give more cash.

At entry-level, there’s less often a recruiter involved but it’s still possible. To put a bow on entry-level because I want to move to the next bucket is, in my opinion, based on my 30-plus years in Silicon Valley. Let’s say you’re coming out of school and you have 1, 2, maybe 3 offers or interview processes going on. The most important variable is not how much money Company A is giving you or how much stock Company B is giving you. The most important variable is which company is right for you. People fail to focus on that. I’ve seen plenty of instances more than I can remember where somebody took the highest dollar and ended up at a company that they loved for six months. It didn’t work out well and then the company itself went sideways. They got bummed out and ended up leaving in 1.5 years and they didn’t advance their career.

Whereas somebody else took less money or even less stock and went to a company that the press was more favorable on. The metrics were stronger for this tech company’s growth and the reputation of the founder or CEO was better, etc. They took a lower offer, went to a better company and ultimately, made more money because the stock ended up worth more. They were happy so they performed better, their salary and bonuses went up. The end result was far better when they went for the lower upfront comp package. It’s a careful balance here. This is where I focus with young people that the most important decision is which industry, do you want to be in?

We can’t overemphasize that the pile of resumes that are behind in the company’s pocket. I know as someone who walked away from somebody because they negotiated too hard one time. I went, “You’re not a good fit for us. I’m sorry.” I withdrew the offer. People don’t even think about that being a risk. They either think, “Don’t think about that being a risk,” or they think about it too much as being a risk. There’s that one negotiation back where you asked for the one thing you want. Especially early career, you go with the flow and show your value rather than trying to talk your value out of the gate.

Let’s go to the other extreme. Let’s look at the bucket of experienced personnel at the VP or senior VP level, all the way up to the CXOs. You may have read about this example. It’s quite public, Sheryl Sandberg. When Mark Zuckerberg identified her as the one he wanted to bring on board as the COO, she shared quite publicly the conversation she had with her husband back then. Dave was the Founder of SurveyMonkey.

Maybe I talked about it in our book but I’m not sure. Zuckerberg gave her this offer and she was thrilled. It was lucrative. It covered most of everything that she wanted. She just wanted to go work with Mark and work at Facebook. She went back to and chatted with Dave and he said, “You cannot accept that offer. You have to go back with a counteroffer that’s fairly aggressive. The reason is not that you or we need any more money. The reason is Mark Zuckerberg expects you to do that because the person he is hiring needs to be somebody who’s willing to counter Mark Zuckerberg. That’s the key metric for being the COO at Facebook,” as he explained it. In that instance, he was right. That’s a rarefied example.

She countered and they went back and forth. The deal got done. At the C-Suite level, there’s a whole different approach. You may even hire an executive compensation lawyer to advise you, if not also represent you in a negotiation. You probably have a high-end professional recruiter working between the two of you. Sheryl and Mark, I don’t believe did but in most instances, that’s in play also. You have to negotiate those and the base plus bonus, equity, performance metrics, responsibility, staff, budget and all of those things are more complex and more negotiable.

By the way, if you are in that space being recruited by a public company, please, rule number one, go to the 10-K and 10-Q. Read the executive compensation pages and all the disclosures that they are required to file in the public record. You will see how they do their comp and who’s getting paid what and why. It gives you an enormous amount of accurate information because it has to be accurate before you start thinking about countering or even analyzing an offer from a public company.

At that top gun level, those shining stars. I’ve known people who were asked to write down the dollar figure they wanted. It’s not all about what can you take from a company, but it turns it on its head when you have to figure out how much value you can provide to a company and to think through that. In that negotiation, whatever you negotiate for dollar-wise, that’s the value you have to provide to that company. You have to be a strong thought leader in order to provide that value to a company whose innovating.

What’s interesting about it is it’s not all that quantifiable. For example, if the VP of sales or you’re coming in and you’re going to be the VP of North America or Europe sales, you’re going to have discussed and hopefully, they’ve disclosed the trailing 12 to 24-month numbers. You can say, “Here’s what I’m going to ask you to pay me. Here’s what I could achieve in the first 12, 18, 24 months as far as sales increases. I can demonstrate to you that I’m worth it.”

In fact, I will go so far as to say, “You can recalibrate my 24-month end bonus based on how well I do.” You can talk about quantifying performance. That’s a unique space. If you’re coming in as the director of innovation at Google, it’s difficult to quantify that. You can point to a fancy job at IDEO or some other design consultancy or even if you’re Apple. You can point to things that you’ve done that are design-oriented at Apple and you’re moving to Google. Although that might be a backward jump. Sorry, people.

It’s hard to quantify. Both sides are poking around. As my old sports coach told me once, “Sometimes, a move that you make in sports is a little bit like searching for the light switch in a dark room. You’re not quite sure where you want to move with your body.” In the same sense, where do you move in a conversation about compensation when it’s something as intangible as innovation? I don’t have an easy answer for that. It may depend in large measure on the context, which is probably where I would go if I was talking to somebody who is trying to sort this out. What’s the context? What kind of innovation do they want? Do they want innovation in a particular department, like the product or do they want across-the-board innovative programs to push innovation as a culture throughout the institution? Those are two different things. I would argue the latter is probably more valuable in the former but the former might be more quantifiable.

One of the things I look for is I help to develop people who are these thought leaders in FAANG organizations is, what’s the new value? What’s the space they’re holding that no one else can hold that they’re elevating the conversation around? Why are they the right person to do that? How will they start to elevate that conversation throughout the organization or up through the ranks? That’s the value they can provide.

If it’s around a thought concept or something that they’re holding then that creates a picture or an image for their leadership that’s not just like, “We hired a person to fill a role that we described.” It’s beyond the described role. That’s exactly what you’re saying, too. We try to get metrics but there is this essential quality to that of what are they providing that’s new in the organization? How is the conversation elevated a brand or topic? That is incredibly valuable to an organization when someone elevates new ideas and they pay for that.

That’s a good perspective because it jarred me to think this way about it. I’ll give you a little example that helps. One of the fundamentals of negotiation is the difference between power and leverage. The example that’s in a couple of the textbooks that I like is this. Imagine you’re a parent at a dinner table and you’re trying to get your six-year-old to eat their vegetables and your kid does not want to eat it. In that scenario, the parent has all the power over the child, money, shelter, you name it but the child senses intuitively that the parent wants him to eat the vegetables. If they refuse to eat the vegetables, suddenly, they have some leverage over the parent. “What will the parent give me to eat my vegetables? Will they give me an extra hour up, give me a TV show or give me extra dessert?” The child will oftentimes almost unwittingly negotiate a deal based on the leverage in order to eat the vegetables.

Art Of Negotiation: Do a deep dive into your personal-professional background experience and find the examples that you can elevate to cut talking points that mesh with your dream.

The difference between power leverage is interesting. You have a big company that probably has 4 or 5 candidates for a director of innovation job and you have the employee who feels like, “I want this job. How do I quantify what I can deliver to the company?” The first thing that you can do is focus on trying to read the company representatives and how much they want you. Assume that they know they’ve got three candidates. Let’s say they’ve shortlisted three candidates and you’re 1 of those 3. You are effectively competing against the other two. They have a 1st, 2nd, 3rd choice somewhere in their system or they may have a dead cold tie between 2 of those 3.

Trying to figure out where you are in that line of three and how much they want you is how you’re going to end up quantifying your value. Let me put it this way. You’ve read the job description. All three of those candidates likely hit 70% to 80% of the job description. We could have a long conversation about how off base they oftentimes are and how far the actual higher is from what the original description was. That’s all fine. In a space such as innovation, I would want to elicit as much information from the company about what they want. Not just what they said in the job description and what the people said in the interview but what they want. More importantly, what leadership is telling the recruiters and HR to bring on board.

Behind every new hire, there’s a dream in the organization for what somebody new will bring to that position, role and organization. A candidate has a real shot at understanding the organization better if they talk about that dream. What are you hoping will happen? If they can tap into that dream as with any sale of yourself, a product or anything, if you understand the dream behind it, you have a better shot at fulfilling it. You, certainly in the negotiation phase, have a better shot at helping them believe that you can fulfill it. Understanding the dream is key here.

That’s a good way of putting it in. Part one is being a good questioner and a good listener about that dream. Part two is doing a deep dive on your personal-professional background experience and finding the examples that you can elevate to cut talking points that mesh with the dream. If you can hit 7 out of 10 cylinders on your prior performance what you’ve done in your work career with their dream, the odds are stronger for you then take comparison the person 2 or 3. The way they react to each of those examples is going to give you a clue to how persuasive you’re being and how much more they want you. Ultimately, their willingness to pay more when you ask for it is going to be based on the desire that they have for you to eat your vegetables.

This is a show about experimenting. I always talked about in experimenting, what’s safe to fail? I was curious if there’s anything around negotiation that you think are good safe-to-fail experiments people can try in the negotiation phase.

Negotiating employment deals is probably not the place for experiment unless you have 2, 3, 4 offers on the table and you’re almost agnostic about which one you choose. I don’t think anybody’s ever in that situation. You always have your heartstrings going for one company and your practical mind going towards the better off or something like that going on.

There is an experiment if you can look at your target condition of bringing multiple offers to the table at one time. I always think it’s a 6 to 8-week time frame down the road. You can manage the offers to play with the timeframe a little bit by the way that you schedule interviews. I’ve always liked multiple offer situations because it gives people choice. I like to taste two glasses of wine together to see how the characteristics are different. I always like the multiple offer game. That’s a cool way to play. I’ll back off because I don’t know what else to experiment with. Experimenting with multiple offers can be super powerful.

I always tell people, particularly at the entry-level, the pre-recruiter stage to try not only to get two or more options available but also to get them surfacing at roughly the same time. What happens is it gets difficult when one offer comes and they say, “We need your answer by next Thursday,” and you have another one that is about a week away. You ask the first people to postpone until the second one comes up. Believe me, they know the game you’re playing and it does not go over well. I’ve passed on plenty of people who tried to play that game when I was doing the hiring.

It’s great to have multiple offers. You want to go out and try and get those to the surface. To go back to the experimentation where I’ve encouraged other people to do this and I’ve done it myself. Oftentimes, to really surprise is experimenting in real-world scenarios that are fairly low risk but still interesting to try and win. This would be negotiating for a little bit of money off at a retail store or packaging some things together. Instead of buying $150 worth of stuff, assemble a larger amount of stuff and then stop shopping and say, “I like all of this stuff. Can you give it to me for 10% or 15% across the board?” They start to walk away if they don’t give it to you. You can always come back and buy the stuff later on another day with another salesperson and nobody. You’ll be the wiser if you want it but you can experiment doing that.

There’s interesting research on this where men do this and women don’t. These statistics always pissed me off, I started experimenting with this. Anytime the price seems high about anything, I experiment. We had a $5,000 Prius repair. We thought about buying a new one but we like our car and finally, decided to pay the money and do transmission or whatever it was. I went in and I negotiated on this car repair and my husband was about jaw on the floor. I was like, “This is expensive. Can you do a little better?” He said, “Sure. I can take $500 off or something.” I was like, “You guys called me and told me I needed this flash thing,” which was the dealer doing a cash call for something I didn’t need. I was like, “I need that, too. Can you throw that in?” He was like, “Okay.” It’s $1,000 just for asking.

Just for Asking might even be the title of one of the books you’re thinking about women don’t ask, a negotiation book entirely about that. There is room if you choose to ask. Another interesting place where I found some success which is pre-COVID days, I lived in San Francisco and my wife and I would, oftentimes, want to go out to dinner at the last minute without reservations. We’d go to the restaurant that we want to go to and show up, “We don’t have a reservation. Maybe you can get a table.” They go hem and haw and then they go back.

During that period of time, I’m scanning the room to see how many tables are open because if you know the business, you know there’s a lot of juggling this going on. They’ll come back and they’ll say no. What I found is I just stand there and look around at the tables. I might say, “Would it help if I told you we can be out in 45 minutes?” I’ll keep standing there. By not agreeing to take no for an answer and not agreeing by my footsteps to walk out the door and try somewhere else, 7 out of 10 times, they find a way to put us at a table when we don’t have a reservation. They know there’s so much fluidity in the table turnover, timing, etc., that you can do it.

I’ll give you one more example where I experimented. When we were in Singapore, there was this place that we wanted to go to time and time again and we kept dropping by. They had a rooftop bar you couldn’t make reservations for. You just had to get the line and go. Finally, we walked up to the same woman that had been manning the front. I told her, “We are flying home to the States tomorrow afternoon. As you know, we’ve been trying to get to this rooftop bar and enjoy the sights at the top of your restaurant in the last six months.” She goes, “I’m sorry.” I said, “Could you please go ask your manager?” The manager came down and I said the same thing. She goes, “Here’s what I can do. I’ll take you up to the second floor. We have a lounge. If you want to wait there, we’ll see what can happen.”

We did that and the next thing that happens is the manager comes, gets us and personally takes us up to the rooftop bar, stand us at the bar and says, “Wait here.” She clears the table and we get the premier bench seat on the rooftop bar. That was nice of her. She was doing that I’m sure because of the story. We were Americans who were leaving the country and it is the culture but it’s about asking in a polite, kind, gentle way with some persistence and showing no indication that you’re ready to walk away. Those kinds of experiments whether you succeed or not will sharpen your skills so that you feel better about asking in a scenario where there’s more at stake.

Art Of Negotiation: Negotiating employment deals is probably not the place for experiment unless you have other offers on the table, and you’re almost agnostic about which one you choose.

When I talk about my work with everybody being reactive and reactivity. Sometimes, when negotiation feels scary, we get reactive in our approach. One of the places to experiment is around being friendly when you ask for things. It’s better if you ask for lots of money while you’re smiling and saying, “I know you’re going to do the best you can.” It’s that personality and charm, as you ask. It’s not like pushover charm and not like, “Whatever you want.” It’s like, “I know you’re super busy and you can’t do everything for everybody all the time but we have this need. It’s our anniversary.” I asked desk clerks, too, like, “We’ve traveled so far to get here. Are there any upgrades that you could give us for a great room?” It doesn’t work all the time. It works some of the time. In general, allowing people to do nice things in the world. You can ask them to and they sometimes will.

There are a few things that we talked about in negotiation class repetitively which is that the liking factor makes it psychologically more difficult for somebody to say no to you. If you rub them the wrong way, it makes it a whole lot easier psychologically for them to say no and feel good about saying no. The liking factor is not so much that they genuinely like you in the sense that you’re going to be a friend of theirs and they’re going to go have a beer with you tomorrow. It’s that it’s psychologically more difficult for them to say no, which in their mind creates pressure to find a way to say yes. They know how to say yes. We don’t know how to say yes. The liking piece is an important piece for them to access their options.

When things get scary, one of the things we teach religiously at the d.school is navigating ambiguity. This is important in a negotiation because negotiations are inherently full of uncertainty because we don’t have the information. We have incomplete information and they’re inherently ambiguous because we don’t know what the other party wants, is thinking or how they’re going to act or react to the next thing we do. Learning to develop the confidence to embrace ambiguity, engage the ambiguity and allow ourselves to slowly but steadily process through ambiguous and dangerous feeling space is an important human emotional skill. The alternative to doing that is to shrivel up and back away in fear.

Navigating ambiguity translates into learning ways to be comfortable in the ambiguity. Some people have a particular fear of the water. Some people have a particular fear of dark water. In order to overcome those fears, at some point, you will steadily migrate to then being able to jump off of the boat in the middle of the night into the ocean. Jump in pitch-black waters that are hundreds of feet deep and feel comfortable with it. It can be scary to think about it and it’s hard to get there but by experimenting slowly and steadily with smaller, less risky iterations, you can get to that place.

How can people find you, David?

The easiest way is my bio on the Stanford Law School faculty directory. I have an email up there. I have a website up and running called Climate-Activist.com. It’s a website for a book I’m working on. There’s a contact page in there. You can reach me through that as well.

It has been fun to talk to you about all this negotiation. That’s rich information. Thanks for being here.

My pleasure. I appreciate it.

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I’ve been with David Johnson. I have been enjoying talking to him about negotiation, experimentation and how asking can make a difference in the outcomes. It’s interesting to know how one thinks about salary negotiation at different stages in tech. It’s been interesting to think about in my own life how I might apply the skills of negotiation, uncertainty and reducing ambiguity to help take me forward. It’s been amazing talking to David. I hope that you found it interesting, too. Go experiment.

Important Links: 

• Dave Johnson
  
• d.school
• Design for Legal Systems
• Designing Online Mediation: Does “Just Add Tech” Undermine Mediation’s Ownmost Aim?
• Michael Watkins
• SurveyMonkey
• Bio – David Johnson’s Stanford Law School faculty directory
• Climate-Activist.com

About David Johnson

Dave Johnson began his career as a trial lawyer in the courtrooms of Miami. After a decade, he came to Stanford to study design, tech and environmental law. He has worked for several Silicon Valley companies, with an increasing focus on teaching, first at Stanford Law School and then the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford (a/k/a the d.school).

His most recent articles are Design for Legal Systems, to be published by the Singapore Academy of Law, Mar/Apr 2021, and Designing Online Mediation: Does “Just Add Tech” Undermine Mediation’s Ownmost Aim?, published in 2019 by FGV Direito, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dave lives in Bay Area with his wife Rebekah, and their puppy-in-law, Buster. He is currently writing a book on design and climate activism.

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