RED BEAR News

From Philadelphia's seven-day municipal strike to an 18-month international nuclear fusion project, this week's negotiation stories reveal a crucial truth: those who master timing and anchoring control outcomes.

Philadelphia's ongoing municipal workers' strike has entered its seventh day, with trash piling up in neighborhoods and negotiations between Mayor Cherelle Parker's administration and AFSCME District Council 33 at an apparent standstill. While this public sector dispute plays out in the headlines, it offers valuable lessons for business leaders navigating their own high-stakes negotiations.

The recent NJ Transit engineers' strike that brought rail service to a halt for three days offers a compelling case study in how understanding underlying motivations—what RED BEAR calls "buying motives"—can make or break high-stakes negotiations. While the immediate issue appeared to be wages, the real drivers behind both sides' positions reveal deeper psychological and strategic motivations that...

When cyber criminals encrypt your business-critical data and demand millions in ransom, you might feel powerless. But even in the most extreme negotiation scenarios, understanding and leveraging your personal power can mean the difference between paying $1.7 million and settling for $225,000.

From AI-powered negotiations to international trade breakthroughs, the most successful outcomes are coming from strategic positioning rather than traditional power plays.

The World Trade Organization's efforts to reinvigorate services trade negotiations offer a masterclass in complex, multilateral negotiation dynamics. When Ambassador Adamu Mohammed Abdulhamid of Nigeria took the helm of the Special Session of the Council for Trade in Services in 2025, he wasn't just inheriting a technical trade mandate—he was stepping into one of the most challenging negotiation...

When AI Agents Negotiate: Why Human Principles Matter More Than Ever How Stanford research on AI-to-AI negotiations reveals the enduring importance of RED BEAR's foundational negotiation framework When Stanford researchers put AI agents head-to-head in negotiation scenarios, they uncovered something profound: even in a world of artificial intelligence, the fundamentals of strategic negotiation...

The recent Finnair pilot union agreement proves a critical point that most negotiators miss: extended timelines aren't negotiation failures—they're strategic opportunities.

Recent groundbreaking research from the University of Cambridge has uncovered a startling truth: your personality traits could be undermining your effectiveness in business negotiations. The study, analyzing data from Germany's Socio-Economic Panel tracking 22,000 households, reveals that personality differences significantly impact professional outcomes and negotiation success. The findings are...

How the world's most complex multilateral negotiation reveals the strategies that separate deal-makers from deal-breakers