Business Conflict Blog

Thanksgiving is one of the most popular holidays of the year for Americans.  It is also culturally becoming.  We are encouraged to pause and reflect on what we have received, especially from those no longer at the table. 

(There are, as always, other ways to look at it — Ayn Rand famously called it a typical American holiday because it celebrated not Pilgrims, but successful production, in a selfish and therefore commendable feast of conspicuous overconsumption.)

Might we consider an accompanying holiday — one where, instead of thinking of what we have received, we think of what we might get rid of?  In particular, our resentments, our grudges, our get-back-ats, and our expensive, time-consuming claims against one another?  Rather than Thanksgiving Day, what about Forgiving Day?

(No, this isn’t religious — it’s commercially rational.  Read on!) Read more »

Tags: conflict management, Culture

For as long as I’ve been active in conflict management, I have been confronted with a quote from Abraham Lincoln about not stirring up litigation.  I first saw it on a pamphlet at CPR in 1998.  Since then I have since seen it in articles, pamphlets, traning materials, mediation center literature, law school courses, PowerPoint presentations, and every other imaginable medium and context, in at least 10 different countries including China.

But there’s a better one. Read more »

Tags: conflict management

The first part of this post analogized the use of arbitration to resolve employee disputes to using a wood chisel to smash a boulder — the wrong tool for the job.  At its conclusion I said that, sympathetic as I am to employees, it was the effect on chisel, not the rock, that concerned me.  This part explains why there is cause for concern. Read more »

Tags: Arbitration, Employment, Public Policy

One hot, lonely summer day in 1958, at our rural home near Crozet, Virginia, I was working on an 8-year old’s project: dislodging a big quartz rock that was buried in the gravel driveway.  After a few hours I realized the trowel just wouldn’t do the job.  So I found a wood chisel in my Dad’s tool chest.  “Ah-ha!” I thought, “This is just the thing!  I’ll reduce it to bits and dislodge it a chunk at a time!”  By the time Dad got back from work at 5:30 or so the quartz had not been reduced by much, but the wood chisel had lost about all of its utility.

Dad’s objections included the necessity of the objective (”You wanted to put a hole in the driveway?”), the soundness of the strategic analysis (”You were going to pound it to bits?”), and (particularly) the skill of the execution of this project ([eyes raised to heaven] “Son….”).  And ever thereafter, when he cautioned me about using ”the right tool for the right job,” his words had particular piquancy.

Which (obviously) gets us to the Arbitration Fairness Act. Read more »

Tags: Arbitration, Employment, Public Policy