Negotiation is the skill you use every day—even if you don’t realize it. In this high-energy talk from Prodacity 2025, John Lowry, Co-Founder & Principal Thrivence, breaks down the two key traits of world-class negotiators: ambition and empathy.

Whether you’re working in government, technology, or leadership, Lowry’s insights will help you secure better deals, drive meaningful change, and navigate high-stakes conversations with confidence. Learn how simple shifts in mindset and strategy can lead to significant gains—in both business and life.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• Why negotiation isn’t just about deals—it’s about solving problems
• The two traits of world-class negotiators (Harvard study insights)
• How to be more ambitious in negotiations—without overreaching
• The power of empathy: Understanding motivations to get better results
• Why moving beyond “positions” leads to stronger agreements
• Lessons from Starbucks, Nike & everyday negotiations

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: Why negotiation is at the heart of everything you do
[01:56] - What percentage of your time is spent negotiating? (Spoiler: A lot)
[06:02] - Harvard study: The two key traits of expert negotiators
[08:05] - The power of ambitious asking (and a 15-year-old’s prom night trick)
[12:48] - A real-world case study: How a small sales shift led to 3% business growth
[16:35] - Moving beyond positions to uncover real interests
[19:56] - Why ego, fear & relationships drive most decisions
[22:12] - Business lessons from Starbucks, Nike & customer psychology
[25:06] - Final takeaways: How to get more by thinking differently

🔗 Stay Connected:
Learn more about Prodacity: https://www.rise8.us/prodacity
Follow us on X: https://x.com/Rise8_Inc
Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rise8/

📖 Get the Book:
Want to dive deeper? Check out John Lowry’s book, Negotiation Made Simple: https://www.amazon.com/dp/XXXXX

👍 Like, Subscribe, and Share:
If you’re ready to negotiate better deals, drive more impact, and influence key decisions, give this video a thumbs up, subscribe to our channel, and share it with your network. Better negotiation = better results.

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John Lowry (00:03):

Welcome. It's great to have y'all in Nashville. I understand that I'm one of the few people in this room that is actually from Nashville. Okay, so I want to give you just a quick primer on how to eat in Nashville. So probably some of you have been to a meat in three. Have you guys hit a meat in three yet? There's one right around the corner called Jack's Bar-B-Que. It's a meat in three. Okay, now here's the thing that you have to understand about Nashville is the meat is the meat. That's obvious, but the three references vegetables. But what's interesting about when you're in Nashville, vegetables get defined a little differently. So for example, macaroni and cheese is a vegetable in Nashville, Tennessee, peach cobbler is a vegetable in Nashville, Tennessee. And so it's a wonderful place to where you can eat whatever you want and we still will redefine it as healthy.

(01:01):

So have at it in terms of your time in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm excited about having the opportunity to be with you today and just think a little bit about negotiation. And you may think, I don't know if I'm really a negotiator, I'm a tech professional, I work inside of government. I don't know. So let's find out real quick. So if we define negotiation, I define negotiation as a strategic communication process to get a deal or to resolve a problem. Alright, so here's what I want you to do. What I want you to do is I want you to think back to last week before you left town came to Nashville. I want you to think back to last week, and I want you to reflect on every meeting, every zoom call, every email, every text message, and I want you to think zero to a hundred.

(01:56):

What percentage of your professional time managing technology and trying to bring about change within your organization, what percentage of your professional time did you spend engaged in a communication process to get a deal or to resolve a problem? Alright, so we can be a little interactive here. Just shout it out. Zero to a hundred, what do you think? 20%. Okay, who else? 75%. Yeah, those are the numbers I'm used to hearing. Okay, who else? 90%. Yeah. You start looking at this and you're like, well, hold on a second, John. That's what I do. I literally spend all day, every day managing a communication process to get a deal or to resolve a problem. Now you all do it in the context of technology, but the reality is, is that what you do is the same thing that other people do in different contexts. And so the word negotiation, it comes from a Latin word called negotiate.

(03:06):

And negotiate literally means to carry business forward. And so the way in which we move business forward is we negotiate. Now how many of you, as part of your formal education to prepare you for the role that you have today? How many of you took a course in negotiation? Yeah, that's usually what it is. It's less than 10% of the room. Okay. So how did the rest of you learn how to negotiate this process that you literally spend 75 to 90% of your time doing? How did you learn how to do it? Arguing with my parents. Arguing with your parents? Yeah. We learned how to negotiate just kind of on the job trial and error.

(03:55):

Now, as we think about that as our learning process, who pays for the heirs? Your organization pays for the heirs when you screw it up. So I have got 21 minutes to make up for the fact that your institutions of higher learning failed you. They did not prepare you for the business world or the governmental world that you were going into because they didn't focus on teaching you this skill that you use every single day. I got 20 minutes to teach you how, and I'm going to share with you two ideas. And if you just embrace these two ideas, you will become a more effective negotiator, which means you will get more of what you are looking to get, whether that's change, whether that's value, whether that's more efficient services, whatever it is that you're looking to get, this is the 20 minutes where I'll teach you how to get it.

(04:57):

The rest of this conference is all about the substance and what you need to get this 20 minutes is about how you get it. Alright, so you guys ready? Here we go. Alright. So Harvard did a study and what Harvard did, the researchers did was they asked organizations and companies across the world, they said, send us your best deal maker. Who is the person that when everything's on the line, you're going to have them go in and try to solve this problem or you're going to have them go in and put this deal together. And so companies and organizations from around the world identified one person in their organization that they held up as the best deal maker at this company. And so what Harvard researchers did was it then interviewed all of these people that had been identified and they began to understand and think about all the characteristics about these people that caused them to be the best of the best.

(06:02):

And what they found was it just came down to two things. There were just two things that caused these people to be better than all of their colleagues, all of their peers, all of their counterparts. This is what made them the best of the best. The first is right here. They were more ambitious. They were willing to ask for more, they strived to get more. They were willing to do the work to position themselves to get more of whatever it is that they were looking for. The second thing, which we'll talk about here in just a minute is they were more empathetic. They best understood the needs and the personal desires of the people that they were working with. And then they were most creative in meeting those. Alright? So the two ideas I'm going to give you is this will make you a better negotiator walking out that door.

(07:06):

If in the next 20 minutes you can learn how it is that you can be a bit more strategically ambitious and how you can be a bit more strategically empathetic. Okay? So that's where we're headed. Alright, so let's talk about ambition. Alright, someone talked about negotiating with our parents. It was you right there. Okay, here's a little story about negotiating with your parents. Alright, so colleague of mine, person who was one of my mentors in the field of negotiation growing up, very sophisticated person, lived in Portland, Oregon. He was a state representative. He was a college president. He was a dean of a business school. He ran for governor in the state of Oregon. This guy was a sophisticated guy, but he learned a lesson about negotiation from none other than his 15-year-old daughter. One day his 15-year-old daughter gets invited to the senior prom.

(08:05):

Now that's a difficult moment for parents because they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. My daughter's a sophomore, she's 15. She just got invited to this big event by a senior who's 18, and it was a moment that he and his wife wanted to get ahead of. And so he talked to his wife and he said, okay, we've got a big decision coming up and we're going to have a moment with our daughter Courtney. And that moment is going to be around what decision, what time she has to be home. And so they said, all right, well her curfew's normally 11. It's a special night. We're going to let her stay out until midnight, but we want to make sure that we set good precedent, we got more problems to go. And so here's the moment where they sit down at the kitchen table and Courtney is ready for this moment.

(09:03):

And so Courtney looks at her parents and she's like, oh, mom and dad, this is going to be the best night you've ever had I've ever had. She said, we're going to start about 4-4:30. We're going to meet at so-and-so's house, we're going to do hair and makeup, get our dresses on. And then about 5:30 we're going to go to the park and we're doing pictures and meeting up with our dates and doing the corsage and all that kind of stuff. And then from there, we're going to dinner. We're going to have dinner at this really nice restaurant. Dinner's going to be about an hour and a half. And then from there we're going to the dance and we're going to be at the dance till about 11 o'clock when the dance closes from there, we're going to go over to so-and-so's house where they're having a big bonfire. We're going to be there for a couple of hours. And then after that we're going to go to another friend's house and we're going to watch a movie waiting for the sun to come up. And then right before Sunrise, we're going to go to the beach and we're going to watch Sunrise on the beach. And then after that we're going to go to breakfast at the original pancake house and we'll be home about nine o'clock the next morning.

(10:02):

And Brian and Anne were like, and so it was Anne that took the lead. And Anne looks at Courtney and she says, Courtney, let me be crystal clear about something. She goes, I want you to have a wonderful night with your friends, but I want to make sure that you are absolutely clear that you will be in this house for good, not one minute later then 2:00 AM Brian looked at his wife, she looked at him and she says, don't you say a word. And his wife gets up and walks out, Courtney looks at her dad and she plays it beautifully. You guys are the worst parents ever. I cannot believe this. This is so unfair. And she goes storming out of the room and Brian who's preparing to be the governor of Oregon, is like, what on earth just happened? I lost all control of this negotiation.

(11:03):

And then he realized about a day later when he was walking through the house and he overheard Courtney on the phone talking to one of her friends. And you know what Courtney was saying to her friends, I can't believe that worked. This is the greatest moment in the world. I never thought I would get 2:00 AM. This is going to be the best night ever. And in that moment, Brian and all of his sophistication said, ah, Courtney just reminded me of an important lesson of negotiation. And that is this. The more ambitious and aspirational you're willing to be, the more that you will be rewarded.

(11:52):

And that's the from Courtney. So the first thing is we got to think about how is it that we can be more ambitious? And I want you to leave thinking about that question. How is it that I'm going to go back and be a bit more ambitious? How am I going to ask for a little bit more? Okay, now ambition and capturing more, it typically happens incrementally. So I don't want you to go back and be like a monster and be like, well, now it used to be this, but now I'm going to go way over here. No, no, no. It's incremental. Okay. Alright. So I was working with a technology company based up in the northeast. I was doing work with their sales team. Some of you are on similar teams to this. Some of you are on the other side in terms of working with these kinds of people that are selling technology and selling solutions.

(12:48):

And so I was brought up because the salespeople in this organization, they were giving it away. Essentially. They wanted to get the deals and there was so much pressure to get the deals that they would just discount, discount, discount, discount in order to put these deals together. And so the vice president of sales said, John, I need you to come help work with my people because they're giving all of our margin away. And so we have this conversation and we talk about the importance of the opening offer and asking for more and being more ambitious. And I am catching holy hell from these people. They're like, John, you don't understand our world. It's a saturated market. Our product used to be ahead. It's not ahead anymore. There's no way in the world we can ask for more. And so finally, the vice president of sales gets tired of hearing all these excuses and he walks up to the front of the room and he says, all right, here's what we're going to do folks.

(13:43):

He says, for the next 90 days we're going to do a pilot project. He says, I am ordering you that before you hit send on that email that has our proposal in it, what I want you to do is I want you to go to that final number and I want you to ask for 10% more. And a lot of these folks were like, well, what's the basis for that? There's no basis for that. And I'll never forget, he looked back at someone who challenged him and he said, the basis is our desire for profitability.

(14:19):

And so 90 days later I go back to do the follow-up course and I'm real interested. I was like, if this thing didn't work, I'm going to be running for my life in front of these people. They're going to be like, we tried that and it didn't work. And so I asked him, I said, what do? He says, I'll announce the results when we start the course. So I was as nervous as anyone. He gets up there and he said, Hey, remember the hypothesis? We thought that if we asked for more what would happen to our deals, they would all start going down. He puts up a slide and says, look what happened to our deals. They stayed level, we didn't lose any volume. And then he put the next slide up that showed how much of that 10% did he capture? What do you think it was? Four? Is that what I heard? It wasn't quite four, it was 3%. Okay. Now here's what I want you to recognize with me. This is the power of negotiation in this 20 minutes is I want you to recognize with me that that technology company, nothing changed with its product. Nothing changed with its position in the market. Nothing changed with its clients. Nothing changed with its marketing approach or sales approach. Nothing at all changed about the business. And that business grew 3% that quarter. Why?

(15:42):

Because they were willing to be a little more ambitious. Do y'all see that? There's an incremental growth, whether you're on the vendor side or whether you're on the buyer side. There's incremental growth that is available to you if you simply ask for it. Does that make sense? But we will never get what we don't ask for. Alright, here we are. We're going to empathy. Let's think about empathy. Alright? Let me tell you how a deal gets put together. You all play this process out every single day as you put your deals together. So the deal begins with an issue. The issue is, is that you have a problem that you need to solve for, and there is a technology solution that will solve your problem. Or there are multiple technology solutions and you've got to decide which one. Anyone resonate with that in here?

(16:35):

And so that becomes the issue. Then what happens is, is we take positions on the issue. And so the position might be, we are really interested in your product, but we're interested in your product if it fits into this budget. Does that make sense? And then there is someone on the other side of that deal who says, well, yeah, we can resolve your issue, but the cost to resolve your issue is going to be this. And now all of a sudden when it comes to the issue of price, there are two different positions. Now, what happens is if there's not a strategic and creative way to put this deal together, here's what typically happens. And that is, is that people are going to do things to try to gain power and strengthen their position. And so here's where we see, well, you've been with us, but we may have to go to market and we may go shop some other solutions.

(17:41):

One of the ways in which we gain leverage and power for our position. Another way on the other side is you say, look, we're slammed right now. If you want to get this installation done in the first quarter, you're going to have to act. Now. We don't have time to wait. Gains, leverage and power for your position. Now, sometimes we can start making concessions and still put that deal together, but here's what we risk. If that's the only approach we use to putting deals together, is this process, it strains relationships. And so as a result of that, we risk having no deal. We risk having a damaged relationship or no relationship. And then we risk wasting a bunch of money a bunch of time and a bunch of resources putting a deal together that doesn't get done. Do y'all see that? All right. Three most important words I'll give you today.

(18:44):

Transition from positions. Get out of this process. It's the process that is the natural way in which this is going to happen. I want you to be better than that. And so to be better than that, what we have to do, excuse me, as we have to go below the line, and once we get below the line, we get to these things called interests. Now, here are some categories of interests. You tell me if you ever run into some of these, are there any egos in your world? There's none. Okay? There are some people that will not say yes to a deal unless it makes them look what? Unless it makes them look good. It's ego driven. This is actually the number one driver of business decisions that exist. It's ego. Okay? The next one is fear. Next time someone gets angry, simply ask 'em what they're afraid of.

(19:56):

Because any sort of anger is usually a manifestation of fear. And fear is another huge driver of business decision making. Then we have values, goals, relationships, circumstances. These are the things that drive people to say yes. These are the things that drive people to make concessions and to put the relationship ahead of the issue. If you are savvy enough to embrace what's driving people internally as they seek to do business, you will get far better deals. So I have this podcast called Negotiation Made Simple. I encourage you to check it out. It's where all the podcasts are. And I was interviewing this guy last week and he literally came up with this thing called Nego Economics. And the idea of this was he was looking at what are ways in which people can make more money in the negotiation process? And do you know what he learned was one of the most significant things to help people make more money in the negotiation process. It wasn't hard. It was simply being nice. If people considered you as nice, they would be more inclined to make concessions to do business with you.

(21:25):

And so the reason that that connects with this is because when we lean into the relationship, when we lean into the people that represent the other side, negotiation always happens between people. We put ourselves in a position to where we're going to get more of what we want. Okay? Alright. A couple of examples real quick and then we're going to get out of here. Okay? First thing is this. Alright? Show you how powerful this is in business and how powerful it is and kind of doing deals out there. All right, so Starbucks. What business is Starbucks in?

(22:12):

Some of you want to say coffee. It's not coffee. You're onto it. Yeah. Okay. If Starbucks was just in the coffee business, it would have a ton of competition. But Starbucks says, no, no, no. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to create community. Now is community above the line or below the line in terms of people's needs? It's below the line, it's an internal need. And then Starbucks said, what? We're going to put a very overpriced cup of coffee as your admission into the community that we're going to create through one of our stores.

(23:00):

And their whole bet was that people would overpay for coffee in order to get the community. Were they right? They absolutely were right. Okay, so what about Nike? What business is Nike in? Yeah, you guys want to say athletic apparel. They're not Think about Nike's slogans. Just do it. Be like Mike Nike is in the association business. And so what Phil Knight bet on is he said, I think everyone wants to be the best in their sport. And so if I can help them associate with whoever it is that is the best in their sport, I think they will pay a ridiculous amount of money for a pair of shoes with that person's name on it. And guess what? He was right. And he is a multi-billionaire today because of it. But notice it wasn't about the shoes, it was about what? It was about the ego lift that comes with the association.

(24:12):

Do you all see that? And so my question for you as we wrap this up is, what business are you in? And as you think about the entity that you represent or the agency that you represent, or the company that you represent, how is it that you are going to play into the internal dynamics that exist with the people that you're doing business with? And if you are the one that embraces those, when everyone else pushes those aside, you're going to be the one that gets the better deals and you're going to be more successful and get more of what you want. Alright, so I leave you with this question. What is it that you can do to be more empathetic? Alright, so in my last few seconds here, I've written a book called Negotiation Made Simple. If you want to learn more about this, go to Amazon wherever you buy books.

(25:06):

And I give you here a whole framework with what you can do this to where in about an hour and a half you can capture this framework. And in doing that, you have the opportunity to put it to work every single day in your negotiations to be able to capture more value. Before I leave, I also want to introduce my colleague Jason Shelton. Jason and I work for a management consulting firm here called Thrivent. We do a lot of IT consulting, a lot of work in terms of helping organizations kind of overcome some of the IT challenges. And this was really exciting for us to have kind of the opportunity to come and to be in conversation. I hope there's some good ideas. Remember, it's just two things. It's ambition and empathy. It's thinking about how we transition from positions. And that little formula right there I think can be helpful in terms of accomplishing the kind of change you want to bring in your world. And I appreciate all you're doing and thanks for your time. Love to have some more conversation with you as the day unfolds. Thank you so much.

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