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Thomas Edison wasn’t just an inventor. He was an inventive negotiator. Contemplate the array of companies he created — 171 in all. Fifty were in countries ranging from Argentina to Canada, from Japan, China, and India to Italy, Germany, and France. He dabbled with partners in electric cars, batteries, cement, chemicals, and office machines. The creative teams he developed laid the foundations for today’s music, movie, and telecommunications industries. Historians list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Edison, but his team’s design improved on the others in three ways: better incandescent material, a higher vacuum, and higher electrical resistance allowing power to be distributed from a centralized source. But the better bulb by itself wasn’t the reason for Edison’s success. He and his partners also developed the basic grid to bring the electricity from a distant generator across the wires to the bulbs. Edison’s AC system had dominated the DC of Nikola Tesla, his one-time employee, and American rival Westinghouse. Now General Electric (GE) makes everything from toasters to turbomachinery. By the time Thomas Edison applied for patent #223,898 for his version of the light bulb, he had already formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City. He’d sold his vision: ‘‘We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles,’’ which helped him line up investors like the Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgan. Within a decade, he’d recruited dozens of the smartest engineers in the world and built the world’s first industrial laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ.

CONCLUSIONS

In summary, the traditional American approach to negotiation is somewhere between competitive and integrative bargaining. For the last three or four decades books and courses on negotiation have emphasized a ‘‘Getting to Yes’’ sort of integrative bargaining. You skip bargaining positions and instead start out discussing negotiators’ interests, hopefully achieving win—win solutions. In the 21st century this is not good enough. The best negotiators in the world use a third level of sophistication in their negotiations, what we call Inventive Negotiation. That is, starting with positions or interests limits what can be achieved. Inventive negotiation processes emphasize combining imaginations. Think Jobs and Iger. By their own admission, they walked in the woods. They laid their cards on the table, face-up. They traded crazy ideas. We challenge you to use all the principles of inventive negotiation in your own inter- and intra-organizational relationships. Some of your colleagues, those invested in the traditional approaches taught in the streets or in the business schools, may grouse. Then it will be your job to convince them that combining imaginations will lead to far better and longer lasting relationships.