What I Did on My Summer Vacation…

We hope that you are enjoying your last gasps of summer, kicking the kids out of the house and into school, and ready to teach/practice/work!  A few of us will be sharing a bit from our summer break including what we read, what we wrote, and what we are going to be adding to our teaching.  Other possibilities include favorite trips, negotiation stories, recipes, whatever….  Readers are invited to send along their summer vacation memories as well so feel free to comment or to send to one of us to post.

What I read:  Following on some great recommendations from the ABA panel last spring, I first read Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly on the importance of vulnerability.  The message of fail often in order to succeed well was a critical one in the book.  She also spends much time talking about empathy and where this comes from.  It was definitely an easy and enjoyable read.  I am now finishing up The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt on why good people disagree over everything.  It is a fascinating look at intuition, morality,  and how our brains are formed to assumptions that then results in political differences.  Really helpful for me in understanding political differences, particularly in my state these days!

What I wrote:  This summer was the summer of second or third editions–edits to the new Mediation textbook (out in print now!), the new Negotiation textbook (coming soon), and the new Examples & Explanations also coming soon.  I also have been working on a more accessible book for science faculty on how to negotiate their careers (grants, research support, co-authorship, etc.) based on some of the training that I have been doing for medical faculty in the last five years.

What I am teaching:  For the second time, I am starting off my ethics class with the DONS exercise.  Before I poison the students with rules (Art’s study shows that over the course of law school, students get less ethical), I want them to get a sense of their ethical compass.  I am also, for the first time, going to have the “clients” do their own negotiation to see if there is any difference.  So I am curious….  As for ADR, I want to use clips from the television show Brain Games (that is what I watched this summer).  Each segment showed several different ways our brain takes shortcuts as we make decisions that can make us less effective (like their version of the invisible gorilla).  So I’ll keep everyone posted how that works.

And, for fun, what I ate:  Too much deli in New York, too much red wine in Pittsburgh, too much pasta in Italy–in short, it was a great summer.  Welcome back to all!

 

 

2 thoughts on “What I Did on My Summer Vacation…”

  1. If you enjoyed “Daring Greatly,” you may enjoy Tavis Smiley’s “Fail Up.” One of my favorites! Smiley writes about 20 of his failures and how each lesson became part of his DNA to success.

  2. I am just going to add my summer vacation news to Andrea’s post!

    What I watched: I caught up completely on Breaking Bad. From the standpoint of private negotiation taking place in a market almost entirely unregulated by law (though certainly affected by law), Breaking Bad is incredible. You could teach an entire session on BATNAs (spinning, bashing), for example, using clips from Breaking Bad. Of course, such a session might not be appropriate.

    What I wrote: I finished a piece on consent in mediation and am about to start a piece on activism and ADR.

    What I taught: This summer, I had two teaching firsts: I taught summer school here at Oregon and I taught for a week at the Harvard Negotiation Institute. After the Harvard week, I’ve decided to stop doing Sally Soprano and do Diego Primadonna instead. And Bob Bordone showed me this funny clip:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOZ8OSd5xlg

    I hope everyone is doing great! Happy fall!

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