MIT Sloan Management Review

Conventional wisdom suggests that companies should avoid growing dependent on their business partners.

Many large multinational corporations are hardly a model of organizational efficiency, with the right hand frequently not knowing what the left is doing. A valuable solution developed at one location fails to spread to other sites struggling with a similar problem, so they continually have to reinvent the wheel.

Lying is a central aspect of human behavior. Negotiators need to learn about every tool that will protect their interests.

We may be in the second decade of the knowledge-worker era, but companies still have much to learn about what makes such workers tick.