About

I came to negotiation as an engineer, looking for the structure underneath it. Strip away the theatrics and a negotiation is a system: leverage, incentives, and constraints that decide the outcome long before anyone sits down.

I have worked across Africa, Europe, and Asia, in four languages, spanning management consulting, consumer technology, and semiconductors. The method stays the same wherever I go: diagnose the structure, find the real leverage, and design terms that hold. What follows is how I think about the work.

Negotiation as structure

Every negotiation sits inside a system of interests, constraints, and expectations. The outcome is largely set before anyone says a word: by who holds leverage, what each side genuinely needs, and how their incentives line up under pressure and incomplete information. Anchoring and mirroring have their place, and they work best once the structure is clear. So my work starts upstream. I map the ecosystem, find where real leverage lives, and then decide what to say.

I am especially interested in the architecture of a deal: how its pricing, indexation, and terms allocate value and risk across the entire life of a relationship. A price is a single number on one day; the terms govern for years. Most value is won or lost in that structure, quietly, long after everyone has shaken hands.

Get the structure right and the tactics take care of themselves.

Game theory and behavioral science

Game theory is a discipline for asking the right questions about a messy, emotional situation. Who are the real players, including the ones not in the room? What are their payoffs? Which threats and promises are credible? Where can a credible commitment, a visible exit option, or careful signaling move the equilibrium?

Behavioral science supplies the other half. People decide under framing, loss aversion, time pressure, and status, and those forces bend outcomes in predictable ways. Put the two together and negotiation becomes legible and closer to engineering. You shape the game itself.

Negotiating in the age of AI

Technology is rewriting the table. Lately I have been writing about AI and large language models, both as tools that transform how we prepare and as negotiating actors in their own right. What does it mean to bargain against a counterparty that runs on probability? When should an autonomous agent stay silent? The next decade of strategy will favor whoever understands these systems first, and I use the newsletter to work through the questions in public.

Experience