You Don’t Get What You Deserve

you get what you negotiate.

That’s the tagline for Karrass negotiation training. You may have seen the ad on the back cover of an airline in-flight magazine. There’s a distinguished looking gentleman letting you know that:

“You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.”

It’s supposed to make you think you need to take his class to become a really good negotiator. When I saw that my first thought was, capitalism is broken.

I mean, shouldn’t people get what they deserve? If there were one socioeconomic system that gives people what they deserve and another that doesn’t, wouldn’t we prefer the one that does?

Instead, if someone said, “You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you can steal.” We would think this person had their values screwed up. This would be someone whom good people should be protected from. It wouldn’t make you want to take a class to become a really good thief.