Indeed, the feeling around the boardroom was that the musicians didn’t appreciate how good they had it. They had great jobs that most classical musicians would kill for, they got to live in the San Francisco Bay area, and they earned full-time salaries for what amounted to part-time work, with ten weeks of paid vacation and plenty of time to teach and perform on the side. Yet the ingrates had staged three strikes in ten years.
Bechtle was a great admirer of Pastreich, whom the board had firmly supported during the strike. (As she told me later, Pastreich was “brilliant,” “creative,” and open-minded, but “he was always debating; he turned every discussion into a debate. And he always had to win.”) The subject of Pastreich led to a revealing conversation.
I asked her, “What is the most important challenge facing the symphony?”
She answered without hesitation: “To restore relations with the musicians and improve labor-management relations.”
Rosenberg turned to her and said, “I wonder if that is your top priority. If it were, Peter would no longer be here.”
So the board understood that Pastreich was part of the problem, I thought. I wondered if some trustees felt that firing him might be the easiest way to get things back on a productive track.
But my stronger sense was that the trustees primarily blamed the radical wing of the orchestra for their troubles. According to Bechtle, there is a “toxic ten percent” in the orchestra. “In any other world this ten percent would quit or be fired. … If you are that unhappy, you shouldn’t be in this job.” It occurred to me that blaming a toxic 10 percent of the musicians for all the symphony’s problems may have allowed the trustees to exonerate everyone else, including themselves. That’s why people often find it comforting to demonize.
The trustees were eager to avoid another debacle, and Bechtle in particular saw the value-creating possibilities of a negotiation skills program. Her only concern was whether the musicians would go along.
The next morning, I met MTT at his magnificent, sprawling home in Pacific Heights. It wasn’t strictly necessary for me to meet him—he had not been involved in the strike—but it was fun. The maestro was a celebrity. He was the public face of the symphony; he carried the brand. The light posts near Davies Symphony Hall were hung with large banners bearing his likeness and name.
MTT represented the third point in the leadership triangle. As the music director and principal conductor, he provided the musical vision. He was responsible for choosing the repertoire and for hiring, evaluating, and developing the musicians. Like most conductors, he was largely insulated from the business affairs of the orchestra. He lived in San Francisco for only part of the season, spending the rest of his time as artistic director and founder of the New World Symphony in Miami and traveling around the world as a guest conductor for other orchestras.
When I asked him about the strike, MTT made it clear that he had taken no sides. All he cared about was building the orchestra and making music. He had worried that the strike would affect the performances, but the players had really come through. He was pleased by that.
When I asked why he thought this particular strike had been so destructive, he saw contributions on both sides. Pastreich “delivers zingers and he’s not aware of it,” he said. The musicians’ demands had been unrealistic: “They are living in Paradise and are unaware of it.” I could almost hear him thinking, Thank God I don’t have to bargain with any of these difficult people.
He speculated that American musicians were jealous of their counterparts in Europe, where orchestras enjoy government support and musicians have more institutional power. In any event, he said, he would support any initiative that would help heal the rift. He was not going to be involved, mind you, and he would not attend any workshops, but “we sure hope you can help.”
By the end of my two days in San Francisco, I was thinking, “These people need help. Lots of zero-sum thinking, and demonization, too. Relationships are a mess and they’re in terrible pain. But they are motivated to change.” I was also thinking that the project might be fun. Most people don’t like being in the middle of conflict, but I rather enjoy it, especially when I think I can help the combatants. I thought, They don’t have confidence that they can recover from this, but I have a lot of confidence they can. And I had the germ of a clever idea (clever at least in my own mind) about how to proceed.
But first I had more to learn. As one experienced labor arbitrator has said, symphony musicians have “the reputation … of being the angriest, most militant group in the whole field of entertainment and the performing arts.” I wanted to understand why.
History provided part of the explanation. In the early days, before American symphony musicians were unionized, they were underpaid and often exploited. There was no job security. There was a glut of classical musicians who could be hired for “pickup orchestras,” one gig at a time. Even after orchestras with full-time musicians were formed, symphony managers “did the minimum necessary, believing correctly that the musicians would continue to play, whatever they were paid,” Pastreich told me. Things changed only after symphony musicians unionized (under the aegis of the American Federation of Musicians) and learned to push back hard. One of their key discoveries, said Pastreich, was that strikes were a “social embarrassment to the boards and management.”
But more secure jobs and better pay did not eliminate the musicians’ anxiety and resentment over being insufficiently appreciated. In Chris Gilbert’s words, “Classical musicians have been struggling for recognition as hardworking, highly skilled professionals. Like a doctor or lawyer, we deserve to be highly regarded and respected. At least part of that respect must come in the form of money.”
Another source of discontent had nothing to do with money. “Even the highest wage can never compensate for the inner distress which clings to the whole profession,” wrote another commentator. Most gifted musicians, especially violinists, are trained to perform as soloists. They begin studying an instrument at an early age. Some are child prodigies. As kids, while their friends are goofing off, they devote thousands of hours to practice. Their grandmother tells them they are going to be the next Jascha Heifetz.10 Then they end up sitting in the third row of the orchestra.
According to one expert, “The basic skill in orchestra section playing … lies in knowing how to suppress individual expression for the sake of the group effect.”11 This requirement is most burdensome on the string players, who are the most numerous and whose lush sound requires them to blend in—to the point where they typically cannot even hear themselves play. A musician likes to be heard! That’s why string players prefer chamber music, where each musician has a unique role. The happiest musicians are those whose instruments stand out—the oboists, flutists, and trumpet players, for example, who can often be heard individually and sometimes have solo lines. Of course, by that measure the percussionists should be the happiest of all. And they aren’t. Hemphill, who used to be a jazz drummer, found the adjustment to orchestra life difficult: “When you’re a classical percussionist, you sit there; then all of a sudden you stand up and play something; then you sit down again.”12
So, are these just a bunch of whiners? No. These are artists who are extremely ambitious and gifted, who have competed fiercely to get where they are, who have probably reached the peak of their careers—and who have almost no control over what they create. They don’t choose the music they play or how to interpret it. That’s the conductor’s job. Musicians live in a state of “psychic bondage” to the conductor, whom they are expected to “obey blindly” while completely subordinating their own artistic preferences.13
All these frustrations have no regular outlet except the collective bargaining process.
Pastreich saw nothing wrong with that. Plus, hard bargaining was a game he knew and even enjoyed. He could still bargain after staying up for forty-eight hours; the musicians typically couldn’t. “I was still very good at hour forty,” he said. With some pride, he reporte
d that the orchestra had once passed a resolution forbidding bargaining past midnight, lest Pastreich wear down the Negotiating Committee.
Over the years, the dynamic at the SFS became even more contentious than at most professional orchestras. Brinkmanship became a way of life. Each side would develop targets in advance and then boldly overstate opening positions. They would commit to these positions early and publicly, and channel all subsequent communication through a spokesman. They would try to keep the other side off balance by using tactics designed to divide the constituents on the other side. There was almost always a strike. “Rightly or wrongly, it was almost seen as a necessary part of negotiating in San Francisco,” Gilbert explained. “We would always plot our strategy to try to pick out [the] maximum leverage [for] a strike deadline. … We would see if we had a tour coming up, or some important concert that would provide additional leverage.” If ultimately the contract was accepted with great reluctance by both sides, this was taken as a sign of success. For management it was a sign that they had maintained fiscal discipline. For the musicians it showed they had extracted as much as they could.
But according to my view of negotiation theory, this was exactly the wrong way to go about it. I believe that effective negotiation requires the management of three discrete tensions:
1. Between opportunities to expand the pie (by creating value) and the need to divide the pie (by distributing value);
2. Between communicating with empathy (demonstrating that you understand the other side’s perspective, even if you don’t agree with it) and communicating with assertiveness;
and in some cases,
3. Between the representatives negotiating at the table and their constituents behind the table.
At the SFS, I discovered, these tensions weren’t being managed—they were being trampled by a herd of stampeding cattle. Indeed, the negotiations surrounding the 1996–97 strike were a textbook example of how to manage the tensions badly.
Behind the table on the orchestra’s side, the Negotiating Committee majority was made up of unseasoned negotiators who “wanted to show who’s boss this time,” as Gilbert recalled. “There were people who felt that if we just were tough [enough], that would fix things.” So they turned to I. Philip Sipser,14 a well-established labor lawyer who had lots of experience representing the musicians’ union and was known to be a hard bargainer. It was the first time the committee had looked outside San Francisco for a lawyer, and they wanted a gladiator. Sipser was as tenacious and tough as Pastreich. That signaled to management that hammering out a new contract would be contentious. But it doesn’t explain why the negotiation went off the rails. Pastreich and Sipser had known each other for years and played the same game. A more significant factor, I believe, was the List of 65 Demands. Here is the story behind it.
The Negotiating Committee was well-intentioned and wanted to be responsive to its constituents. So, in preparing for the negotiations, it sent each musician a questionnaire with a long list of potential issues for bargaining. Next, a member of the committee interviewed each musician. “What we did,” Gilbert recalled, “was go through, point by point, virtually everything in the contract and ask them, ‘Do you think we should have an improvement in this?’ Which of course yields a lot of yesses.” The committee also asked: “What are the ten most important things that you think should be changed in the next negotiation?” Not surprisingly, they ended up with a long list of desired changes. For example, the old contract provided that each player receive $30 per radio broadcast; some musicians wanted $40. Overtime started after fifteen minutes; some wanted it to be ten minutes. Some musicians hated long rehearsals; others hated playing on Saturdays. The mushrooming list eventually included heaters and canopies at outdoor concerts, coverage for orthodontia, and a prohibition on folding beds on tours.
When Sipser, the lawyer, saw the List, he warned the committee not to use it. Gilbert wished they had listened. “He did counsel us against having a laundry list and he did assure us that what we had was a laundry list,” Gilbert said. But the committee rejected the advice.
This is an excellent example of the negative traps clouding the judgment of inexperienced negotiators behind the table. Indeed, nearly all of the traps—Tribalism, Demonization, Dehumanization, Moralism, Zero-Sum Fallacy, Fight/Flight, and the Call to Battle—seemed to be at work here. The committee wanted to “bloody” Pastreich, and the List was one of their weapons. It was also the product of a terribly ineffective process behind the table. In trying to serve its membership, the committee had collected a list of fantasy benefits and provided no leadership in setting priorities. The Hard Liners on the committee then proceeded to ignore their lawyer, one of the most seasoned fighters in the business, in planning their strategy. That was inexperience plus the negative traps at work. How dumb is it to hire an experienced, hard-nosed labor lawyer—the attack dog you thought you wanted—and then refuse to take his advice? I doubt the committee intended to blow off their own fingers while setting a bomb for Pastreich. I think they were just in a vengeful frame of mind and not thinking clearly. Spock would have strongly disapproved.
The List also demonstrates how an opening move can influence much that follows. Putting that List on the table was a disastrous move, largely because Pastreich didn’t understand the flawed process that produced it. He was not only shocked, but alarmed. When he asked the committee, “Which of these things really matter?” and they said, “All of them matter,” he heard a declaration of war. Which it partly was. But what he couldn’t have known, because the committee wasn’t about to admit it, was that the committee didn’t know the answer to his question.
As might be expected, the negotiation across the table was zero-sum all the way. Pastreich responded in kind with his own set of extreme demands. The tension between assertiveness and empathy wasn’t managed at all: the discussion was all assertion and no empathy. According to Pastreich, the negotiation went as follows:
We [management] said, “We have a serious deficit so we are not going to be able to give you a really good contract. We’re not going to be able to give you anything special this time because we have a financial problem.” And they said, “We don’t believe you. We don’t think you have a deficit. We don’t think you have a problem.” And they came in and said, “We are working harder than any other orchestra in the country and we are getting sick and injured as a result of all that, so we need some serious relief.” And we said, “We don’t believe you. We don’t think that injuries have anything to do with overwork, we don’t think you work harder than anyone else.” So with respect to the two most contentious issues we didn’t believe one another. … Each side knew that the other side didn’t really believe them. … A kind of desperation set in on both sides where each of us said to ourselves, “We’re not going to get anywhere with these people. They don’t even hear what we are saying.” And that turned into great anger.
A similar exchange took place during a heated argument about auditions. One issue was the musicians’ demand for equal power in hiring decisions.
Committee member: In my opinion, the power divided [should be] precisely equal. Each side must agree on a candidate for them to be hired.
Pastreich: We do not feel they should be equal. The board feels that the music director should have more power in making the decision than the orchestra.
Another committee member: I hope that this issue would be [discussed] under an umbrella of greater respect.
Pastreich: This is not a matter of respect.
But what were they arguing about, if not respect? Pastreich was focusing on the committee’s demands without fully understanding what was motivating them. Pastreich later came to think, “It was a strike looking for issues. It wasn’t about any real issue, it was about the relationship.”
I would agree with that, with one qualification: negotiations are almost always about both the substantive issues and the relationship.
Now I understood the territory and had a pl
an. Within six weeks of my first visit, I agreed to undertake a negotiation program on two conditions. First, the symphony people would have to be in control. I didn’t want the Hewlett Foundation grant coming directly to me. I wanted it to go to the symphony. Control of the process would be shared by all three groups—the musicians, management, and the trustees. They would have the power to hire and fire me. They would share ultimate responsibility for the project’s success or failure. And as their first therapeutic exercise, I decided, they would jointly prepare the grant application to Hewlett, with my help. This would encourage “buy-in” and show them that they could start working together.
My second condition was that I would build a team to help me with the project. It would include Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, a labor-management expert who was then a faculty member at MIT and part of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation. The third member would be Gary Friedman, an experienced Bay Area mediator who had worked with me for many years both at Stanford and at Harvard. Gary would serve as our West Coast anchor and be more readily available than I could possibly be, given my obligations in Cambridge.
My proposal won immediate support from everyone I had met at the symphony: Bechtle, Pastreich, and the Players’ Committee. But there was still one group that needed to be persuaded: the musicians themselves. The committee was still in a state of high anxiety about this task and I soon understood why.15 Moving the orchestra was like pushing an elephant uphill. It took three long meetings, including one at which Gary Friedman and I answered questions for several hours, to per-suade the musicians that interest-based bargaining was not a tool of the Devil and that this proposal was not a management initiative. There were some dissents, and a handful of musicians viewed the commit-tee’s endorsement of the program as a “betrayal,” but ultimately the orchestra approved the program by a substantial majority.
Bargaining with the Devil Page 23