This week features a battle-tested lesson from Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference, game-changing AI tools, and the news that matters most to your business. Let's dive in!

In the world of traditional business, "win-win" and "compromise" are treated as golden standards. If I want $100 and you want to pay $0, we settle at $50, and everyone goes home happy, right? Wrong. According to former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator Chris Voss, compromise is often a lazy, damaging cop-out. In high-stakes hostage situations, you cannot "split the difference"—you can't agree to save half a hostage. Voss argues that this same logic applies to business: compromise often leads to bad deals that no one is truly happy with.

The central lesson from Voss is that negotiation is not a battle of logic; it is an exercise in Tactical Empathy. Most people enter a negotiation armed with arguments, ready to batter the other side into submission. But the real power lies in disarming your counterpart by making them feel deeply understood.

Voss illustrates the folly of compromise with a simple example: A husband wants to wear black shoes with his suit; his wife wants him to wear brown. If they compromise and meet in the middle, he wears one black shoe and one brown shoe. The result is a monstrosity that neither person wanted. In business, "splitting the difference" often creates a similar Frankenstein’s monster—a project with half-funding, a product with diluted features, or a contract that protects no one.

Instead of compromising, Voss suggests you use Labeling. This involves spotting your counterpart's emotion and verbalizing it back to them using phrases like "It seems like..." or "It sounds like..." For example, if a client is resisting a price, instead of explaining why you are worth it, you say: "It seems like you're under a lot of pressure to keep costs down."

This simple validation triggers a psychological release. The goal isn't to get them to say "Yes"—which is often a fake agreement just to get you to stop talking. The goal is to get them to say, "That's right." When someone says "That's right," they feel understood, their defenses drop, and they essentially invite you to help solve their problem.

So, stop trying to be "fair" by halving the pie. Start listening, label the obstacles, and push for the solution that actually works.

Most finance teams are stuck guessing when cash will actually hit the bank because they rely on contract due dates that customers rarely respect. Tesorio fixes this by connecting directly to your ERP to automate the entire accounts receivable process, handling the tedious work of sending dunning emails and organizing collections tasks. Its "Predictive Payment Intelligence" analyzes years of behavioral data to flag exactly when a specific client is likely to pay, distinguishing between those who are habitually late and those showing signs of real financial distress. This shifts the CFO’s role from reacting to liquidity gaps to proactively managing cash performance before a shortfall ever happens.

Hiring usually involves a chaotic mess of open tabs and lost spreadsheets, but Manatal streamlines that chaos into a single, navigable pipeline. It functions as a lightweight applicant tracking system that doubles as a sourcing detective, allowing you to pull a LinkedIn profile into your database with a single click. The platform uses AI to "enrich" these profiles by scanning the web for social data and additional background info, while simultaneously scoring every applicant against your job description to highlight the best matches instantly. It gives small agencies and startups the power to build and screen a massive talent pool without needing an enterprise-sized HR department.

When you are flooded with ten thousand applications for a few dozen roles, reading every resume is operationally impossible. HireVue solves this volume problem by replacing the initial phone screen with on-demand video interviews and psychometric games that candidates can complete on their phone at any time. Instead of relying on gut instinct, it uses Industrial-Organizational psychology and AI to analyze candidate responses and gameplay, scoring them on critical soft skills like cognitive ability and communication style. This tool is essential for global enterprises that need to filter a stadium’s worth of applicants down to the top 1% without bias or bottlenecking the hiring team. 

Saturday is the Biggest Cash Day of Q4

Are You Ready? This Saturday, November 29th, is Small Business Saturday, and the stakes have never been higher. With Black Friday ad costs hitting record highs, this is your organic edge. American Express and the SBA estimate that shoppers will spend over $20 billion at independent retailers this weekend.

The IRS Just Blinked: 1099-K Threshold Stays High Finally, some clarity on the "Venmo Tax" confusion. The IRS has officially confirmed that for the 2025 tax year, they are retaining the $20,000 and 200-transaction threshold for Form 1099-K reporting, delaying the drop to $600 yet again.

The "Agentic" Era Begins: OpenAI’s "Operator" Changes the Game The rumor mill was right. OpenAI has begun rolling out "Operator," a new autonomous agent capable of browsing the web and executing multi-step tasks—like booking flights or researching vendors—without you baby-sitting it. Unlike previous chatbots that just talk, Operator actually does.

Is it possible to technically surpass Elon Musk’s net worth using a loophole, a crumpled suit, and a single £50 note? Max Fosh proved it is. His experiment serves as a hilarious, high-speed masterclass in how Market Capitalization actually works—and how easily it can be manipulated.

The math is dangerously simple: Market Cap = Share Price × Total Number of Shares. Max formed a shell company ("Unlimited Money Ltd," ostensibly a pasta manufacturer) and issued himself 10 billion shares. To become a billionaire, he didn't need a product; he just needed to establish a specific share price. By convincing a stranger on the street to buy just one share for £50, he mathematically set the market value of his remaining 9,999,999,999 shares at £500 billion.

It’s a perfect demonstration of "paper wealth." For seven glorious minutes, Max was the wealthiest man on earth—on paper. Then, reality (and the law) crashed the party. The valuation advisors pointed out that claiming a half-trillion valuation with zero revenue is less "entrepreneurship" and more "immediate financial fraud."

The ultimate insight? Valuation is not value. This stunt exposes the often illusory nature of wealth headlines. It teaches us that unless there is liquidity and revenue to back up the math, a billion-dollar valuation is just a shared hallucination.

In 1894, the Times of London made a terrifying prediction. They estimated that within 50 years, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure.

It sounds funny now, but at the time, it was an apocalyptic crisis. The world ran on horses. More people meant more goods, which meant more horses, which meant more waste. It was a mathematical certainty. In 1898, the world’s first international urban planning conference convened in New York specifically to solve this problem. But they couldn't. After three days of arguing over manure removal logistics and sanitation squads, the delegates gave up and went home. They saw no way out. The civilization was going to drown in its own waste.

But the crisis never happened.

Why? Because while the "experts" were arguing over how to design better shovels, Henry Ford was building the Model T. The internal combustion engine didn't solve the waste problem; it made the horse irrelevant. The problem vanished because the paradigm shifted.

This story is the perfect illustration of a trap that kills more businesses than bankruptcy: The Better Shovel Fallacy.

Most entrepreneurs are obsessed with solving the problems right in front of their faces. You look at your business and think, "I need to answer emails faster," "I need to cold call more people," or "I need to squeeze 5% more margin out of this product." You are sweating, grinding, and losing sleep trying to shovel the manure a little bit faster than your competitor. You are optimizing the status quo.

But history—and capitalism—rewards the person who realizes that the shovel isn't the point.

If you are a copywriter today, you can spend years learning to type faster, or you can learn how to wield an AI that generates 50 drafts in a second. If you are a retailer, you can obsess over organizing your shelf space, or you can realize that your customer is now buying on TikTok and the shelf doesn't matter.

The hardest truth in business is that efficiency is not innovation. You can be the most efficient manure-shoveler in London, the hardest worker in the room, the one who stays late every night—and you will still go broke the day the Model T rolls down the street.

So, stop looking at your to-do list for a second. Look at your industry. Are you solving a problem that is about to become irrelevant? Are you trying to optimize a process that shouldn't exist in the first place?

Great founders don't ask, "How do I do this better?" They ask, "Why are we doing this at all?"

What are your thoughts? Is there a part of your business where you are working incredibly hard to solve a problem that simply shouldn't exist?

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