Discover the hidden leverage you already have in negotiations using Albert Rutherford’s game theory principles. Russell Newton breaks down how Julia, Marco, and others missed their power by not revealing it. Learn the ‘signal audit’ technique for uncovering your true negotiating position—whether you’re negotiating salary, a job offer, or any business deal. Find out how to negotiate from a position of strength you didn’t know you had and gain the winning edge in your next negotiation.

If you’re looking to level up your negotiation skills for that next job offer or salary review, tune in as Russell Newton shares insights from Harvard Business Professor Albert Rutherford on leverage and game theory strategies. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, these tips will help you uncover hidden leverage and win negotiations like never before. Don’t miss the chance to boost your business acumen with wisdom straight from an audiobook narrator turned negotiation expert!

How many negotiations are you active in right now?
I bet it’s more than you think.
And it’s not those necessarily across a table.
Those that are in a text thread you haven’t answered.
In a raise you haven’t asked for.
In a conversation with your partner that keeps ending in the same place.
Most people think negotiation is a skill for the boardroom.
It’s not.
It’s a skill for Tuesday.
I just finished narrating Albert Rutherford’s newest book on the game theory underneath negotiation, and the chapter I keep coming back to isn’t the theory.
It’s five ordinary situations, and the one move each person is missing without knowing it.
The first one.
Julia is three years into a job and she’s pretty good at it.
Her reviews are strong, her workloads have grown.
A competitor just offered her meaningfully more money.
She hasn’t told anyone.
She updated her LinkedIn and figured that was signal enough.
It wasn’t.
Her manager calls her in, says the company wants to keep her, slides over an offer, a modest bump, and the word non-negotiable attached to HR policy.
Here’s the part Rutherford’s book gets right that most negotiation advice skips.
Julia?
She already has the leverage.
She has a real competing offer.
That’s her batna, the walk away power we broke down in full a few episodes back.
The problem isn’t that she lacks leverage.
It’s that the leverage is invisible.
Nobody can respond to a card you haven’t shown.
The book calls the diagnostic for this the signal audit.
One question.
What do I want the other side to know that I haven’t actually said out loud?
For Julia, the answer’s obvious once she asks it.
She has another offer and she’s weighing it, not as a threat as information.
I want to be transparent.
I’ve received another offer and I’m genuinely considering it.
Then she moves the conversation off the one number that’s fixed.
And if the base is set by policy, I’d like to understand the full picture.
Bonus, equity, flexibility.
Because HR policy governs the salary band, it almost never governs everything else.
That undisclosed offer was her lever the entire time.
Keeping it invisible didn’t protect her, it neutralized her.
Our second scenario runs in the same blind spot, but a different mechanism.
Marco is a freelance designer, but the client he genuinely likes.
Two years spilt, good pay, real trust.
The contract covers three rounds of revisions.
Over the current project, she’s asked for one more logo version, a deck tweak, a copy change, each one small, together about 20 unpaid hours.
And Marco hasn’t said anything.
He doesn’t want to damage the relationship, but silence isn’t neutral in a relationship you’re going to keep having.
Rutherford’s book calls this The Echo.
In any repeated interaction, your past behavior trains what the other side expects next.
Marco’s silence set a signal he never meant to send that small overages are fine here.
His client calibrated that without necessarily knowing she’d done it.
And Marco’s stuck in what the book calls the fixed pie assumption.
Treating this as a conflict where naming the problem means losing the relationship when there’s almost certainly a structure that pays him fairly and keeps her happy.
The fix is not a confrontation.
It’s a signal audit set out loud at a natural breakpoint, a project wrap not mid-deliverable.
I want to name something.
The revisions over the past few weeks went well beyond scope.
I estimate about 20 hours.
I haven’t raised it because I value how we work, but I need us to address it going forward.
Then, a structure, not a complaint.
A monthly retainer or a tighter contract definition of what counts as a revision.
That trains the other side’s expectations, whether you intend it to or not.
One direct, structure-first conversation can reset months of drift.
Scenario 3 is the highest conflict one on the list, and it’s not really about money.
Diane and Ben co-founded the company two years ago.
She put in $200,000.
He put in two years of full-time unpaid work building the product.
Now they’re raising funds.
Investors want the cap table clean and both of them are asking for 60%.
The conversation’s gone adversarial.
Rutherford’s book has a name for the trap they’ve both walked into, the pie test.
They’re treating equity as a fixed 100% that has to be divided.
When the actual structure of equity is far more flexible than that and underneath it, both of them have drifted into mini-max thinking, protecting against the worst case of being undervalued, which produces what the book calls a safety trap.
Neither one can move without it feeling like they’re conceding that their contribution doesn’t matter.
The equilibrium they’ve landed on, call it the lock in Rutherford’s terms, the point where nobody wants to move first, isn’t actually the right lock.
A better one exists.
Neither of them can see it from inside the current frame.
The move is to ask what each person needs that the other doesn’t actually have to sacrifice.
Diane needs recognition that the capital carried real risk.
She could have lost that 200,000 outright.
Ben needs recognition that two years of unpaid work built the value the capital is now funding.
Now, those two needs aren’t in competition.
Once that’s on the table, the actual negotiation is about structure.
Cliff vesting with milestone adjustments, separate columns for financial and sweat equity, a profit sharing overlay.
Not about who wins the percentage argument.
The fourth scenario is lower stakes emotionally, but it’s the cleanest lesson in the chapter.
Tom.
He’s been hunting for a specific vintage guitar for two years.
One finally shows up.
The seller’s listing is detailed and precise.
This is someone who knows exactly what they have.
Tom’s first message.
Happy to negotiate.
What are you thinking?
That question is a trap and it’s an elegant trap.
Brotherford’s book calls this the information trap.
Whoever names a number first, in a situation where one side knows far more than the other, that hands the other side information they didn’t have to give up.
Tom’s Batna is weak in this instance.
Two years of searching found exactly one of these.
So answering fast before he knows what he’s talking about is the worst version of this negotiation.
This move is what the book calls a range check.
30 minutes finding comparable sales, same model, same year, similar condition across a few platforms before responding to anything.
If that produces a real number, Tom anchors just below it with the research attached.
Now, based on recent comparable sales, I’m thinking around this, happy to discuss if you see it differently.
If the models are rare enough that comparables don’t exist, Tom does something that feels backwards but isn’t.
He lets the seller anchor first.
I want to make sure I’m thinking about this accurately.
What number did you have in mind?
Their answer becomes research Tom couldn’t get anywhere else.
And this last one isn’t really about negotiation tactics at all.
Elena’s been offered a role in another city.
A real career step.
A serious pay increase.
The kind of opportunity she’d worked toward for years.
Her partner Sam values what they’ve already built, family nearby, a community, a stability he has trouble putting into words without sounding like he’s asking her to give something up.
Every conversation ends the same way.
One person states their case, the other restates theirs, nothing moves.
They’ve framed this as binary, move or don’t.
And a binary frame turns a complicated set of interests into a fight one of them has to lose.
It’s the pie test again.
But this is the highest stakes version either of them will ever run it on.
Because the echo here, how this conversation goes, shapes how every major decision in their relationship gets made for decades.
The fix is the same diagnostic as scenario one, run by both people separately in private, before the next conversation.
What do I want the other person to know that I haven’t actually said?
Elena’s answer?
This specific opportunity might not come again.
Sam’s answer?
His fear isn’t about her career at all.
It’s about losing the infrastructure of a life he doesn’t know how to rebuild.
Once both of those sentences are actually said, the binary dissolves on its own.
A trial period with a review point, a travel budget, a timeline tied to real conditions.
None of it is available inside move or don’t.
Five completely different scenarios.
Same buying spot, five times over.
Leverage, information, or fear that never gets said out loud.
Because saying it feels like weakness.
Brotherford’s argument, and it’s a good one, is that it’s the opposite.
The undisclosed thing is never protecting you.
It’s just costing you the negotiation you didn’t know you were already in.
I’ve narrated close to 15 of his books at this point, and this is the one where the game theory really stopped feeling like theory.
If you want to hear how deep the framework goes, batna, the echo, the pie test, all of it, the audiobooks are the place.
I’m not a 15 minute video.