The job market remains strong—and wages are still increasing at a fast clip. Of course, so is inflation.

Perhaps that’s why employees are feeling particularly keen to negotiate on salary. That’s great! Kellogg professor Leigh Thompson is a big fan of negotiating on salary. But she cautions that when employees get ahead of themselves, their efforts can backfire.

Today, we’ll hear her advice on negotiating when you think you have the upper hand. And should you land the job, we’ll also explain why that celebratory cocktail might be made with a dash of … Velveeta? Finally: an interesting study that explores how innovation emerges from startups. Let’s dig in.

Know Your Own Leverage

In an article for Insider (behind a paywall), Thompson offers a few tips for job seekers who might be overly eager to negotiate.

Things are most likely to go awry when you negotiate prematurely—before you have an actual written offer in front of you, she explains. A verbal offer isn’t enough! So practice patience.

Then, once you have an offer in hand, consider scheduling a conversation over Zoom or the phone about the terms of your employment. “Speaking in real time enables you to better adjust your message to suit the audience and situation,” Thompson writes.

Thompson also suggests that you avoid mentioning other offers that are on the table unless you need to, or you are specifically asked. “Sure, it may be tempting to play your prospects against each other. Unfortunately, employers don’t like this,” she writes. This can “sound like a thinly veiled threat, and conveys a sense of arrogance.”

We’ve talked to Thompson a lot about negotiation in the past. You can read her thoughts on preparing for a negotiation here, and persuading people via email here.

Shaken not Stirred?

In case you missed it, Velveeta’s gone full quirk—and other legacy brands could have something to learn from its success.

Velveeta, the “velvet-y” processed cheese that comes in a box, has had a good pandemic. Customers were stuck at home, feeling nostalgic, and in the mood to give the legacy brand another shot. But to keep the brand’s momentum alive, it has initiated a rather unusual campaign. It features high-end collaborations that position Velveeta as a luxury product. Think: cheese-scented yellow nail polish or a veltini splashed with—well, you get the idea.

Kellogg professor Tim Calkins is a fan of the campaign. “The power of this idea is that it doesn’t make any sense at all,” he recently told Fast Company. “We live in a world where there’s so much happening, so people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about you; especially if you’re an older, established brand like Velveeta. The power of unexpected and creative marketing is that, for the first time in a long time, people start thinking about these brands again.”

Innovation Stifled

You might think about tech startups as being incubators for some of the most innovative ideas out there, ones with the potential to transform our economy and our society. But it turns out that one of the most popular exit strategies for startups—being acquired by an established firm—could be stifling innovation.

Kellogg professor Niko Matouschek and a colleague built a model to explore, among other things, how a startup’s product development would be influenced by the desire to be acquired by an existing company. They found that, when hopes of acquisition drove decisions, the startup tended to develop a product that was more similar to the product made by the existing company. This would put their product in more direct competition with the existing one and drive up its acquisition price.

But what’s good for the startup might not be good for society. Antitrust legislation that limits these acquisitions could “induce the entrants to engage in more radical innovations, which are likely to fail, but every now and then they’re going to succeed spectacularly,” Matouschek says. “And that’s really what we care about.”

You can read more about the research here.

LEADERSHIP TIP

“The big, big winners in this one are gonna be the law firms. These guys are gonna make a fortune.”

—Clinical professor Harry Kraemer in Insider, on Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter.