"A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." :) An established relationship is value, where instead of just sunk costs, you

"A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." :) An established relationship is value, where instead of just sunk costs, you have solved a lot of the problems that most relationships need to solve, and you can focus on just making it beneficial to all involved. At a large enterprise scale, an established process is value because it is stable and can become the foundation for other processes. When I identify something as value, I mean that it either creates or resolves tension in a dynamic or conflict of some kind, which creates opportunity in the form of new potential. When I say "super valuable," I mean it appears to have opportunity with nonlinear upside. Price is one of the most interesting qualities of things to think about, as in a way, it's the resolution of separately held beliefs suspended in an super position. There is a "true" price that is the unity of these ideas, and then there is the settling price that it clears at, where all those other factors collapse into it. Negotiation is the art of discovering how close you can get the clearing price to the abstract true price as possible. It's weird, but approaching negotiations as empirical price discovery is an immensely powerful bargaining position.