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06 — Skin in the Game Principle — Stop Selling Hours and Share the Risk cover art

06 — Skin in the Game Principle — Stop Selling Hours and Share the Risk

06 — Skin in the Game Principle — Stop Selling Hours and Share the Risk

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If you sell your brainpower for a living — writing code, designing, facilitating, consulting — you've probably felt the suffocating anxiety of justifying every hour on a timesheet. That anxiety isn't a people problem. It's a contract problem.

In this episode, we break down why the two default contract models in knowledge work — fixed price and time & materials — are both structural traps. Fixed price forces you to predict the future on day zero. Time & materials rewards inefficiency and invites micromanagement into your daily life. Either way, you lose.

The escape hatch is a principle called Skin in the Game: engineering your agreements so that if you fail, your client fails — and if you succeed, they succeed right alongside you. Not a motivational buzzword, but a precise contractual mechanism that forces shared risk, shared reward, and total alignment.

We walk through four real-world case studies — a high-stakes multi-million-euro tender, a software agency that replaced 357-page contracts with three brutally simple rules, an a cappella band negotiating a venue gig in Milan, and a team of facilitators breaking through corporate procurement at a 220-million-euro publisher — to show you exactly how to deploy this principle in your very next negotiation.

Extreme Contracts is a framework for negotiation and collaboration in knowledge work, by Jacopo Romei.

Learn more: extremecontracts.com
About Jacopo: jacoporomei.com

This episode includes AI-generated content.
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