Stop Playing the Villager
What the game of Werewolf reveals about why executives leave millions on the table.
The game is Werewolf—and the rules are simple.
A group of players gather.
Think of a table of 12. Cards are distributed at random.
10 are “Villagers.” 2 are “Werewolves.”
The Werewolves silently reveal themselves to one other. The Villagers remain clueless.
The game unfolds in a cycle of Day and Night.
Each day, the group debates and votes to eliminate a suspect. If the Villagers execute both Werewolves, they win.
However, the Werewolves win the moment they reach numerical parity with the Villagers. If the group thins to the point where Werewolves make up half the table, the Villagers lose their voting power, and the monsters take the town.
The werewolves win over 60% of the time despite 5:1 odds.
Why?
Not because they are stronger, but because they are informed.
In a room full of blind accusations, the only people who know the truth are the ones trying to kill you. The game isn’t about finding monsters—it’s about how easily the people with information destroy the people without it.
Werewolves win because they have information the majority doesn’t.
They know who’s on their team. They know who’s dangerous. They know exactly what’s true while everyone else is guessing.
The villagers?
They’re debating in the dark—building theories off of body language and gut feel, reacting to whoever talks the loudest or acts the most suspicious.
The informed minority doesn’t just have an edge. They control the game.
Now replace “werewolf” with “employer” and “villager” with “you sitting across the table in a negotiation you think is a conversation between equals.”
It’s not equal. It never was.
You’re debating in the dark—building theories off of Glassdoor reviews and “market benchmarks,” reacting to a recruiter’s tone of voice or a vague promise of “growth potential.”
The informed minority doesn’t just have an edge. They own the map.
The Villager’s Real Problem
Herb Cohen—one of the most respected negotiation minds of the last century—argued that every negotiation comes down to three things: Information, Timing, and Power.
Most executives obsess over the wrong ones.
They walk into negotiations leading with credentials and logic.
Here’s my track record.
Here’s my P&L impact.
Here are three reasons I’m worth more.
Or they focus on timing and leverage.
I’ll wait for the right moment.
I’ll let competing offers do the talking.
But Cohen understood that power and timing are derivatives.
They’re downstream.
The thing that feeds both of them—the thing that makes the other two actually work—is information.
Without it, your power is a bluff and your timing is a guess.
But you don’t simply gather information by asking hard questions. You get it by making the other person want to tell you things.
This is where you must apply your ability to influence and persuade. These are the soft skills that turn mediocre 6 figure deals into 7 figures and beyond.
The executives I work with who collect the best intelligence aren’t interrogators.
They’re the ones who walk into a room and make the recruiter, the hiring manager, and the CHRO feel like they’re on the same team.
They lead with curiosity, not credentials.
They say things like, “I want to make sure this is a win for your team too—help me understand what success actually looks like in this role from your side.”
They give the other party a version of themselves worth living up to—the collaborative partner, the transparent leader, the person who solves problems rather than creates them.
More alignment, less confrontation.
And in doing so, the other side opens up.
They share the real timeline.
They reveal the internal politics.
They sometimes even tell you what the last person in the seat was paid and why they left.
Not because you cornered them and drilled them with an aggressive ultimatum—but because you made it feel safe and smart for them to be honest with you.
Credentials get you in the room. Logic keeps you in the conversation. But emotion—deployed with precision and empathy—is what gets people to hand you the map.
The Werewolf problem plays out in real time across every executive negotiation I advise.
The company knows the approved band. They know the internal equity concerns. They know how desperate the hiring manager is to fill the role, how many other candidates fell through, and exactly how much budget flexibility exists above what they offered you.
They know whether the role was created for you or if you’re the fourth-choice candidate they’re trying to close before the req expires.
You know what they told the recruiter to tell you.
That’s not a negotiation between equals. That’s a villager raising their hand in the dark.
My role is to be the seer.
In the last year across my client base, the executives who consistently outperformed—who landed 40, 70, and sometimes 200% above initial offers—all had one thing in common.
It wasn’t better credentials. It wasn’t harder negotiation tactics.
They showed up informed—which helped us get more creative.
We knew the company’s hiring urgency before the first call.
We knew the internal politics around the role.
We mapped the decision-makers and understood whose opinion mattered versus whose was theater.
We did the work before the game started—while everyone else was waiting for an offer letter to figure out where they stood.
We didn’t show up to debate in the dark. We showed up with the map—and the other side never knew we had it.
How to Become the Seer
In Werewolf, there’s a special role called the Seer.
Each night, while the werewolves hunt, the Seer gets to look at one player’s card and learn the truth. The Seer gains more power than anyone else at the table because they have more information—and that changes everything about how they play.
The Seer doesn’t argue louder. They don’t need to.
They ask better questions because they already know things the room doesn’t. They guide the conversation without revealing their hand. They move with precision while everyone else moves with panic.
That’s the role I play for my clients.
But it’s also a role you can build for yourself—if you’re willing to do the work before the game starts.
Here’s what most executives do:
Get a call from a recruiter.
Get excited. Jump on the phone. Answer every question openly.
Share expected comp when asked.
Wait for an offer and react to the number.
Try to negotiate from a position they didn’t build.
Here’s what the best-informed executives do:
Before the first call, they’ve mapped the company’s leadership and identified who owns the hiring decision—not just who’s conducting the interview.
They understand the market players, pressures, and opportunities.
They’ve worked their network to understand the internal politics around the role.
They know whether this is a backfill, a new position, or a rescue hire—because each one carries a completely different urgency and budget.
They’ve talked to people who’ve left the company and understand the real culture, not the careers page version.
They understand the comp philosophy—whether this company pays at the 50th, 75th, or 90th percentile—and they know where the flex exists.
They remain intellectually curious to find new information that will help them create more value for everyone—giving them an opportunity to break the status quo.
Script A — The uninformed executive says: “I’m really excited about this opportunity. Here’s what I’d like to make—I won’t go backwards or laterally at this stage in my career.”
This approach reveals information and collects nothing.
Script B — The informed executive says: “I’ve spent time understanding your business and where this role fits into your growth plan. I’d love to understand from your perspective—what does an ideal outcome look like for this hire in the first twelve months, and what would make the investment feel like a no-brainer for your team?”
This approach collects information and reveals nothing.
Same conversation. Completely different control of information.
Script A hands the company your card.
Script B makes them show you theirs—without ever feeling like they’re being interrogated.
You must lead with alignment. You give them a version of themselves to live up to—the thoughtful company that invests in the right leader, not the one that grinds on nickels.
And when information flows in your direction, the entire negotiation shifts with it.
Because the real unlock isn’t arguing over a bigger base or a better bonus. It’s proposing structures nobody else at the table was thinking about.
When you understand the company’s actual priorities—the revenue target that keeps the CEO up at night, the market share play the board approved last quarter, the product launch that has to land—you can tie your compensation to their outcomes.
Milestone triggers. Performance accelerators. Equity kickers that only vest if you deliver what they already told you they need.
This is how the best deals in Hollywood and professional sports get structured. Why is it so different in corporate?
The base is the floor. The real upside is engineered around performance—and both sides win because the incentives are aligned, not adversarial.
You can’t propose that structure if you showed up uninformed. You can’t expand the pie if you don’t know what’s in it.
But when you’ve done the intelligence work—when you understand what the company is actually trying to build—you stop negotiating for a number and start designing a deal.
I push every client I work with to think this way.
And the most forward-thinking CHROs, talent consultants, and comp committees are starting to arrive at the same conclusion from the other side of the table—because this model solves their biggest problems too.
High performers naturally break compensation bands.
That’s not a bug—it’s a signal.
A performance-aligned structure lets companies reward that outsized impact without blowing up internal equity, because the upside is tied directly to outcomes that justify the spend.
And underperformers?
They earn less—not because someone made a subjective judgment call, but because the structure was honest from the start.
There’s a tell here too.
The executives who embrace performance incentives are signaling something—confidence, conviction, a willingness to bet on themselves.
The ones who push back and demand a larger guarantee? They’re telling you something equally important.
Which one would you rather hire?
This is the next generation of executive compensation.
Longer executive retention because the deal is more balanced.
Better performance because the incentives are real.
Less adversarial negotiation because both sides built the map together.
The market is moving here.
The candidate who shows up informed isn’t a harder negotiation.
They’re a better hire.
The Game Is Already Happening
Too many people think negotiations start when someone slides an offer across the table.
It doesn’t.
It started the moment the recruiter looked at your LinkedIn profile and decided what you were worth before you said a word.
It started when the hiring manager described their ideal candidate to HR and HR translated that into a comp band you’ll never see.
It started when the company decided how much budget flexibility to hide and how much to reveal.
It started when someone in your network got asked about you—and you had no idea what they said.
The game was already happening. You just weren’t playing yet.
And if you’re on the company side of the table—every time you default to opacity, you’re not protecting the budget.
You’re building a trust deficit that compounds until your best people leave.
Not today. Not in the interview. Eleven months in, when the resignation letter arrives and you’re back at the table paying a premium to replace someone who never should have been lost in the first place.
The informed minority will always outperform the uninformed majority.
That’s true in Werewolf. It’s true in executive compensation. And it’s true whether you’re the candidate or the company.
The only question is which side of the information you’re on.
Stop playing the villager.
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Stay fearless, friends.