Negotiating Genuinely: Being Yourself in Business by Shirli Kopelman; illustrations by Ruth Gwily

Author:Shirli Kopelman; illustrations by Ruth Gwily [Kopelman, Shirli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3.5. Self-interest-based value creation

As you can see from Table 3.1 and Figure 3.5, an important preparation strategy for joint value creation is to brainstorm and generate a list of possible negotiable issues. Even if an issue seems relatively unimportant to you, it could be valuable to the other person and thus critical to consider from a value creation perspective; you might easily be able to make a concession on it and gain a lot in return through a trade-off. And if something appears of relatively low priority to both negotiators, why not add even a relatively miniscule amount of net value to both negotiators? The cost often is solely spending a few more strategically focused minutes in preparation and confirming assumptions during the negotiation.

In your negotiating-genuinely template, I recommend generating a preparation table similar to Table 3.1 to map out multiple additional issues and discern similar interests and differences in priorities as the drivers of value creation. Once you gain expertise, the visual patterns that emerge from this table will help you understand the resources and drive your strategy in real time. Again, the first row of this preparation template defines the basic distributive issue. The next rows cue discovery of additional and potentially joint-value-generating negotiable issues. Understanding how each negotiable issue influences the overall deal will enable you to apply negotiation strategy more wisely and appropriately. For example, positive anchors may be just as relevant on the distributive and the trade-off issues but will play out differently. On a trade-off, despite opening with a positive anchor (imagine that the seller in the previous example initially requested a four-day delivery), a negotiator might profit most from strategic flexibility, conceding to the other negotiator’s position (for example, conceding from a four-day all the way to a one-day delivery), while linking this concession to a gain on the distributive issue. On the distributive issue (such as price of the gizmo) a negotiator needs to strategically monitor concessions. And compatible issues leverage a different type of openness and discussion of interests. When multiple negotiable issues identified in your preparation table are linked, value potentially increases (or decreases) as it is being distributed. Having multiple issues in a negotiation may seem like a complication, but it is strategically necessary for value creation.

Perhaps from now on, you will imagine the negotiation task as a joint building opportunity, in which rather than a tug-of-war on price you are exploring what building blocks (negotiable issues) you can add and what resources on the table can be better leveraged. As illustrated in Figure 3.5, the tug-of-war converts into a collaborative dance, a dynamic dance that is simultaneously both cooperative and competitive.

Wisely leveraging the negotiation building blocks, you become an architect of profits—a profit architect who cooperates and competes.

THE INTEGRAL HAT ENABLES A SIMULTANEOUS APPROACH

The integral hat enables you to be a profit architect who simultaneously cooperates and competes. Just as people tend to think categorically about cooperation and competition, they think categorically about themselves when they negotiate.

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