business negotiation skills

Negotiation skills in business negotiations are similar to those in interpersonal or personal negotiations in that they employ the same methodologies and strategies except at a much larger scale.

The following items are tagged business negotiation skills.

Conflict Management: The Challenges of Negotiating Long-Term Concerns

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To protect the future interests of their organization, negotiators sometimes must accept fewer benefits or absorb greater burdens in the short run to maximize the value to all relevant parties – including future employees and shareholders – over time.

Suppose that the operations VPs of two subsidiaries of an energy company are preparing to negotiate the location of a new energy source within the company. Beta, the energy source, is limited in supply, but it is inexpensive and efficient to use in the present and grows in potency over time.

Issuing a Draft in Negotiations: Risks and Pitfalls

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A draft agreement may allow you to control the early stages of talks, but be aware that it also can obstruct agreement in the long run.

Putting a draft on the table may lock parties into bargaining positions prematurely, interfering with a search for common interests and creative options.

A Cash-Out Transaction: Cox Communications

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On August 2, 2004, Barbara Cox Anthony and Ann Cox Chambers, two sisters who together owned 73% of Cox Communications, announced that they wanted to cash out the minority shareholders of their company. Their initial offer was $32 per share, or a 14% premium to the preannouncement trading price of approximately $28 per share.

Power Failure

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In 1992 as part of efforts to privatize its energy sector, the Indian government chose energy-trading firm Enron, in conjunction with General Electric and the Bechtel Corporation, to build the world’s largest electricity-generating plant in Maharashtra, one of the poorest states in India. Possessing significant financial, intellectual, and reputational capital, Enron had to have been a formidable opponent in those initial negotiations. Enron was then on top of the business world, with sky-high stock prices and a reputation for innovation and growth.

Improving Negotiation Skills Training

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

How would you characterize your negotiating style: Are you collaborative, competitive, or compromising? If you have trouble answering that question, you’re probably not alone. That’s because skilled negotiators typically take on all these styles during a negotiation: they listen closely and collaborate to create value, they compete for the biggest slice of the pie, and they make compromises when necessary.

Keeping the Game Out of Court

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Sometimes those on opposite sides of a bitter dispute can achieve great gains – if only they can spot the ways in which they are similar.

In 2001, the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association (MIBA), an organization of five New York-area colleges best known for staging college basketball’s National Invitation Tournament, filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). MIBA allege that certain NCAA rules governing team participation in preseason and postseason tournaments restricted school’s participation in MIBA tournaments, in violation of various antitrust laws. After four years of litigation, the two parties announced not only that they would settle a lawsuit but also that the NCAA would purchase the rights to the MIBA preseason and postseason tournaments.

Fickle Intuition

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Placing Trust in Others

When it comes to trusting others, negotiators often rely on their gut instincts.

Recent studies indicate, however, that extraneous factors can sway such judgments.

For example, Michael Kosfeld and other University of Zurich researchers introduced a twist in a classic trust game in which subjects must decide on how much money to invest when there’s no guarantee that the party playing the “trustee” will return the investment or share the gains.

How to Negotiate When You’re Literally Far Apart

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Imagine that you’re the CEO of a sports clothing manufacturer based in Chicago. You recently traveled to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to meet with a distributor who has a rich and diverse network in the European sports market.

During the business trip, you both express enthusiasm about the possibility of a joint venture and agree to give the potential alliance more thought.

Back home, you learn that one of your competitors has discussed similar plans with the same distributor.