Business Negotiations

Negotiations between corporate entities, their vendors, or their employees.

The following items are tagged Business Negotiations.

Being Fair and Getting What You Want

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Imagine that you and your business partner agree to sell your company. You get an offer that pleases you both, so now you face the enviable task of splitting up the rewards.

Some background: Your partner put twice as many hours into the firm’s start-up as you did, while you worked fulltime elsewhere to support your family. Your partner, who is independently wealthy, was compensated nominally for her extra time.

Are We in Competition?

Posted by & filed under Dispute Resolution.

Ford vs. GM. Coke vs. Pepsi. Oxford vs. Cambridge. These famous rivalries remind us that the top two achievers in a given realm often compete fiercely with each other.

Now Stephen M. Garcia and Richard Gonzalez of the University of Michigan and Avishalom Tor of the University of Haifa have produced a useful series of studies on when competition between entities will exist – with findings that are relevant to all negotiators.

Trying to Forgive and Move Forward

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution, Dispute Resolution.

In business negotiations, when a counterpart apologizes for harming or offending you, should you forgive and move forward? What if doing so seems impossible?
In a chapter in The Negotiator’s Fieldbook (American Bar Association, 2006), Ellen Waldman and Frederic Luskin write that forgiveness isn’t an essential component of negotiation; you may be able to get to

Sellers: Stay out of legal hot water

Posted by & filed under Sales Negotiations.

When it comes to business negotiations, you probably understand the importance of being as principled as possible to protect your reputation and ward off legal trouble. You probably expect your counterparts to follow the straight and narrow as well. Yet negotiators often have only a fuzzy grasp of which claims and strategies are legal and

Clearinghouse Customers Speak!

Posted by & filed under Daily, Negotiation Skills, Pedagogy at the Program on Negotiation (Pedagogy @ PON).

In an effort to understand more about how the PON Clearinghouse does and doesn’t meet its customers’ needs, we interviewed a number of long-time Clearinghouse clients. We asked what teaching materials they found most valuable and for what reasons. We also asked how they found out about the Clearinghouse and what additional teaching and training

Heading Off Deception

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

In all types of negotiations and across all phases of the process, people can sometimes misrepresent or fail to tell the truth. Individual negotiators lie with the hope of improving their own outcomes. When negotiating his salary with the Cranbury, N.J.–based pharmaceutical marketing firm Carter-Wallace in 1997, Robert Bonczek misrepresented his prior title and salary at DuPont. Once Carter-Wallace detected the deception, it withdrew its offer. Sometimes entire teams of negotiators lie [or was this just a bluff?]. In the union-management negotiations between the United Autoworkers Union (UAW) and Textron that began in 1994, Textron’s management team misrepresented its intention of hiring nonunion workers. As a result, the UAW agreed to a contract that it later regretted accepting.

Mediation Secrets for Better Business Negotiations: Top Techniques from Mediation Training Experts

Posted by & filed under Freemium.

In this Special Report, the experts and editors from Harvard’s Program on
Negotiation offer a sampling of advice from past issues of Negotiation to help you learn the techniques you need to resolve your disputes through mediation. You will learn to select the right dispute-resolution process, choose a mediator with appropriate expertise, learn the steps your mediator is likely to follow and enhance your outcomes through novel strategies.

A Better Negotiation Map

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

How often have you heard that, when entering a negotiation, you should get your allies onboard first? Conventional wisdom, but not always the best advice. When the United States sought to build a global anti-Iraq coalition following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, for instance, Israel appeared to be its strongest regional ally.

Is Your Agent Faulty?

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Top executive pay attorney Joseph Bachelder was representing a client who’d just been chosen as a company’s next CEO. After a first session with the board’s representative to hammer out a compensation package, Bachelder took his client aside and informed him that he would get everything he wanted from the negotiation, according to the Wall Street Journal.