dealmaking

The following items are tagged dealmaking.

Conflict Resolution and Negotiation Across Cultures

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution.

After recently losing an important deal in India, a business negotiator learned that her counterpart felt as if she had been rushing through the talks. The business negotiator thought she was being efficient with their time. How can she improve her cross-cultural negotiation skills?

Research shows that dealmaking across cultures tends to lead to worse outcomes as compared with negotiations conducted within the same culture. This is primarily because cultures are characterized by different behaviors, communication styles, and norms. As a result, when negotiating across cultures, we bring different perspectives to the bargaining table, which in turn may result in potential misunderstandings and a lower likelihood of exploring and discovering integrative, or value-creating, solutions.

Dealmaking: Three Deal-Drafting Pitfalls

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

The transfer of an agreement from negotiators to lawyers or other professional deal drafters can introduce three main types of mistakes. Read on to discover how you can avoid making these same mistakes at the bargaining table during your next dealmaking negotiation session.

Exclusive Negotiation Periods

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

The clearest method for achieving exclusivity is an exclusive negotiating period, during which both sides agree not to talk to third parties, even if approached unexpectedly by others. In some arenas, these terms are called no-talk periods.

What to Do Before the Deal Breaks Down

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

Whenever one side fails to meet its contractual obligations, renegotiation is more likely to succeed if the parties have a strong relationship. Ideally, the aggrieved party will value long-term relations more than potential gains from a claim for breach of contract. For example, a bank will be more willing to renegotiate a loan with a delinquent debtor when the prospect of future business with the debtor is likely. Bondholders of the same debtor, on the other hand, will generally be more resistant to renegotiation, as they tend to lack opportunities for a profitable future business relationship.

Check Your Emotional Temperature

Posted by & filed under Conflict Management.

Do you ever feel ambushed by strong emotions?

To guard against acting irrationally or in ways that can harm you, authors of Beyond Reason: Using Emotions As You Negotiate Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro advise you to take your emotional temperature during a negotiation. Specifically, try to gauge whether your emotions are manageable, starting to heat up, or threatening to boil over.

Wheelers and Dealers?

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Car salespeople truly understand how to use modest concessions to extract much larger ones.

First, they spend a long time legitimating the sticker price and suggesting that it’s not only fair, but nonnegotiable.

Advanced Negotiation Master Class

Posted by & filed under Advanced Negotiation Master Class.

In the mid-1990s, a young JD/MBA student at Harvard was writing a case study about a railroad deal that was ongoing at the time. Somewhat to his surprise, he landed an interview with Bruce Wasserstein, the renowned dealmaker who had pioneered the hostile takeover, and who was a consultant in the railroad negotiations.

It was a fascinating conversation, the student remembers.

“I began to recognize that sophisticated dealmakers play the game at a different level – like a chess game instead of trying to scream and yell louder than others in the room.

“Rather than a frontal assault, sophisticated dealmakers engage in a carefully thought-through sequencing strategy: Get all the pieces lined up, to the point where when you go in the room, it’s basically a done deal.”

Like many of us, this student was hooked by the sweet art of negotiation … and he went on to become a world-renowned dealmaker, instrumental in megadeals such as Oracle’s $10.3 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, Cox Enterprises’ $8.9 billion freeze-out of minority shareholders in Cox Communications, the $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of Toys “R” Us, and Exelon’s $8.0 billion hostile takeover bid for NRG.

Mediation in Transactional Negotiation

Posted by & filed under International Negotiation.

We generally think of mediation as a dispute-resolution device. Federal mediators intervene when collective bargaining bogs down. Diplomats are sometimes called in to mediate conflicts between nations. So-called multidoor courthouses encourage litigants to mediate before incurring the costs – and risks – of going to trial.

Scott R. Peppet, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law in Boulder, Colorado, reports that mediation may be quietly creeping into transactional negotiation, or traditional dealmaking, as well. In Peppet’s survey of 122 practicing mediators, 48 reported having been involved in deals ranging from $100,000 to $26 million in value.

March 2012

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Monthly Archives, Publication Archives.

Reach a more creative agreement. You’ve heard it many times: to get the most out of an agreement and a new business relationship, you have to collabo­rate to find new sources of value in addition to claiming value for yourself. Yet coming up with original, value-creating ideas can be easier said than done. We present