negotiator

The following items are tagged negotiator.

Laughing Matters

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution.

You don’t have to be serious to be a serious negotiator. Humor, deftly used, can be a positive factor in promoting agreement.

That’s what Finnish researcher Taina Vuorela confirmed in a comparative study of two real-world transactions. One was an internal meeting of a sales team trying to hammer out a strategy to land a potential customer. The other was the subsequent negotiation between that same team and its outside client.

Enhancing Your Deal in Business Negotiations

Posted by & filed under Sales Negotiations.

Not all contracts are created equal. Some maximize joint through creative trades, while others are barely satisfactory. Strategic wariness causes many people to leave untapped value on the bargaining table. Of course, agreements based on incomplete and distorted information aren’t likely to be efficient.

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.

Status Anxiety

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Sometimes in negotiation we are forced to deal not only with the issues on the table but also with concerns about status.

One famous instance took place in the late 1980s, when Robert Campeau, head of the Campeau Corporation and then one of Fortune magazine’s “50 Most Fascinating Business People,” tried to acquire Federated Department tores, the parent company of the prestigious department store Bloomingdale’s.

A bidding war over Bloomingdale’s escalated between Campeau and R.H. Macy. Campeau won with an irrationally high offer – but had to declare bankruptcy shortly thereafter.

Fickle Intuition

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

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

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

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.