Today’s tip on nego­ti­at­ing comes directly from a con­ver­sa­tion I had with one of my neigh­bors Marty. It is often said that great neigh­bors are the result of a strong fence. If that’s the case then out­stand­ing neigh­bors are those who have a knack for shar­ing appro­pri­ate knowl­edge & wis­dom. There were def­i­nitely some gems in this exchange.

Ques­tion:
What is the most com­mon rea­son, or two, that nego­ti­a­tions fail/breakdown/stall? What can be done to avoid it?

Answer:
The rea­sons nego­ti­a­tions fail, stall or break­down are actu­ally var­ied. Please note the fol­low­ing is based on obser­va­tions of prac­ti­tion­ers, and as such, it has pre­sented itself enough such that it is very much a reality.

The most com­mon rea­son is that one party chooses not to nego­ti­ate.  They take a stance that is non-negotiable in their mind and they will then just decide not to nego­ti­ate at all. When you don’t engage the other side there is no nego­ti­a­tion, just stand­off. Or worse yet, if they do engage hav­ing a fixed posi­tion it results in an argument.

To see the other rea­sons check­out the post on my main blog DonaldMcMichael.com

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

Do you believe your­self to be an entre­pre­neur or busi­ness owner? Most often peo­ple use the term inter­change­ably… espe­cially when talk­ing about start-ups or small busi­nesses. This is a mis­take that I often run across, and most of those I’m talk­ing with are involved in estab­lished busi­nesses. One shouldn’t con­fuse man­age­ment with entre­pre­neur­ship. And here is why, despite both being processes, get it twisted and your entity will go down in flames.

Entre­pre­neur­ship is the process of iden­ti­fy­ing an oppor­tu­nity for which a mar­ketable need exists then fig­ur­ing out a con­sis­tent way to make mean­ing­ful returns from solv­ing that abyss.

Busi­ness Man­age­ment is an ongo­ing process of oper­at­ing an estab­lished busi­ness. Man­agers must be able to deal with the chal­lenges of:

• hir­ing
• react­ing to cus­tomer needs
• mak­ing sales
• keep­ing cash flow positive

Entre­pre­neurs exhibit the fol­low­ing behaviors:

• cre­ation – starts a new business
• inno­va­tion – estab­lishes a new pro­ce­dure, process, mar­ket, or organization
• risk assump­tion – bears risk of poten­tial loss
• gen­eral man­age­ment – allo­cates busi­ness resources
• per­for­mance inten­tion – expects high level of profit or growth

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

While I never going into depth about the finds, I do encour­age you check them out if they sound interesting.

How to Test a Busi­ness Model Like a Sci­en­tist
Whether you like it or not we base our deci­sions on the way we believe par­tic­u­lar things work. This is both good and bad; the good is that what we really are doing is putting together a series of hypoth­e­sis that develop a model, which means it can be tested. The bad is that this is so ingrained in human nature – think wis­dom – we often fail to real­ize that our insights are just those insights not facts. A sit­u­a­tion that in my house­hold often leads to some­one ulti­mately say ‘What I had in my head was that… ’. This post opens the door on how Steve Blank exploits this fact to bet­ter sit­u­ate businesses.

Are You A Small Busi­ness, A Startup, Or An Entre­pre­neur?
I must admit that it took me more than a minute to fig­ure this one out back in the 1990’s when I was first start­ing out. We often use, hear, refer to these terms as if they are inter­change­able. In real­ity they all have dis­tinct mean­ings although at times slight they can have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the sus­tain­abil­ity of a busi­ness or you own energy level. Read this post on Busi­ness Insider to see which you iden­tify with the most?

Visit my main site DonaldMcMichael.com to see the rest.

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous