Today’s tip on nego­ti­at­ing comes from our good friends over at Scot­work NA.

Ques­tion:

What is the first thing that you need to do before you enter a nego­ti­a­tion… or meeting?

Answer: 

Pre­pare in advance. In nego­ti­at­ing this is how one makes the biggest impact on out­comes for the your team. Take the time to think through exactly what it is that you must have, would like to have, and a win­ning posi­tion for your coun­ter­part. Here is how you go about it:

• Iden­ti­fy­ing objec­tives: iden­tify issues, define intended out­comes and real­is­tic expec­ta­tions, and deter­mine the limit to where you will move if you have flexibility.
• Cre­at­ing a wish list: if you are flex­i­ble in any of your issues and you move closer to your limit, deter­mine what you’ll ask for in return. If you come to con­clu­sions quickly, deter­mine what small thing you can ask for to enhance the deal.
• Deter­min­ing con­ces­sions: see where you can be flex­i­ble and what you can give to get what you want.
• Research­ing infor­ma­tion: ana­lyze power bal­ance and deter­mine the degree to which the other party under­stands your pri­or­i­ties and you under­stand theirs.
• Prepar­ing ques­tions: deter­mine what you don’t know and pre­pare ques­tions you should ask ahead of time.
• Devel­op­ing a strat­egy: be flex­i­ble so you can quickly adjust. Make it fairly sim­ple so you avoid daz­zling them with you know what.
• Assign­ing tasks ahead: iden­tify leader, sum­ma­rizer and observer to con­trol the infor­ma­tion flow and the shape of the negotiation.

About the insight con­trib­u­tor: Marty Fin­kle is the CEO of Scot­work (NA) Inc. Marty runs Scotwork’s North Amer­i­can busi­ness where he and his team of sea­soned nego­tia­tors work with over 100 com­pa­nies in over 20 indus­tries focused on negotiations. 

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“You can­not dis­cover new oceans unless you have the courage to step away from the shore.”

Nobel Prize-winning author André Gide

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photo via Don­ald McMichael 

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

Design Think­ing Is A Failed Exper­i­ment. So What’s Next?

In this blog post Bruce Nuss­baum, on of the biggest advo­ca­tors of Design Think­ing via his Busi­ness Week columns, has deter­mined that like many busi­ness frame­works Design Think­ing has reached an influ­ence plateau. Some of it is based on its large adop­tion fac­tor but Bruce argues that a larger than fair amount of his deci­sion was based on his obser­va­tion that many lead­ers had “turn­ing it into a lin­ear, gated, by-the-book method­ol­ogy that deliv­ered, at best, incre­men­tal change”. What con­ven­tional frame­work has he moved on to… Cre­ative Intel­li­gence. So what is Cre­ative Intel­li­gence, or CQ? Read this arti­cle, it is worth your time and as an added bonus it includes a video (go to my main blog) fea­tur­ing IDEO’s Tim Brown and Bruce Nussbaum.

Go to my blog to see the other 4 top articles/posts for the past week.

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The March 31^st post — 60 Sec­ond MBA: Res­cue Your Nego­ti­a­tions; 3 Com­mand­ments http://www.donaldmcmichael.com/60-second-mba-rescue-your-negotiations.htm — on nego­ti­a­tion drew a fair amount of inter­est. Why, because nego­ti­a­tion skills are impor­tant for every­one, no mat­ter what they do for a liv­ing. It is some­thing that most every­one uses often in life; skills to swing the deal in your favor come in handy. For this rea­son, I decided to put together a fail-safe list of nego­ti­at­ing insights that you can turn to in a pinch.

HBS (Har­vard Busi­ness School) pro­duces a ton of busi­ness research. It is a great des­ti­na­tion for free arti­cles on nego­ti­a­tion; http://hbswk.hbs.edu/topics/negotiations.html. Also, don’t for­get to check out their sis­ter depart­ment Har­vard Law at http://pon.harvard.edu.

Stick­ing in acad­e­mia Kel­logg School of Busi­ness’ site ‘Inside Kel­logg’ (http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/) also has a great stash of nego­ti­a­tion articles.

On the lit­er­ary front flip through:  [go to DonaldMcMichael.com to view the full post…]

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s posterous

I invite you to join me as I con­tinue my… well let’s call it a voy­age of dis­cov­ery. Pub­licly, it all started last week with a post enti­tled “It’s All About the Cus­tomer; 5 Myths to Bust to Get There”, the premise is that busi­nesses have/are mov­ing away from sell­ing a prod­uct to sell­ing a solu­tion by focus­ing on cus­tomer rela­tion­ships and reten­tion. This is how I closed the post:

Myth­buster Needed

What’s we as busi­ness lead­ers need to embrace is new answers for old prob­lems — lead­er­ship, inno­va­tion and growth – and new chal­lenges. In order to do this here are five myths that we need to bust.

Myth 1: We can’t Afford to Fail… Often

Myth 2: Deci­sions should be based on data not intuition

Myth 3: Past ways need to be totally forgotten

Myth 4: Prob­lem solv­ing and crit­i­cal think­ing are the same

Myth 5: It’s all about the features

I’ll explore these myths more next week.

On Field Audible

We most cer­tainly will dig into each of these myths, how­ever, upon fur­ther reflec­tion dur­ing the week I think it is well worth the effort to take the time to explore the back-story that’s dri­ving this trend. After all, if we don’t develop a hypoth­e­sis around the engine of change (the core) how could we ever expect to for­mu­late rea­son­able argu­ments against the myths?

The Post Reces­sion Consumer

I’m not nec­es­sar­ily a fan of trickle-down– eco­nom­ics but rip­ple effects (reper­cus­sions) within the supplier-consumer eco sys­tem are all too real. At the core of the cur­rent busi­ness model renais­sance is the impact the past reces­sion (although to mil­lions it is still all too cur­rent, so well just think of it as the reces­sion and post reces­sion wave) has had on the atti­tudes of con­sumers. In the U.S. we have seen sav­ings rates jump from under 5% of take home pay to in some cases to +10%, ter­ri­tory, an area that has not been treaded upon since the early 1970’s. Accord­ing a Strat­egy + Busi­ness arti­cle “The Power of the Post-Recession Con­sumer” by John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, it is a move to a lifestyle more focused on com­mu­nity, con­nec­tion, qual­ity, and cre­ativ­ity. These spend­ing shifts have  

<to read the full arti­cle go to my main blog at DonaldMcMichael.com>

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