NEGOTIATING - MAKE THE PIE BIGGER
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Latest Breaking News - Business - Viewing: Negotiating - Make The Pie Bigger Saturday, November 07, 2009 If you plan on doing business with another party more than once, a successful outcome requires that both parties feel satisfied. You really doo not want to hammer the other party into submission as they probably will spend most of their time getting even with you at some time in the future to the detriment of both parties. Over the years, I have determined that in many peoples' minds, probably in most peoples' minds, negotiating is a confrontational process where at the end of the day, someone has to win and someone has to lose. This attitude can be seen from the inception of most negotiations where the parties position themselves on opposite sides of a rectangular table, and effectively set up another "chicken dance." I want you to take a fresh look at the negotiating process. Step back and imagine a pie in the center of the table with the objective of dividing it between the parties. If the parties are sitting opposite one another staring at the pie, each will be thinking about how to cut the pie in such a way that their "half" is bigger than the other party's "half" -- a pretty typical mind set and approach to most negotiations. To achieve true success, that thinking has to change. In other words, the objective has to change from getting a "bigger piece" of an existing pie, to an objective of working together to "make the pie bigger" so that, at the end of the day,both parties end up with a bigger piece of pie than they would have through a more confrontational approach to negotiating. For this outcome to have a chance of happening, the physical set up has to change. In those cases where I was able to arrange the setting, I made sure there was a round table where the parties had the opportunity to act as equals -- no head of the table and no arbitrary "line in the sand." In those cases where a rectangular table is the only available option, ask the other party to make room for you on their side of the table so you can put your heads together, and hopefully, achieve a better outcome for both parties. Explain that your hope is to "make the pie bigger." At first, this approach may not be credible to some people because of their perspective of negotiations as strictly transaction type events where somebody wins and somebody loses. So, in fact, your first negotiation may be to convince the other party that you are sincere, that you are honest and that you really are trustworthy. In other words, you will need to convince them that this approach is not some new kind of negotiating tactic or trick to win something from them before you even get to the main points of the actual negotiations.
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