Strategic Negotiation: A Breakthrough Four-Step Process for Effective Business Negotiation

• Trying to trade something without measuring it. Find a metric for each trade, such as people, dollars, percentages, days, and the like. If you can’t measure it, you can’t trade it.

• Thinking of “quality” or other similar elements as something you can trade. Quality is a Consequences of No Agreement issue, not a Wish List one.

• Overlooking the ranking of Wish List items for both sides. It’s the gap between rankings on the two sides that creates opportunities for trades.

You have now taken the first step toward blueprinting your business deal by developing a goal to “create joint value and divide it given concerns for fairness in the ongoing relationship” and conducting Consequences of No Agreement and Wish List Estimations for both sides in the negotiation. In the next step of the process you conduct a fact-finding exercise designed to enable you to validate the results of the “best guess” analyses you’ve just completed.