Negotiation

Background: I was negotiating with our third-party partner who is a small company and based in India how we can work together to integrate their products with ours to develop a demonstration for consumer electronics tradeshow (CES). Initially, we were in a distributive negotiation situation because they were trying to bargain with us to get our funding to do the integration and demo work but we felt our partner should absorb their own cost. To make this partnership work and produce the demo we like to have for the tradeshow, I turned our negotiation into more integrative discussion so we collaborate to develop a win-win business partnership. My integrative negotiation to accomplish the above is based on the following principles.

Focus on Purpose First—Identify common goals and specific areas where collaboration is useful. Build the infrastructure to support our goals after the purpose is clear.

Accentuate Differences to Clarify Interests—Use a thorough understanding of the differences between stakeholder interests to identify new ways of collaborating rather than compromising or focusing on the “lowest common denominator.”

Use the Process as a Temporary Substitute for Leadership—Make it possible for all parties to participate in joint problem solving and design. This builds shared responsibility and creative thinking about options.

Build the “Spirit of the Deal”—Use problem solving strategies that require cooperative effort. Find the issues where multi-lateral action advances individual organizational goals and grows value for many.

The steps I took in my integrative negotiation process are described as follows:

1. Identify and define the problem

Define the problem in a way that is mutually acceptable to both sides: Our partner and our company needed to jointly develop a joint demo at CES...

State the problems with an Eye toward practically and Comprehensiveness: We made sure anything that distracted from the core problems should be removed or streamlined so that the objective is achieved.

State the problem as a goal and identify the obstacles to attaining this goal: What we and our partner wanted to achieve was to have a compelling demo at CES. The obstacles to achieve this goal were we didn’t have sufficient expertise to integrate our partner’s software, our partner preferred to charge us for the integration, and our management viewed this as a joint marketing project so they asked our partner to absorb their cost since we let me use our software and hardware for free and we paid for the tradeshow with a channel for them to gain exposure.

Depersonalize the problem: We tried to depersonalize the definition of the problem which allowed both sides to approach the issue as a problem external to the individuals.

Separate the problem definition from the search for solutions: We developed some standards by which potential solutions will be judged for how well they fit. For example the question was how will we know our goal has been attained?

2. Understand the problems and bring interests and needs to the surface

When we began negotiation, we exposed four