The next point in our on-going trip through negotiations land may sound pretty basic and not .jpg)
particularly profound and if that's what you think, you're right.
An admonition not to take anything in a negotiation personally and not get personal could sound unnecessary, however, I have seen plenty of negotiations that otherwise had a good chance to result in a mutually beneficial deal go off the tracks solely because of a violation of this tenet. Remember, most of these suggestions are directed toward the reaching of agreement on a business transaction with several moving parts and which should not have much emotion involved. Unlike a discussion about the settlement of a lawsuit, which often has much emotion involved because of the adversarial nature of the beast, a business transaction works better when approached rationally.
However, some approach negotiations as a zero-sum game and as a contest and measure success not by the attainment of a mutually beneficial goal but by the amount of scorched earth left behind them. While such an approach (and result) may bring some short term benefit, it has been my view (both as the scorcher and the scorchee) that this gives one of the parties an incentive to find ways during the relationship to claw back real or perceived slights and generally poisons the situation such that a long term deal is difficult. The same is true for ad hominem attacks.
Permit an old man a war story. I had negotiated a long term deal with termination rights for the other side but with a eight figure termination fee, which was designed to pay for the unamortized costs still in the deal. The other side was acquired and the acquiror seriously wanted to terminate and not pay the termination fee. We agreed to discuss some renegotiation but the first two days of the meetings were highlighted by a multi-volume PowerPoint presentation attempting to tell us how much we had breached the agreement, how bad we were as a vendor and generally, how bad we were as people. Now, I have to say I took some of that personally and that made me harder to deal with. We negotiated off and on for over 6 months, in three states and two countries and the deal never got any better for us. We failed to reach a renegotiation, the blustering about breach was just that and nothing came of that and several years later, the other side terminated pursuant to the agreement and paid the large termination fee. I say that only to illustrate that I violated this principle in that deal but the other side did to a much greater extent. And we neither one got a longer term relationship, which would probably have been much more beneficial to each.
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