The Idea in Brief
Business leaders today report feeling that they must constantly negotiate to extract complex agreements from people with power over industries or individual careers. Sensing that they’re in continual danger makes them want to act fast, project control (even when they don’t have any), rely on coercion, and defuse tension at any cost.
The end result may be a compromise that fails to address the real problem or opportunity, increased resistance from the other side that makes agreement impossible, resentment that sours future negotiations, a failure to develop relationships based on mutual respect and trust, or an agreement that creates enormous exposure to future risk.
To avoid these dangers, executives can apply the same strategies used by well-trained military officers in hot spots like Afghanistan and Iraq. Those in extremis negotiators solicit others’ points of view, propose multiple solutions and invite their counterparts to critique them, use facts and principles of fairness to persuade the other side, systematically build trust and commitments over time, and take steps to reshape the negotiation process as well as the outcome.
To learn more about how to put these ideas into practice, please read “Implementing Strategies in Extreme Negotiations.”
