Patent troll Erich Spangenberg has some surprisingly good advice for would-be collaborative negotiators: “Once you go thug, though, you cannot unthug.” How true! Spangenberg, owner of IPNav, brings law suits alleging patent infringement against companies on behalf of the “little guy.” An aggressive form of negotiation is the name of his game—not building long-term relationships. […]
Negotiating Agreements for Highly Collaborative Relationships
By Jeanette Nyden, Kate Vitasek, and David Frydlinger It’s time for a new approach and mindset for contract negotiations—time to leave the old me-first, I-win-you-lose strategy far behind and replace it with highly collaborative partnerships. What if the agreement you negotiated was more than just a short-term, legalese-burdened piece of paper specifying a bunch of […]
Kid Rock Has a WIIFWe Mindset
On June 7, 2013, the Wall Street Journal profiled Kid Rock’s decision to cap ticket prices at $20 per seat for his tour in “Kid Rock’s Plan to Change the Economics of Touring.” His decision was radical in several ways, but from my perspective, what he did was to turn the economics of concert tours […]
Getting to We: The Guiding Principles
There are six relationship principles that drive the Getting to We mindset, both in negotiating the relationship and in the subsequent operation of the partnership. These guiding principles tell the parties how to act within the relationship. In earlier posts, I’ve talked about the importance of trust and the necessary steps needed to build and […]
Developing a Shared Vision and Guiding Principles
Getting to We is a process. After partners assess the levels of trust and compatibility between them and agree that there is enough trust and compatibility, they are ready to move on to the next step in the process: developing a shared vision for the relationship. It is vital that the parties view each other […]
Assessing Trust and Compatibility in a Business Relationship
Accurately assessing trust and compatibility is not easy. It’s often one-sided: a buying company will evaluate a supplier’s trustworthiness without understanding the supplier’s perceptions of its own trustworthiness. That’s why professors Gerald Ledlow and Karl Manrodt developed the Compatibility and Trust AssessmentTM (CaT) to measure the strength of a business relationship across five dimensions, with […]
Getting to We: It’s All About Trust, Transparency and Compatibility
Getting to We is a book about negotiating. It is not, however, a typical negotiation book when compared to the hundreds of other negotiation books out there. It’s a book that opens the way to developing a new mindset and process for negotiating business relationships where the success of the relationship matters most. And that […]
The 5 Steps of Getting to We
Getting to We is a new approach and mindset for agreement negotiations that leaves the typical “I win, you lose” strategy in the dust. That strategy simply no longer works for the long-term. And it never worked very well for the short-term, either. But if you buy into The Getting to We premise—that highly collaborative […]
Getting the Deal by Getting to We
When we talk about the doing the deal, the point is to get the deal done, right? To get to yes in the most advantageous way possible for your company—the deal that best serves your specific interest, at the lowest possible cost. And then you move on to the next deal, right? Wrong! That mindset […]
