posts By Bradley Chowles

Knowledge, as they say, is power. And when you’re at the table negotiating with suppliers or a potential customer, this is truer than ever. That being said, it’s not only important to know as much about your opponent as possible. Skilled negotiators also make a concerted effort to know as much about their own situation as well.

As automation sweeps across the business world, professionals need to ask themselves: what value can a human offer, that can’t be replicated by a machine? The answer, according to experts across industries, is creativity, strategy, and imagination.

As humans, we’re naturally averse to dwelling within a state of tension — it’s uncomfortable, it makes us feel vulnerable, and it often leads to behavior that dissipates as much of the tension as possible. Managing and overcoming this discomfort is actually what sets the world’s best negotiators, athletes, and poker players apart from the rest. They’re not only at ease in a state of tension, they...

A negotiation is a gestalt process: a series of events that, when taken together, lead to an outcome greater than the sum of its parts. That’s why it’s important to treat every negotiation meeting as an important part of the entire negotiation process. For clarity, let’s quickly consider another kind of gestalt process — going on a diet.

No business is an island – especially in a world of global supplier networks and transnational partnerships. What’s more, companies are increasingly outsourcing roles and functions previously considered core to a business: managers, marketers, and even certain C-suite positions.

In a previous blog post, we offered five guidelines to navigate the often slippery slopes of customer price pressure in a negotiation. But in the words of a prospective customer when you concede too much too quickly: there’s more where that came from. Here are five more guidelines to help you ensure you never undermine your organization’s self-interest in the face of price pressure from a...

There’s an old Buddhist story involving a group of blind men who encounter an elephant on their travels. Each attempts to describe the creature to the others based on their sense of touch, but they can’t reach a mutual understanding to agree on what exactly it is in front of them. This leads to accusations of dishonesty, heated tempers, and an all-out brawl.

The world’s best negotiators understand that managing information skillfully is critical. When you’re sitting across the table in any negotiation, everything you do and say tells the other party something about your case. There’s direct information that you hand over willingly – the words coming out your mouth, the supplementary documents, the actual demands and concessions – and then there’s...

In previous blog posts, we’ve explored how effective negotiators balance competition with collaboration to pave the way towards creative, mutually beneficial outcomes. But this knowledge alone is of little use unless you know how to move the negotiation in the right direction to build trust. If things are getting too competitive – say the other party has made a difficult demand – you need to know...