In our last webinar we referred to the work of one of today’s leading business thinkers, Adam Grant, and his book, GIVE AND TAKE. When opening the Op-Ed section of today’s Sunday New York Times, I was interested to see a piece by Dr Grant titled: “Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ is Terrible Advice” What struck me is that his… read more →
How to Make Concessions More Successfully We have shown that those who make concessions readily – givers – can be the least successful negotiators but they can also be the most successful ones. The difference is how you make those concessions: are you a passive Giver who never looks out for himself or are you an active Giver who helps… read more →
How to Make Giving a Route to Success We saw that Adam Grant of the Wharton School wrote in his book Give and Takeabout how takers are the most successful engineers. That that may be no surprise, the next result of Grant’s research may be. He found that the engineers with the lowest productivity are givers, but the ones with… read more →
Mobus Takeaways from Recent Conferences: ISM and ATD The Mobus team is back in LA after a successful round of conferences. In Indianapolis, we exhibited our services at the International Institute for Supply Management (ISM) conference. Alan Mullaly, former CEO of Ford Motor Company, spoke about how much he appreciated his suppliers. While heading up Boeing and later Ford,… read more →
The core of negotiation is how do you compromise, or what’s called the process of give and take. And specifically, what kind of balance should you strike between giving and taking? To put that question in a broader context, negotiating has a competitive side and a cooperative side. Some people may seem hyper-competitive, but the very reason they are negotiating… read more →
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” Might have been the title of an eye-opening workshop at last week’s national convention. The actual title was: Is the Risk in Your Supply Chain Getting Ready to Bite You in the …….? (The Key Steps for Identifying and Mitigating Supply Chain Risks.) Two leaders in the field, Carrie Ericson, VP… read more →
Supply chain professionals, eager to keep up with the latest trends in the market would do well to attend the ISM (Institute of Supply Chain Management) annual conference. Coupled with a large trade show, attendees can see the latest services being offered to supply chain organizations, as well as the most recent trends in the procurement world. This year’s annual… read more →
What’s the secret to negotiating success? First, we will take a look at the conventional approach. Then we’re going to see what new research has to say. As the conventional approach says, even experienced negotiators fall into certain traps: They make inopportune remarks, revealing information that undermines their position. The first rule of negotiating is “Shut up!” To make the… read more →
The manifesto for the “win-win” school of “principled negotiation” is Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Their approach is a stark contrast to the zero-sum technique many think of as defining good business negotiating. They had a lot of good insights, but they went way overboard. While twenty-first-century negotiating is indeed collaborative,… read more →
Starbucks and United Airlines Negotiation Some years ago, a United Airlines passenger survey made one point crystal clear: Airplane coffee was horrible. The survey caught the eye of a sales executive at Starbucks, then a medium-sized company with about six hundred stores and no international presence. Seeking to raise their profile, Starbucks asked United to go where no airline had… read more →
10 Insider Tips On Car Sales Negotiations Having both a background in negotiation training and experience working as a car salesman for a prominent Southern California Acura dealership, I’ve got something of a unique perspective on the world of car sales. Outside of the standard discounts, I’d estimate a swing of about $3,000 dollars on contentiously negotiated sales for new… read more →
Pitfalls of Predicting: Don’t Lock Yourself In Based on Your Confident Predictions We emphasize how much negotiating these days is about relationships, rather than a simple one-time purchase of a commodity. Whether the relationship is something as straightforward as training and support for software or something as complicated as a strategic partnership, the two sides make assumptions—predictions—about what will happen… read more →
Take the Advice of Shark Tank’s Daymond John: Aim Higher to Do Better What role do expectations play in business success in general, and success at the bargaining table in particular? The story of Shark Tank’s Daymond John is instructive. Raised by a single mom in Brooklyn and Queens, and burdened with dyslexia, he overcame significant hurdles to captain… read more →
Since I’ve spent the last 30 years teaching negotiating skills, I’ve been asked several times to rate Donald Trump’s abilities in this area. My immediate response has been since I’ve never actually seen Trump himself practicing the “art of the deal” it’s hard to say. I’ve heard back: Well, c’mon, there must be something you can say about Trump as… read more →
Adam Grant on Originality Adam Grant is someone we follow. Here at Mobus Creative Negotiating we’ve incorporated some ideas from his book “Give and Take” into our negotiation seminars. Grant has a new book out “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.” It relates to one of our key concepts: creativity. Negotiating great deals—deals that work for you and the other party… read more →
Since joining the marketing team here at Mobus Inc, I’ve often heard it said that people negotiate everyday – in their relationships, at work, with family, etc. As Frank explains, “Negotiating is just people getting together to make an agreement.” I instinctively know this to be true, and yet I hadn’t experienced any moments of “Ah, this is a negotiation”… read more →
Organizations spend a lot of time and resources to create efficient systems for the production and delivery of goods and services. But those systems can be upended overnight by disruptive players in the market. Every year, CNBC publishes their list of the top 50 disruptive companies. The article, “Meet the 2015 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies” lists the top 50 disrupters… read more →
We at Mobus Creative Negotiating sing the praises of behavioral economics that shows that we are not Mr. Spock: emotions do affect our decisions. As the January 17, 2016 New York Times article by Jennifer Kahn, “The Happiness Code,” explains “We cash checks quickly but drag our feet paying credit-card bills, no matter the financial cost, because cashing a… read more →
Recent Comments