Patent Law

Oldies but Goodies: Negotiate Better with Socrates and the Negotiation Guru

By Les Weinstein, Michael Young, John Leo Wagner, Eric van Ginkel, and Victoria Pynchon

(Socrates image links to a fine article on "Intellectual Cheerfulness" here)

As Dr. Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University has informed us, only seven percent of negotiators seek information that would reveal the other parties' true goals and aspirations when it would be dramatically helpful to do so.

That should make every negotiator stop in their tracks.  It means that 93% of us are not doing what we need to do to dramatically improve our own or our client's negotiation position.  93%.  And it's not like we're failing to do so because we also haven't yet discovered the cure for cancer.  No.  This is easy.  It just needs to be learned and then practiced.  

The Negotiation Guru in a post from last year on How Socrates Would Negotiate, leads with the spot-on observation that we're not asking strategic questions in a way calculated to obtain the information Dr. Thompson tells us we need to get the best deal.  (On a similar topic, see my recent post on How to Negotiate with Irrational People).  For now, an excerpt from the Guru's post and a link to the article itself.

The problem with many negotiators is that they do not direct their questions towards a certain purpose. The art of questioning has to be strategic. To be truly prepared, you need to put some thoughts and time into the type of questions you direct to the other party. Work out the questions with a strategic plan in mind.

Many negotiators believe that by proving inconsistency in the other party is strategic and tactical. They cannot be further from being strategic. When you show that you are trying to provoke them in your questions, you turn on the defensive mode of the other party. You put them on guard and that is not something you want to achieve during a negotiation. As the other party starts to get defensive and closes up to any form of conversation, the negotiation will go nowhere.

The true art is to make the other party open up to you.

Continue reading here.

Upcoming will be ways to integrate these negotiation techniques with your IP settlement negotiations.  Stay tuned!

Full post as published by IP ADR Blog on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).