The Death of the Hammer
As years passed and the world turned, Effective Negotiating pretty much ran in place. Taken to its logical extreme, the Karrass Way was a blunt instrument to hammer the other side: This is my price, and here’s why it’s a great price, and here are five reasons you’ll be in big trouble if you don’t pay my price. The program was geared to a zero-sum environment. I win, you lose.
But over the last decade, globalization has innovated—and disrupted—every business in unprecedented ways. While the marketplace is more competitive than ever, it’s also more intensely cooperative. In particular, as Daniel Pink points out in To Sell Is Human,search engines and social media have created information parity, a level playing field for buyers and sellers. As a result, it’s much harder these days to bluff or game your way to an advantage. In complex negotiations within long-term business relationships, trust matters. The old, cutthroat tactics can backfire—badly.
Price is no longer king. We are living in an age where buyers have limitless needs and sellers an elastic array of assets (or vice versa); the challenge is to “customize” the deal and find the optimal match. Twenty-first-century negotiators may need to consider Scope of Work or guaranteed gross margin or quality control, or a dozen other factors. They may need to explore the potential for joint advertising or joint technology or even joint project management. Price-driven haggling won’t get them where they need to go.
In short, a new approach is needed. In our next newsletter, I’ll look at Harvard’s “win-win” alternative to Karrass. I’ll also tell you about the all-important ingredient that both of them were missing—that makes Mobus Creative Negotiating the evolutionary next step.
