Good morning, Team! Aloha from Kaua’i!

The Michel ‘ohana is making the trek to enjoy a few days of tropical bliss before we nestle into the Winter months.

I had the pleasure of hearing a very experienced negotiator/instructor on Monday. Jack Kaine spoke to my Vistage group and provided a 5 day Stanford course on negotiation in a 3 hour time slot. His story is compelling as his father was a literal horse trader and brought Jack with to witness deal making and would talk to him before and after the deals were done. Clearly, he paid attention.

He was throwing around salient points so fast that I got writer’s cramp. (see below)

He’s a little old school so we didn’t get power points or laminated handouts…he says his clients have done his advertising for him.

We went through an exercise to help us improve our understanding of how to ADD value rather than bargain or create win-lose scenarios. It really is rooted in asking more questions and seeking to understand before seeking to be understood.

I will try to recount the top things he said so you can digest, think about and work to implement these nuggets he has picked up and refined over his extensive years in business.

Out of the gate he started rattling off points important enough to start writing

•Bargaining is competitive and focuses on who’s right
•Negotiating focuses on what’s right

•Any agreement that favors one party won’t last
•Words don’t have meaning, people do
•Negotiation is all about control
•There’s always a better deal with all parties involved
•Never want anything so bad you have to have it
•First you educate, then you negotiate
•win-win = mutual gain, not equal gain
•Persistence is to negotiation as carbon is to steel

Five rules of negotiation
•The person who speaks first sets the tone
•The person who asks the most questions determines the content and direction
•Never argue! No one ever won an argument. Always question for understanding
•People do things for their reasons, not yours
•The person who listens the most will have the greatest effect on the outcome

More guidelines:
-Use promises, not threats
-Time is power, use it
-Do not negotiate with yourself
-Prepare
-Slow down
-Have the courage to set goals high
-Do not underestimate your power
-Ask good questions…”what” not “why” questions
-Business goes where it is invited, it only stays where it is appreciated
and my favorite…
-Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice

This training triggered another phrase for me, “work smarter, not harder”. My dad worked his ass off his entire life and imprinted a socially acceptable but painful characteristic in each of his kids. I feel bad for our spouses. I can say that he was a poor negotiator. He trusted people way too much and ended up with three times used up trucks (tired iron we used to call it), stock in silly shit like fertilizer made from carp grown in barrels by a guy named Ole and fire truck start up companies. Seriously. Get rich quick schemes don’t work and as hard as he worked, he should have been able to keep a little more.

If he would have recognized one of his weaknesses was an inability to negotiate a deal, whether it was buying equipment, a business or selling his product…we all may have prospered just a little more and saved our nose from being ground to the nubbins before we started growing facial hair.

My hope is that you, as leaders, take these points to heart and find the balance where you value who you are, what you do and achieve success in productivity instead of just being insanely busy from dawn to dusk.

Have a blessed weekend!