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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Pilgrimage to Warren Buffet’s Omaha

Pilgrimage to Warren Buffet’s Omaha A Hedge Fund Manager’s Dispatches from Inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting By Jeff Matthews

The Big Idea
They come to Omaha by the tens of thousands, flocking to an annual meeting that has become legendary for investors, businesspeople, and fans of one of the savviest capitalists on the planet. They come to eat steak, buy furniture at a discount, and bask in the brilliance of value investor extraordinaire Warren Buffet.

Hedge fund founder, financial blogger, and professional skeptic Jeff Matthews got his own highly-coveted ticket to the 2007 and 2008 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meetings that covered the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years and held only for shareholders and their guests, and proceeded to post reports on his blog, offering tempting glimpses into the much-discussed meeting. This well-written, easy-to-read book is an expanded version of Jeff Matthews’ original essay.


Why You Need This Book
Matthews delivers a full-length account of his adventures at this infamous financial hoedown, and answers many questions, including:

Does Buffett's famed penny-pinching cripple his companies?

Why does Buffet – a bridge partner and best friend of Bill Gates – not own any technology stocks?

How does the extremely rational Buffett square his well-known social progressiveness with his lily-white audience of investors?

Is Buffet really an "Oracle"?
What information, insights, and ideas do the meeting's attendees pick up, and how do they put this information to use in their own investments?

Will Berkshire-Hathaway survive his death?

Matthews also applies his financial acumen to harvesting potent lessons from his experiences that you can use as you survey the investment field, from finding how the world’s greatest investor evaluates not only businesses but the people who run them, to the importance of “just reading and thinking” and the value of having a smart, cynical partner.



Why Omaha?
As great as his track record is, and as wise as his pearls of wisdom are, Warren Buffett’s investment philosophy does seem narrow-minded and old-fashioned. He focuses on a handful of industries he knows well – insurance, home furnishings, business services, and anything else that fits within his famed “circle of competence.”

And the rest he leaves alone.

Like pay phones in a wireless world, Buffett seems increasingly antiquated – even irrelevant – to more flexible, wide-ranging investors who have grown up in a highly connected, technologically independent world.

Of course, neither Buffett nor his “quality shareholders” express any remorse over missing Google or Apple or even Microsoft, outside his circle of competence as those investments are. After all, while many investors have had better years than Warren Buffett, and some may have had better decades, Buffett’s track record over the long haul is, quite literally, unsurpassed.


The Newspaper Generation
Almost every person sitting around, waiting for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting to begin, is reading a newspaper. It is an open, relaxed, inviting, approachable kind of posture.

Blackberry readers, on the other hand, tend to be hunched over, head bowed, reading the text. It is a closed, tense, uninviting, not-very-approachable posture.

It’s no wonder that Warren Buffett reportedly makes it a point never to trade stocks when he’s in New York City.



The Oracle of Omaha
If there is one word that describes Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” it is not oracular. Nor is it prophetic, divinatory, clairvoyant, extrasensory, or telepathic. While he may be known as “the Oracle of Omaha,” there is in truth absolutely nothing oracular about him.

Yet it is true that in May 1969, near the peak of that era’s bull market, he wrote to the investors in his partnership that “opportunities for investment… have virtually disappeared,” closed his partnership, and kept only two stocks: a retailer that he later sold, and an old-line textile company named Berkshire Hathaway, which he decided to keep.

And it is true that in October 1974, after the Dow Jones Industrial Average had collapsed and with the American economy mired in gasoline shortages and price controls, Buffett made perhaps the most unequivocally bullish – and correct – utterance on the subject of investing ever recorded by any business publication when he told Forbes magazine: “Now is the time to invest and get rich.”


Budding Buffetts: Where to Begin
The question is, “What should I do to become a great investor?”, and it is asked for the first time by an earnest 17-year old from San Francisco who says he is attending his tenth consecutive meeting.

Buffett’s emphatic answer is simple and straightforward: “Read everything you can,” he says with finality.

Buffett’s reading habits did not stop when he was 10. He still reads literally thousands of financial statements and annual reports each year – as he has done for each of the last 50 or more years that he’s been investing.

Of course there is more to what has made Buffett a great investor than this. But it all began by reading.

Each time the question is asked, Buffett makes it clear he is not sure where the world is going and what will happen now, but things are about as good as they’ll ever get. “Corporate profits as a percent of gross domestic product have increased from 4 to 6 percent to 8 percent.”

“You have lots of businesses earning 20 percent on tangible equity in a world where corporate bonds are yielding 4 to 5 percent. That’s astonishing. If you read a book, it would say it’s not possible.” Buffett holds his palms wide apart to illustrate the high level of profits. “Namely labor.”

Buffett also discusses the “extraordinary” profits now prevailing in the banks and the financial sector. “We’ve invested in and owned banks. If 20 years ago you’d asked me whether it was possible, in a world of 4.75 percent bonds, that countless banks would earn 20 percent-plus returns on tangible equity, I’d have said no.

Munger, Buffett’s business partner and friend, follows with his own observation, one that will prove, in retrospect, at one unremarkable yet quite profound. “A lot of profits are not in manufacturing or retailing,” he says somberly,” but in financial sectors.

There’s been a huge flow of profits to banks and investment banks. Buffett finishes with a coda for the times: “Corporate America is living in the best of all worlds – and history has shown this is not sustainable.


Secrets in Plain Sight
The “secrets” to Warren Buffet’s success are hidden in plain sight. He talks about his methods freely with anybody who asks. Buffett gives perhaps his best advice to a teacher at an Orlando community college who asks what she should be teaching her students about financial matters.

“How would you treat it?” Buffett asks rhetorically. “You’d read the owner’s manual five times; you’d change the oil twice as often as you do now… Buffett’s own most noteworthy habits – frugality and rationality – have certainly followed him throughout his life. And they have made him, for the moment, the richest human being in the world.


The “Yes” Won’t Change
Buffett stripped down concepts ranging from investing for beginners to nuclear proliferation to their bare essence:

WHAT IT MEANS TO INVEST. “What we’re doing in an investment is we’re laying out money now to get more money back in the future.”

“We want a business with a durable competitive advantage, management we trust, at a price that we understand.”

WHY HE DOESN’T HIRE AUDITORS WHEN HE BUYS A BUSINESS. “If you think the auditors know more about making an acquisition than you do, you ought to take up accounting and let the auditors run the business.”

ON EGREGIOUS CORPORATE COMPENSATION. “The idea that you have to pay some guy a $10 million retention bonus to keep him around – I don’t know of a CEO in America that wouldn’t gladly do the job at half the price or a quarter of the price.”

HOW TO CHANGE EGREGIOUS CORPORATE COMPENSATION. “If the half dozen largest institutions would simply withhold their votes and issue a short statement why they’re doing it, it would work. Big shots don’t like to get embarrassed.”

WHAT A SMALL INVESTOR SHOULD DO TO START INVESTING. “Put it all in a low-cost index fund, like Vanguard.”

I can tell people ‘yes,’ and that won’t change. The $6.5 billion will be available whether a nuclear bomb goes off in New York City, or whether Ben Bernanke runs off with Paris Hilton.”

WHY THE DERIVATIVES MARKET GOT OUT OF HAND. “You had to read 750,000 pages to evaluate one security, and that was madness.”

WHEN REGULATION FAILED. “We had this organization called OFHEO [Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight] whose sole purpose was to oversee two companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac… They had 200 people going to work at nine every morning, whose sole job was to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they had two of the biggest financial scams ever, so they were two for two.”

WHY MASS TRANSIT ISN’T USED. “The American public doesn’t like mass transit. I used to be involved in bus companies, and you can make all kinds of rational arguments to people about mass transit. But one person per car seems to be an enormously popular method of moving around.”

WHY THE CHINA OLYMPICS SHOULDN’T BE BOYCOTTED. WHY NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IS STILL A THREAT. You’ve got 6.5 billion people in the world, so there are close to twice as many people that wish ill on other people as you had when the population was 3 million.”

THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN LIFE. You provide warmth and food, and they’re learning about the world… and you don’t get any rewind button.”

The Berkshire shareholder meeting is more than a pilgrimage for 31,000 investors: it’s big business here in Omaha.

Will the phone at Berkshire still ring when Warren Buffett is no longer there to pick it up?

A lot of other people around Omaha certainly hope so.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service. Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States. For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Free Book Summary : Negotiate Like the Pros



Free Book Summary : Negotiate Like the Pros
A Top Sports Negotiator’s Lessons for Making Deals, Building Relationships, and Getting What You Want

Author: Kenneth L. Shropshire
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-07-154831-1
208 pages

The Big Idea

Do you want to be a better negotiator? Do you want to negotiate with the same success and confidence that you see among the professionals who handle teams, leagues, athletes – the sort of people you see in the sports pages and on ESPN – on a daily basis? In Negotiate Like the Pros, author Kenneth L. Shropshire explores powerful negotiating strategies, and teaches you how to use them to score big in any negotiation.

Prepare With Passion

To begin, you’ll have to understand both how to prepare and why taking the time to do so can be the most valuable transformation you can make in your negotiating life. That viewpoint dominates in sports, and it should be just as prevalent in business dealings.

Establish the road map to get from the beginning of the negotiation to the end result that you desire. Your counterpart will of course want to establish an agenda that will drive the conversation in a direction most favorable to him or her.

Begin with the basics - preparation puts you in the best possible position to win, whatever winning might be in a given setting.

Be prepared for negative circumstances as well as for positive ones. Your counterpart may know that single piece of information you thought he lacked. He may actually have another option that you did not foresee.

Stick with Your Style

Understand your most comfortable bargaining style as well as how to use it to your advantage rather than fretting about a style that does not come easily to you. In sports, we most often express this as “playing within yourself.”

It is vital to know who you are and who your opponent is in terms of style and, maybe more importantly, not to try to be someone you are not. Discover your strengths and base your preparation strategy on them. Be honest with yourself about what kind of negotiator you are, what you’re good at, and what you are not so good at.

Make the negotiation environment as favorable as possible to your style and your comfort level. Once you have a grasp of your style, you want to set the stage for the negotiation so that it is advantageous to you and detrimental to your counterpart.

Set Goals and Aim High

It is important to establish goals and make them a regular part of your preparation process. It is not unusual for sports teams to begin a season aiming for an event or for the Olympics by setting goals for the number and types of medals they will win. It is clear that the higher your goals are and the more support you have for them, the more successful you are likely to be.

Know your walk-away point. What is the minimum you will accept? Be as firm as you can about your walk-away point as you enter the negotiation. The best way to determine your walk-away point is to focus on your options.

What is the number, quantity, price, or whatever the metric is that you think, given the full impact of all of the information available, will close the deal fairly? This is the target, the bull’s-eye.

How should you establish goals? You do so with reference points, indicators that point you in the direction you want to go.

Seek Leverage

When establishing leverage, honesty is essential. Anyone can have success with a single deceitful act – maybe even several successes. But once your credibility is damaged, it is nearly impossible to get it back.

Leverage is fleeting. Circumstances can change, and you can lose it. How the parties view the future value of a deal is a fleeting concept too, but it comes up frequently in sports when the endorsement value of an unproven athlete needs to be determined.

Leverage is often supported, too, by the element of consistency. People want the same standard applied to them that was applied to others. People want to be perceived as being reasonable and want to act consistently for that reason.

Focus on Relationships and Interests

Go beyond the monetary side of deals and focus your attention on the other benefits that flow from them. For an athlete, such a side benefit may be a supportive relationship with the hometown crowd, as opposed to moving to a new city as a free agent for more money. In business, this benefit may be likened to a long-term relationship with a vendor or boss.

Those most successful in courting relationships take the time and make the effort to understand the interests of their clients. In most deals, this means that you need to comprehend what there is in a relationship with a counterpart that is important beyond the dollars and cents of the deal.

In creating your game plan, leave adequate time for thinking about relationships. The value of those relationships will be individual as well as cultural. If you are negotiating in another country, or with someone from a different country, be aware of the special issues that might be presented by virtue of this diversity.

Often those interests, the real reasons why someone wants to get a deal done, are non-monetary. The two are intertwined, as you cannot always get to a party’s interests unless you extend the effort to develop a relationship.

Fully contemplate the importance of current and future negotiations. Make sure, too, that you understand your counterpart’s true interest in closing the deal.

Negotiate Like a Pro

Winning certainly has a different meaning in every negotiation. Achieving that desired outcome is most likely to occur when we use all of the skills that we possess in a carefully prepared manner. Be prepared.

The magic of success really comes when you are able to practice with the same intensity that you use when you play, but are also able to play the game with the same relatively relaxed frame of mind that you have in practice. That is the challenge.

So where do we end up? With the lesson so many of us heard from our parents: do the best you can. You will know you are doing that when you combine all of the elements laid out in this book. Your bets get even better if your preparation is done at the highest level. You are not doing the best you can if you have not fully prepared.

To read the full 12-page summary of the book, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Top Ten Reasons Why Coaches Need Book Summaries

1. You don't have time to read 4 books a month
You sell your services. You coach your customers. You even have your own blogs. And you have time to read books?

No need to do critical reading of an entire book. We take out the effort of weeding through the 300 or so pages getting the key concepts by doing it for you. We then email to you the book summary in an easy-to-read format.

You save more than 1,200 hours of reading per year. With only 30 minutes of reading per book summary, you spend the time applying new ideas rather than spending time reading them. People will envy your knowledge while wondering where you find the time to read all the books you can discuss.

2. Focus only on winning ideas
In the U.S. alone, more than 2,000 new business books are released every year. There might be just one winning idea or two among the thousands - your key to getting your customers (or YOU!) ahead of the competition, to make more profit, or generate more sales. How do you look for that gold nugget of wisdom?

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Like it or not, your readers and customers set high expectations on you. You are their coach, right?

How can you help them make more profits? Increase their revenues? You need to be constantly exposed to new business ideas, concepts and strategies. You have to be up to date with the latest in business thinking -- and be aware of and anticipate changes in the competitive business environment.

Business in today's world is constantly evolving. A buzzword, new trend or idea emerges as soon as another one fades. You don't want to be left behind. With globalization, and the Internet, our world is getting smaller. Events are moving faster.

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You need to constantly research on the net for fresh ideas. You are on the lookout for interesting articles for your readers. You subscribe to a lot of industry news sites and ezines just to be up to date. The search to keep your reader's attention focused on your blog never ends.

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Knowledge is power and you need the essential knowledge from BusinessSummaries to make a big difference in your professional and yes, even your personal life.

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6. Sharpen your skills
Business gurus and their books provide us with timely advice and guidelines. They help your business move in the right direction.
Since the ideas are presented to you in summary format, it is easier to implement ASAP! Spend more time putting them into action rather than sitting down reading on them.

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As part of your normal subscription of BusinessSummaries Pro, you also receive for free a second series of book summaries called "Inside The Guru Mind".

The summaries you receive form BusinessSummaries Pro are normally from books that discuss business, economics, leadership, human resource and many other topics written by a lot of business gurus like Tom Peters and Peter Drucker.

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For more information, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Let Authors Owen and Brooks Teach You How Net Promoter Discipline Can Change Your Company for the Better!

Miami, Florida, March 9, 2009—BusinessSummaries.com releases its new business book "Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business", by Richard Owen and Laura L. Brooks, Ph.D., Jossey-Bass Books, 2009. Subscribers may now access PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, Audio, Video and Mindmap formats of “Answering the Ultimate Question”, and enjoy the book summary anytime, anywhere.

Miami, Florida, March 9, 2009—BusinessSummaries.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites for business book summaries, today releases the abridged version of one of the business bestsellers "Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business", by Richard Owen and Laura L. Brooks, Ph.D., Jossey-Bass Books, 2009. This executive book summary is now accessible to subscribers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and Mindmap formats.

In this book, authors Richard Owen and Laura Brooks discuss how — based on a variety of real case studies — Net Promoter discipline can be embedded in organizations of all types and industries. The Net Promoter Score is a fast, accurate, quantitative measure whose purpose is to gauge customers' real loyalty to a company, establish a baseline and effectively track changes going forward. This discipline was co-developed by Owen, Brooks and fellow author Fred Reichheld, and was first introduced and elaborated on in Reichheld’s 2006 book The Ultimate Question.

Answering the Ultimate Question takes the topic a few steps further by re-introducing the topic and building on the link between Net Promoter Scores and business growth and profitability. When combined with an operational discipline, Net Promoter represents a potential win-win for businesses and their customers. The Net Promoter Score offers a near-real-time metric that is closely coupled and correlated with precipitating actions. Instead of looking in the rear view mirror of customer satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter will help effect real, positive change every day in and for those organizations in which it is applied correctly.

Drawing on illustrative case-study findings from the more companies for which the authors have helped to put Customer Experience Management and Net Promoter disciplines in place, this book is designed to help apply Net Promoter correctly, and foster growth and profitability in any organization.

Every week, subscribers enjoy business book summaries of today’s business bestsellers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and mindmap formats. The latest versions of the book summaries are all available online upon subscription to BusinessSummaries.com.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Satisfaction Versus Loyalty



Customer satisfaction scores for the majority of large corporations have not historically shown significant improvement. Although annual reports highlight the importance of customers (usually accompanied by glossy phoos and glowing tributes), many CEOs, when interviewed, have expressed a lack of confidence in their customer satisfaction efforts or a disregard for the programs that exist. Billions of dollars a year are spent on customer satisfaction surveys and market research, and outcomes seldom seem to result in any real changes to the business. Consider your own experiences as a consumer. When you fill in a customer satisfaction survey, do you believe that something will happen as a result?

Research can be valuable for the organization, but viewing your investment in customer loyalty as a research project is setting your efforts up for failure. We unfortunately continue to witness the stereotypical annual customer satisfaction report, presented to a suspicious executive team that invests just enough time to argue its validity before consigning it to the corporate bookshelf for another year. This is the classic outcome of a program that is driven from the needs of research rather than the needs of the business.

It’s worth clarifying the difference between satisfaction and loyalty. Simply put, satisfied customers still defect. The fact is that satisfaction is a standard that had great meaning in the postwar industrial growth of Europe and the United States but falls short against the standards of global hypercompetition today. Worse, it provides a false standard thatundermines the impact that leadership could obtain byapplying a higher standard to their businesses.

If you turn on your TV and see a company claiming to have 90 percent customer satisfaction, what does it tell you? It certainly indicates that the company’s basic products or services seem to work as advertised. It might also suggest the company is able to handle inevitable problems in a reasonable and timely fashion. You might even suppose that this business’ help desk phones are not clogged with customers calling in to complain about the company. But does any of this sound like a basis for competitive advantage or an engine for growth?

Net Promoter programs establish a higher standard than simple satisfaction, one worth holding your business to. There is no false sense of comfort, just a real focus on the drivers of growth and competitive advantage.

Dell, the world’s largest direct-sale computer manufacturer, runs a global customer experience program and understands the distinction between satisfaction and true loyalty. Dick Hunter, who heads the global consumer support program, told us:

The thing I was struck by is that we were all hung up about customer satisfaction, and I frankly didn’t think that was the right goal. It’s one thing to have a customer call us with a problem. We solve their problem, and they’re satisfied with the fact that we solved the problem. It’s an entirely different matter if, after a customer calls us, they’re much more loyal to us and say, “I’m going to buy from Dell forever because I really get great service and that’s part of the overall experience that is great and I couldn’t imagine buying from anybody else.” There’s a huge difference between those two. And my view was that we had to go toward loyalty and move away from satisfaction.

We couldn’t agree more.

To access the full book summary of "Answering the Ultimate Question," please visit BusinessSummaries.com.



Monday, March 2, 2009

Negotiate Like the Pros

A Top Sports Negotiator’s Lessons for Making Deals, Building Relationships, and Getting What You Want by Kenneth L. Shropshire

The Big Idea
Do you want to negotiate with the same success and confidence that you see among the professionals who handle teams, leagues, athletes – the sort of people you see in the sports pages and on ESPN – on a daily basis?

Negotiate Like the Pros tells the stories behind some of the most notable, complex, and lucrative sports deals of all time. A world-class negotiator in his own right, Kenneth L. Shropshire uses those stories to explore powerful negotiating strategies, and teaches you how to use them to score big in any negotiation.


Why You Need This Book
In Negotiate Like the Pros, Shropshire tells the stories behind some of the most sensational sports deals of all time and extracts powerful lessons on the skills you need to master to become a top-notch dealmaker.

This book offers an approach that challenges you to mentally analyze your own negotiating techniques, style, relationship-building strategies, and powers of persuasion. If you want to become stellar at deal making, building relationships, persuasion, and even leadership, then this book is for you – whether you are a sports fan or not.


Prepare With Passion
To begin, you’ll have to focus on the most important element in any negotiation: preparation. You’ll understand both how to prepare and why taking the time to do so can be the most valuable transformation you can make in your negotiating life.

That viewpoint dominates in sports, and it should be just as prevalent in business dealings. There are many coaching admonitions that dwell on the phrase “just do your job.”

CULTURAL, GENDER, AND RACIAL DIFFERENCES
In any global negotiation, you must take the time to learn and understand the negotiating style of the culture of your negotiating partner. Just as you wouldn’t like to be stereotyped as an “American-style” negotiator, those in other cultures also do not want to be stereotyped.

AGENDA SETTING
An important part of planning any detailed negotiation is to establish the road map to get from the beginning of the negotiation to the end result that you desire.

CONTEMPLATING THE APPROACH
Another key piece of the preparation phase is determining if there are any steps you can take to move your position forward that will be viewed positively by the decision maker on the other side.

According to successful coach John Wooden: “I believe there is nothing wrong with the other fellow being better than you are if you’ve prepared and are functioning in the way you’ve tried to prepare. Preparation puts you in the best possible position to win, whatever winning might be in a given setting.

ESTABLISHING CREDIBILITY
Credibility is important on two levels: your personal credibility and the credibility of the information you bring to the table. Even your counterpart will respect you more if you are credible.

WORST-CASE SCENARIO
You must be prepared for negative circumstances as well as for positive ones. Your counterpart may know that single piece of information you thought he lacked. Spend some time thinking about that worst-case scenario and how you will respond to it.


Stick with Your Style
This chapter guides you through both understanding your most comfortable bargaining style as well as how to use it to your advantage rather than fretting about a style that does not come easily to you. In sports, we most often express this as “playing within yourself.”

REVEL IN YOUR STYLE
Discover your strengths and base your preparation strategy on them. It is easy to be yourself for the long haul; imitating another style is a formula for potential failure. Be yourself, and assert that style to the fullest.

As much as you can control it, you want the negotiation environment to be as favorable as possible to your style and your comfort level. Once you have a grasp of your style, you want to set the stage for the negotiation so that it is advantageous to you and detrimental to your counterpart.


Set Goals and Aim High
This chapter relays the value of establishing goals and making them a regular part of your preparation process. It is not unusual for sports teams to begin a season aiming for an event or for the Olympics by setting goals for the number and types of medals they will win.

THE POWER OF GOALS
There is a psychology to getting successful negotiation results that is underused: visualizing the end result. The concept of visualization is valuable for everybody. You are more likely to accomplish goals if you actually have them and then picture them in your mind. You are certainly more likely to achieve success if you have goals than if you don’t have them.

GOALS, TARGETS, AND WALK-AWAY POINTS
If in the course of the negotiation you can deliver your plea and it passes the chuckle test (that is, no one laughs out loud at the suggestion), that is probably your goal position.

You should also know your walk-away point. Be as firm as you can about your walk-away point as you enter the negotiation. The target requires a high level of precision. What is the number, quantity, price, or whatever the metric is that you think, given the full impact of all of the information available, will close the deal fairly? This is the target, the bull’s-eye.

REFERENCE POINTS
Saying that you need to have a goal, target, and walk-away point is easy enough, but how should you establish goals? You do so with reference points, indicators that point you in the direction you want to go.


Seek Leverage
This chapter explores how lying and negotiating somehow seem to go hand in hand. It helps you push back against lying while focusing on the topic that is lied about most: tales told to create leverage. In sports and non-sports negotiations, the most prevalent lie is about how interested potential bidders really are in your goods or services.

LYING
When establishing leverage, honesty is essential. Anyone can have success with a single deceitful act – maybe even several successes. Caution: In your preparation, develop your game plan regarding competing offers carefully. But, of course, if you lie and get away with it, you may have substantially improved your position, unless your lie is uncovered.

LEVERAGE VIA TIMING
There are two issues related to timing and leverage that are important. The first is that leverage is fleeting. The other timing issue is how the parties view the future value of a deal.

LEVERAGE FROM CONSISTENCY
Leverage is often supported, too, by the element of consistency. People want the same standard applied to them that was applied to others. People want to be perceived as being reasonable and want to act consistently for that reason. This is especially the case where there is public information on similar previous deals.


Focus on Relationships and Interests
This chapter takes you beyond the monetary side of deals and focuses your attention on the other benefits that flow from them. For an athlete, such a side benefit may be a supportive relationship with the hometown crowd, as opposed to moving to a new city as a free agent for more money. In business, this benefit may be likened to a long-term relationship with a vendor or boss.

VALUING RELATIONSHIPS
The best negotiators incorporate a focus on relationships into their initial preparation as well as during the negotiation itself.

INTERESTS
Those most successful in courting relationships take the time and make the effort to understand the interests of their clients. In most deals, this means that you need to comprehend what there is in a relationship with a counterpart that is important beyond the dollars and cents of the deal.

ALIGNING INTERESTS
In creating your game plan, leave adequate time for thinking about relationships. The value of those relationships will be individual as well as cultural. If you are negotiating in another country, or with someone from a different country, be aware of the special issues that might be presented by virtue of this diversity.

Closely coupled with relationships is the importance of understanding the interests of the other side and those associated with them.

Often those interests, the real reasons why someone wants to get a deal done, are non-monetary. The two are intertwined, as you cannot always get to a party’s interests unless you extend the effort to develop a relationship.


RELATIONSHIPS IMPACTING FUTURE NEGOTIATIONS
Fully contemplate the importance of current and future negotiations. Make sure, too, that you understand your counterpart’s true interest in closing the deal. To be a successful negotiator, you must embrace the negotiating process and be fully engaged in seeking the best deal your circumstances allow.


Negotiate Like a Pro
Winning certainly has a different meaning in every negotiation. Achieving that desired outcome is most likely to occur when we use all of the skills that we possess in a carefully prepared manner.

The important point is that you must be prepared. Do the “practice” phase as thoroughly as possible.

Your bets get even better if your preparation is done at the highest level.

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