Articles

There are no rules; no laws concerning Gratitude. If you haven’t developed it or don’t use it enough, you won’t get a ticket; be judged guilty; get sent to jail. You won’t lose your job or the respect of your colleagues either…for you’ve made it a rule to say: ‘thank-you’ and everyone seems quite satisfied with that. But let’s not fool ourselves: saying ‘thank-you’ is not the same as being grateful. Not at all.

There is good conflict and then there’s bad conflict. The first one gets resolved; the second one doesn’t. For years, bad conflict ensured good conflict couldn’t earn a dime, never mind a profit. But things are turning around. Figuratively and in real dollars, good conflict is generating hefty returns both in business and at home. And it’s achieving those results with very little initial outlay.

Picture the scene: it’s late in your fiscal year and you’re in the final stages of negotiating a big sale. If you land this one, you will exceed your annual sales target by 25% and your bonus will double. No doubt about it – you want this one.

Then comes the bad news: to do the deal, the client wants a major concession that will erode the profitability of the transaction and set a bad precedent. You thought you had handled this objection earlier and put it aside, but you were wrong. What now?

In this article, I will share some advice that I hope will help address challenges like this.

How Master Negotiators ‘Get Bigger’ From the time of inception, we began to change.  To say that being born; that coming out of baby and childhood was hard work, vastly understates the case, for the hurdles each one of us had to overcome were simply astounding.  Generally however, between the ages of two and three, you [...]

Recently, I had the good fortune to be part of an audience where Peter Hiddema was speaking. He said a number of pithy things which I’ll share with you in future articles, but the one that hit me square between the eyes was that most people, upon making a mistake, feel themselves diminished by it.