Here’s a scenario: You have been in a business negotiation for several days. There are ten items on the agenda and you have been reaching agreement on each of them, albeit slowly. You come to the tenth item and you can’t reach an agreement. What do you do?
• Do you agree to disagree on the tenth item but declare you have a deal?
• Do you call the whole negotiation off?
• Do you agree to negotiate on the tenth item at a later date?
This is a common occurrence since there will be items that are harder to agree on than others. But should you allow hard issues, or issues where you are deadlocked, derail the entire negotiation? Perhaps the best answer is that it depends on what it is and how big an issue it really is.
If you can’t agree on an item now that will keep most certainly keep coming up in the future, then you should continue to negotiate until you reach agreement. This is especially important if you are in the process of negotiating a joint venture. As is reported in “The Rules of Alliance,” a BusinessWeek article about an upcoming alliance between Intel and GE, joint ventures have to respond to compatible, mutually-agreed objectives. The article says:
“But there is a powerful temptation for two companies that are strongly attracted to each other to rush things along, like teenagers with hormones raging. ‘You get impatient. You want to get moving. You’re excited,’ says Louis Burns, vice-president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Health Group [...] Often during negotiations, Burns notes, if two sides agree on nine points and are stuck on the 10th, they’ll let the 10th one slide and agree to revisit it down the line, if need be. But for joint ventures, he warns, ‘the problem is that the 10th point will come and bite you in the backside later.’”
Read the article here: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/aug2010/ca20100826_270920.htm
If you are discussing something that does not have the ability to impact the entire scope of the agreement, or that is deemed to be minor, then you should agree to disagree on the one issue, and revisit it later.
What are your thoughts? Please share your experiences in the comments.
