There are two reasons why performance measures don’t guarantee performance. Read below for the first reason. This article is part 1 of a three-part series. In part two, I will outline the second reason, and in part 3 I will offer a solution. What follows is an excerpt...
Trust is the core quality of any collaborative partnership. Companies with high degrees of trust can spend their energies leveraging each other’s core strengths and creating value, rather than on compliance, enforcement, or worse, fighting metaphorical fires as a...
Raise your hand if you can handle one more thing on your plate right now. No one can. It seems like everyone spends their time putting out one fire after another. Today more than ever before, negotiations happen in pieces and on the fly. You might quickly shoot off an...
When the negotiation team gets mediocre deal results, their bosses blame the economy, or the other company, or the weather for bad results. The real problem is that the negotiation team did not take the negotiation process seriously enough to systematically plan for...
Imagine a mid-level manger in the global commodities group got an email from the operations manager from a plant that read something like this. “Bob, I called ABC supplier to see where our XYZ parts are, and they told me that we’ll get them in 3 weeks. They said the...
I am happy to announce I was on the Sales Reinvented Podcast to discuss the power of open-ended questions in your negotiations. In this podcast I define negotiation and give 3 do’s and don’ts in any negotiation. I also answer the important questions of how negotiation...
Have you ever wondered how to get real innovation from your customer/supplier relationship? I explain in this video how the Department of Energy and the Kaiser-Hill joint venture used outcome and incentive-based contracting principles to drive innovation....
Contract language is boring. The contract professional’s goals are to develop an agreement that reflects the intention of the relationship and a document that is clear, precise and exact. This video offers advice on 4 points that will help contract professionals...
When negotiators get mediocre results their boss blames the economy, the weather, or the other company, when the real problem is that no one took the negotiation process seriously enough to systematically prepare for it. In my experience, there are ten common mistakes...
During my mentoring, I was co-negotiation a 15 year contract. The stakeholder leadership wanted a early termination agreement in the agreement with a fixed fee. They wanted a buy-out in the agreement for early termination. Watch the video and tell me what you think....
