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Being Tiger’s Agent or Negotiating in St.Gallen
Blogs Jay - 04-06-10
At the height of the Cuban missile crisis and the World in the verge of a Superpower Nuclear showdown, Attorney General Robert Kennedy is supposed to have had a masterstroke. He suggested that the Americans respond to Soviet leader Khruschev’s October 26 letter which demanded a U.S. promise to not invade Cuba in return for removal of Russian missiles from the Island - and ignore the October 27 message which had also demanded the removal of missiles from Turkey. Yet another very old negotiating technique I came across during the second of the Negotiations Workshops during our HSG MBA.
Saving the world might not come high on the job requirements of most newly minted MBA graduates. Perhaps it may be more important to teach how not to create ‘cutting edge financial instruments’ which can be comparable in wealth destruction to nuclear bombs. But it indeed remains that hardnosed negotiation skills would be among the most required whatever the future career.
The first session we had was with Prof. Nello Gaspardo and the topic was Negotiating across cultures.
By definition, in the workshop, many national and cultural templates had to be built up, some had to be broken down and some had to be made fun or parodied to get the message across. Among the most interesting insights was regarding how power was signaled in a relationship by the party having the bigger leverage. While a Migros in Switzerland may host their suppliers in habitable but uncomfortable rooms, the more powerful party in the Arab world might just turn up late, at their convenience.
Among the more controversial and necessarily over-simplified generalizations were that while the Protestant rooted cultures were present oriented, the Catholic rooted cultures tended to be present oriented and the Orthodox oriented cultures tended to be past oriented. Prof. Gaspardo, while reminding who the Soccer World Cup winners were at present, would admit that “we Italians are able to fight when we have the same opinion.” While he may not be contested on his observation that English is the only European language with an I, German poets and French essayists may not be made happy by his remark that “when you train a dog, you can’t use French, you use German.” Also, according to him, ignoring women is only less fatal compared to not talking with proud entrepreneurs about their companies which they are proud of and both indeed is pretty well known to those who had made the bad judgment of doing so.
The second session was a two day workshop on Negotiation skills by two of our own Alumni. Oldrik Verloop, who was a Corporate Strategist at Shell and is now in the Swiss bank Wegelin and Micheal Neidow, who was a Consultant at McKinsey before he joined Corporate Development in Hilti AG, both belong to the HSG MBA batch of 2007. A very intensive two days in which we did workshops ranging from a real-life inspired tenant-houseowner exercise to pretending to be Tiger Woods’s agent to doing business simulated RFQ-Quotation negotiation in the Home Appliances sector. And yes, there were some smirk-laden questions from some smartass MBA students who wanted to sleep in on a Sunday, regarding what specifically to negotiate for Mr.Woods.
What was especially enlightening was to do a formal evaluation of your own negotiation styles and learn about the situations where the default behavior would be an enabler or a hindrance. For instance, a relationship oriented, compromise seeking man like yours truly could get thrashed by a highly competitive alpha male during a transactional negotiation while the default behavior does enable relationship building and conflict avoidance.
Jay is an Engineer and an MBA Candidate for 2010 at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. More about him and by him at his homepage.