Filmmaker and Phoenix native Steven Spielberg was 13 when, as he tells it, a “local bully gave me nothing but grief all year long. He would knock me down on the grass, or hold my head in the drinking fountain, or push my face in the dirt and give me bloody noses when...
“How much authority should we give our front-line negotiators,” I was recently asked. “They constantly ask for more, but the more we give the more they use. On the other hand, they aren’t taken seriously if we don’t give them enough.” This is a challenging strategic...
You’re the CEO of a company employing a quarter of the city’s employees. Your company provides a significant portion of the city’s tax revenue but neither you nor your company is active in the community’s political affairs. Recently, you decided to expand your...
“We’re going to court,” she told me during a break in my negotiation seminar. “What else can we do? We really want to sell, and my brother-in-law’s `best offer’ for our share of the family business will only give us 10 percent of what it’s worth. Plus, the...
“How can we use our large size and power to get our best deal, yet still avoid alienating smaller companies with whom we want a future relationship? After all, we value our reputation and don’t want them to feel we’re just imposing our terms.” This question, posed by...
Longtime Wall Street lawyer James Freund, counsel in many of the 1980s corporate takeover battles, wrote in his book Smart Negotiating that he almost always wanted to make the first offer on price issues as it sets the “ballpark where the action will...
My name is Marty Latz, and I am the founder of Latz Negotiation Institute, a national negotiation training and consulting company, and ExpertNegotiator, online software that helps individuals more effectively negotiate based on the experts’ research. I am also...
I often am asked what is the most powerful element in a negotiation – and I always answer “leverage.” Bottom line: Your leverage more than anything else increases your ability to accomplish your goals. How? First, let’s be clear, as leverage...
I recently led a seminar for about 200 procurement professionals in which we addressed how to gain leverage when there’s only one entity interested in selling to you. In procurement, this is the sole source problem. Importantly, almost every negotiator has faced a...
