Negotiation Lessons from the World’s Most Interesting Man
One of the side benefits of what I do is that I get to work with really interesting people!
J. M. is an executive with a manufacturing company selling products in ninety-three countries. A true man of the world, he’s comfortable in any setting, be it a boardroom in Amsterdam, a fish market in Taipei, or a dirt-floored hole-in-the-wall café outside Cuernavaca, Mexico. J. M. is a real man’s man, and wherever he goes, he knows everyone. He asks the office manager about her pet parrot, and he always has a couple of foreign coins for the security guard’s kid. You’d be just as likely to find him at the racetrack or a bullfight as in an office building. He’s something of a Hemingway in modern business.
The business problem was that many countries have their own set of specifications for manufacturing, set up by their own regulating agencies. Obviously, a company can’t manufacture to ninety-three different sets of specs and remain profitable.
So the challenge is simple enough. Our technicians need to negotiate with the government regulators in each country and get them to accept our set of specs as the standard. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that our technicians (like most others) are not natural negotiators. J. M. wanted an approach that would apply to the negotiations they were seeing on the ground every day, but it had to be down-to-earth, noncomplex, not academic.
This clearly was a situation that required a customized approach, and a key question was whether to do this virtually or in person. It was found that face-to-face interaction not only increases comprehension, it builds trust. "There's no substitute," J. M. said. "Driving travel costs down to zero is a false economy.” Then he went wandering about the workplace, saying he needed to “talk to some folks.” I, of course, was happy to let him mingle with engineers and marketing execs and work his special brand of magic.
After interviews with people in each of the marketing segments in several locations, we created a program combining new content with elements of The Effective Negotiator, Negotiating When Relationships Matter, and even the sales negotiation program How to Negotiate High-Profit Sales. The focus of all the programs was to enable an engineer to become a master of persuasion and influence.
The moment that J. M., the head of HR, and I looked at the finished content curriculum, we knew we had a winner! After a successful pilot and final tweaking, we rolled out the program in eight locations in Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Asia. It was a resounding success. Eighteen countries accepted our specs the first week after training!
When I looked around for J. M. to give him the happy results, he was nowhere to be found. And I rejoice in the knowledge that while the programs were being delivered, his people were negotiating more effectively, and the company was making more money, J. M. was probably watching the thoroughbreds thunder down the home stretch at Keeneland on an Indian summer afternoon, enjoying the horses, good bourbon, and burgoo.
Carry-on!
Bob