Beyond Dealmaking: Five Steps to Negotiating Profitable Relationships

Introduction

If the recent economic collapse has taught us anything, it is that the pursuit of immediate gain with no attention to the long-term consequences is a recipe for financial disaster. The gains accumulated were primarily on paper, but the losses have been painfully real. The problem was that far too few people were looking beyond the deal to see whether it would result in a positive outcome. Mortgage brokers got paid bonuses for signing off on loans, regardless of whether those loans could ever be repaid. What did it matter if the borrower, who had been passed off onto some other institution, defaulted down the road? The answer became agonizingly clear when banks and mortgage companies began to sink under unpaid debts, when borrowers ...