The Negotiation Book: Your Definitive Guide To Successful Negotiating

2.1. MAKING SENSE OF NEGOTIATION SO THAT WE CAN ALL BENEFIT FROM IT

To make sense of how different approaches to negotiation could serve us, and because of the unique challenges we all have, I developed a model called the Negotiation Clock Face.

The definitions used on the right-hand side of the clock face represent competitive negotiations based on those involved distrib-uting a finite amount of value between them. This means that those on the right are tougher to negotiate in nature: what I get, you lose and what you get, I lose. So the process is going to be positional and potentially confrontational. The pie is only so big and it's simply a case of how it gets shared out.

Figure 2.1. The clock face.

Those definitions on the left-hand side of the clock face are based on more cooperation where collaborative negotiations lead to the creation of incremental value (creating a bigger pie). The definitions used here reflect those negotiations which are more commonly promoted in business-to-business situations, but not always. Between 6 and 12 o'clock there tends to be a broader range of issues used as part of building agreements.

However, these definitions are only a guide in that many negotiations move from one area to another in the same meeting. For example, many partnership-based negotiations work well during the process, building ideas and opportunities that result in the agreement ...