How Successful Were You in This Negotiation? How Do You Know You Were Successful?
Introduction
In this essay, I will state the process of my personal thought in our final negotiation. Firstly, I will present my outcomes in this negotiation and what tactics I have used to claim value and the type of strategies to maximize the joint points on this negotiation. Secondly, I will explain how I cope with the complicated relationship among all these five parties and the way about getting team coalition. Last but not least, I will demonstrate the cognitive bias and emotions related to this negotiation.
Main Body
1、How successful were you in this negotiation? How do you know you were successful?
In one negotiation, if we intend to succeed, we have to try our best to obtain the optimal outcome, in a word, target and prevent the opponent realizing their target to the greatest extent.
As the representative of the Aussie Air Shareholders (AAS), my interest was to strive for the highest interest for all shareholders of Aussie Air. Due to Equilibrium Investment (EI) was the major shareholder of Aussie Air, as the manager of EI, I am willing to increase the price of Aussie Air shares. Thus, I need confirm obtain a negotiation agreement with Down Under Air (DUA) in order to prevent the price of shares decreasing and advance the interests of shareholders. The shareholders have decided they will not accept if the price of share is lower than $5.25 per share, in other words, this point will be my walk away point. On the other hand, the shareholders prefer to see that we can keep jobs of Aussie Air as many as possible and maintain more jobs can contribute to decline the possible of threatened sickout. At the same time, this is the best opportunity that I can build my reputation among both my financial peers and potential clients.
In order to achieve my goals, I need confirm DUA could make an agreement with me. Absolutely, DUA also has their own target and wants to get more profits. Thus, I emphasized on getting a win-win situation. In this negotiation, I firstly tried to understand the ideal price what they prefer. Then I compared this price with my walk away point and matched two price to come up with a rational price between them. Certainly, this rational price was a more favorable for my party. After several bargain, I finally set the price as $5.75 per share successfully. It is a pretty ideal price for my party and can provide us more profits.
2、How did you claim value in this negotiation? What tactics did you use to advance your interests?
In this negotiation, for value claiming, concession making strategy must be needed. At first, I have to set an appropriate room that can allow myself to make concessions and then I developed a rationale for each concession. When I can assure my concessions were reciprocated, I can control the last price of agreement. For instance, I came up with $7 per share and representative of DUA certainly refused this price but this price gave me a huge room to make concessions.
On the other hand, the hardball tactics was my main tactic. The hardball tactics include amounts of methods, such as good cop/bad cop, highball/lowball, bogey, snow job and so on. In this case, bogey tactic played the important role. For pretending how many shares they intended to buy is an important issue, I asked and confirmed how many percentage of shares DUA wanted to obtain over and over again. And I specially dispute with them about how many percentages are reasonable. I successfully transferred their attention to the amounts of shares and leaded them to being afraid of decrease the price. Although tactic is likely to anger other party or generate conflict, I still used it to improve my profits successfully.
3、How did you create value in this negotiation? How did you maximize the joint gains?
Value creation often need to satisfy mutually advantageous outcomes of all parties in order to avoid to occur conflict. According Neale and Bazerman, an agreement would make any party better off without decreasing the outcomes to any other party as pareto efficient.
In order to balance the interests of all parties as soon as possible, I studied interests, BATNA and Reservation point of each party in advance. After taking out pre-tabulated file which was made before the negotiation, the demand of the parties be clear at a glance, so we carried on the effective communication and discuss. Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers (MESO) has many benefits, such as anchoring the negotiation, gathering information from the other side about relative priorities, help other negotiators who may be unskilled and controlling the process of the negotiation. First of all, parties which have the similar interests need to reach a consensus, such as the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) and Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) should have a consistent on the percentage of jobs kept and DUA and I reach a consensus on the price of share.