Negotiation plays a key role in your business activities. Filip Hron, managing director of International Negotiation Consultants (INC) shares his tips on how to achieve your goals by asking the right questions.
So you have a negotiation coming up? Perhaps this is a salary negotiation, an annual price negotiation for an ongoing contract, or negotiating the sale of your business. You realise the importance of this negotiation and therefore spend some time up-front thinking about what you really want. That is time well spent!
This is never clearer than in war and battle. We expect the strong army to defeat the weak army. Yet, as is beautifully articulated in a terrific article by Ivan Arreguin-Toft titled How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict, some 30 per cent of the time the weaker army will win a war.
Of course, it is not really the case that weaker armies win wars; for if they were truly the weaker army they would have lost. Instead, we are surprised when our judgement of which army was stronger is proved incorrect. When the weak win wars it is normally said that they “had a better strategy”. The army with the better strategy is simply the one who’s General has done a better job of accounting for all the variables at play when formulating his strategy.
