1.1 Introduction to Negotiation

Hello and welcome to the Art of Negotiation, which is part of the Business Communications for Career Readiness specialization, and made available on Coursera by the University of California Irvine Extension. My name is Sue Robbins and I will be facilitating this course. I am an instructor for the university extension program and the owner of Ascend Training Solutions, a company that specializes in instructional design, curriculum development, and facilitation of employee training and leadership development programs. I’m delighted to be presenting this course for you, as I enjoy the process of negotiation. Long ago when I first began my career, I found it challenging, anxiety producing, and even sometimes frightening to be responsible for a business negotiation. Over time, however, I’ve learned to enjoy the relationship building aspects of negotiation, and the fantastic feeling of creating an agreement that is mutually beneficial and may be even better than either party anticipated at the outset. This course encourages a principled negotiation approach. The principled approach and its variations have been written about extensively, with the best known authorities on the topic being Roger Fischer and William Ury. They’re the authors of Getting to Yes. In this approach to negotiation, each participant holds the goal to getting what he or she wants, but also strives to ensure that the negotiation counterpart also gets what he or she wants. In principled negotiation, the goal is not to get a greater portion of the benefit than your counterpart, to beat your counterpart, or to take away any of your counterpart’s power or influence. The goal is to create an agreement in which both parties feel as if they walked away with a good deal. And that they got everything, perhaps even more than they wanted. And that they would gladly do business together again. There are, of course, other approaches to negotiation. And I will explain those as well. This course focuses on the process and factors that affect the progression and style of negotiation taken, as well as planning and preparation that will ensure you maximize your influence and power in the negotiation. Module 1 focuses on defining and describing negotiation, how it differs from selling, and several different perspectives on negotiation. In Module 2, I will address various factors that influence how a negotiation proceeds, as well as what we mean by value and fairness and the role emotions play in a negotiation. Module 3 is about you and your counterpart as people, people involved in a negotiation. I will discuss traits and behaviors of successful negotiations and working with counterparts who espouse a different approach to negotiation than you. In Module 4, I will explain how to plan and prepare for your negotiation as well as the development of a framework agreement and a best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or a BATNA. You will also be able to see interviews with some professional negotiators, who will give us their perspectives on some of these concepts. Specific negotiation stances or tactics are not the subject of this course. There are a myriad of books on the topic of negotiation tactics, and I recommend that you read some of the resources provided to you, provided in this course to learn specific tactics and how to respond to them. For our purposes, however, the focus will be on how to prepare, understand your counterparts so that you can predict which tactics he or she will, will use, and present yourself an offer, and your offer in the most beneficial light. I encourage you to work through the course in the order provided at a pace that is best for you. Also, there are some excellent texts provided in the resources section of the course. The course focuses on United States based negotiation practice. I encourage non-US based participants to share their perspective on the concepts presented. Our objectives for Module 1 are to understand the basics of principled negotiation, learn some alternatives to principled negotiation, be able to characterize the difference between negotiation and selling, learn from some negotiation experts how they approach negotiation. Let’s get started.