How to negotiate - perhaps small children have the answer
What can we learn from some famous negotiations?
“The ship has reached the shore”. It was hard not to be moved by the UN negotiator who announced the historic treaty signed by more than 100 countries to protect the ocean environment last weekend. As Rena Lee, UN ambassador for oceans sat in front of the press, you could see the 15 years of on-off discussions on her and her advisors' faces as they finally achieved what they had been striving at for so many years.
It has been a good couple of weeks for dealmakers - not only for Ms Lee’s teambut finally Brexit got ‘ done’ - or at least, the Northern Ireland Protocol reached a breakthrough. The whole country felt as though it breathed a sigh of relief after so many dispiriting years and so much ambiguity.
These landmark agreements will affect all of us and they got me reflecting on the power of good negotiators. All of us use this skill in our professional lives. Although I often feel as though some of my best negotiating happens at home with my children, what have I learnt from more expert dealmakers, especially from some of the stories behind the headlines?
The importance of patience cannot be overestimated. The ocean agreement took over a decade to come to fruition with multiple governments blowing hot and cold at different moments, but a group of dedicated NGOs stood firm and played a long game with the huge number of parties involved
Perhaps it was all those saved fish that made me think of the classic movie Finding Nemo. Whatever the link in my mind, the surprise sale in 2013 of Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney company was a great example of a corporate negotiating with patience. It was completely unexpected at the time, especially as George Lucas controlled the fabulously lucrative Star Wars franchise - an asset many people wanted to take over. Bob Iger, Disney’s charismatic chief executive, led the deal personally and apparently built up a rapport with Lucas over many years.
He spent time reassuring Lucas that it was the right decision to hand over his considerable creative legacy. He even had scripts drafted of the new Star Wars releases he had committed to making so as to show his seriousness about the deal. Iger told the New York Times, “There was a lot of trust built over a lot of time”.
Allowing for the unexpected and often deeply personal, is another important takeaway for me from that Iger playbook. It is vital to remain open minded about what is important to the other side. In the late 1990s, Nike was negotiating a huge deal with the Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo to endorse its products. The negotiations were almost derailed when Ronaldo's agent demanded that Nike make a donation to a children's hospital in Brazil as a condition. At first, Nike was hesitant to agree, but eventually, it relented. This detail, which had nothing to do with the product endorsement itself, helped to build goodwill between Ronaldo, his agent, and Nike. The deal was signed, and the resulting advertising campaign became one of Nike's all time most successful.
For Lucas it was the draft scripts, for Ronaldo it was a hospital, but finding that extra and unexpected motivation enabled those contracts to get signed.
In the same vein, during the early 2000s, the software company Adobe was negotiating with Google to have Adobe's Flash Player pre-installed on Google's Chrome web browser. The inclusion of an unplanned and surprising detail in the negotiation helped the deal get done and paved the way for a successful partnership. The negotiations had been at a standstill until one idea emerged that helped break the deadlock. Adobe agreed to let Google index and display the text contained in Flash files on Google's search engine. They found their motivation.
If the characteristics of these mega deals feel a bit remote from your average business, they shouldn’t. The principles are the same in most negotations.
It also seems to me to be very important not to forget the importance of levity and fun. I have some experience of its usefulness in negotiating.
When Brent and I were starting lastminute.com, one of the most pressing things we had to do was find a travel agency to team up with so could issue airline tickets under their IATA license. It was not easy - we were the whippersnapper upstarts and did not come from a travel background. Eventually we made friends with Apollo Travel in Rotherham who seemed like the perfect fit. However they made sure to test us with a series of long lunches in a Soho restaurant. We were not used to having lunch let alone having lunch with a lot of red wine but we had fun. They could see we were friendly and we understood their culture.
It turns out that in addition to the predictable business book tips, patience, allowing for the unexpected and having fun could all be part of achieving more successful work negotiations. So I now realize that spending time with my two six year olds might be the most useful training for my professional life after all.