华盛顿大学福斯特商学院助理院长Dan Poston谈国际商务谈判策略与经验

My name is Dan Poston. I work for the University of Washington and Foster School of Business at this point, but before I came back and worked with a business school, I spent 15 years as an international business lawyer, did a lot of negotiations between companies in different countries, and also I was part of three different companies operating in Japan and China, so I come with some experience in this area. In terms of the most successful steps in a negotiation, far and away, the most important thing to begin with is to make sure that you know the other people, the people in the discussion and the negotiation. You want to know where they're coming from, you want to know something about their company, if it's a company, what is the business environment that they're working in, what are their objectives in having this negotiation in the first place? So you take a long time to get to know them.

You also need to know what your objectives are. What are you trying to accomplish by having this negotiation in the long term? What are satisfactory solutions? You need to go in with those ideas, not just one concept, but perhaps some alternative concepts that would all work. I was the lawyer for a Japanese corporation that wanted to negotiate with a Chinese government corporation to create a joint venture. Their objective was to deliver the equipment they would use in manufacturing some down-comfortors and down-fabric products, and they were looking to the Chinese corporation to provide the material and the down products, the raw materials to use. In this negotiation, it took us five years to get to know each other well enough to build a relationship with the Chinese government corporation. This was a huge step. It was the first time they were doing an international joint venture in a completely different area than anything else that had been done before. So it took a very long time and a lot of meetings between the parties to build up a sense of trust. Once they had that trust, after all that long-term investigation and discussion, it only took about six months to put the whole deal together and start the production.

I think the personal qualities that make a good negotiator first and foremost is empathy, and that is being able to understand where the other people are coming from. I think also being able to put yourself in the position of the other people. If you can understand where they're coming from, what their objectives are, you imagine yourself being on the opposite side of the table talking to you. When you speak and when you propose things, you think, how would I take that if that was me on the other side of the table? So that's what I'd be looking for and trying to find out that understanding of both sides of the discussion.

There's several things that can cause a negotiation to fail. Certainly, one of the biggest problems is if somebody is not authentic in the discussion, and especially if they misrepresent anything, if there's some idea that they propose or some concept that they have that just can't be delivered on, that's going to be a real big problem. It's not unusual in a discussion and a negotiation for a business transaction internationally to propose to deliver some kind of product. In this case, the organization was delivering some betting for material, and they delivered some samples before the negotiation that were very impressive samples. And then later when the initial inspection was made on the quality of the material, it was nothing near the quality of the samples. So after all the discussions about putting the business deal together, just that one mistake was enough for the other side to say, that's it, we don't want to go ahead with this at all.

Differences in culture can create a great deal of problems. It's not unusual at all for some cultures who have an easy time saying no, and for another culture to have a very hard time saying no. And I have gone to negotiations, I've gone to several negotiations in China, where my American clients were determined to get a deal, and they talked, and they talked, and they did most of the talking, and the Chinese contingent constantly said, oh, that sounds wonderful, that's a really good idea. They sound really promising. There's some terrific things here to work on. At the end of the day, there was no yes, and there was also no no. And so the American contingent came home and thought things went quite well. They thought they just sent a document back over and get a signature, but in fact, we'd never made a deal, because the Chinese contingent was never happy with anything that was being discussed.

I will often talk to the people. I have a hard time quite often with American clients who want to do all the talking. They walk in and they're first objective is to help the other side hear all about them and how wonderful they are and what great business people they are and all the great opportunities they will have to work with them. And it's much wiser, I think, to go in and start off by saying, let me hear more about you. What are you all about? What are you doing? Give the other party a chance to explain their strengths, what they're looking for. Actually, the longer you sit and listen, the more they quite often tell you more things that you need to know about being successful in the negotiation.