Negotiation Tactics

For this assignment, I watched 3 different videos that each discussed negotiation techniques. The first video I watched was William Ury’s video “The walk from “no” to “yes”. One fact that I took away from this video was the story at the beginning of his speech regarding the 3 brothers who were trying to figure out how to divide up 17 camels between themselves. What I took from this short story was how to reach a mutual benefit between the 3 brothers in how to divide up the camels. Much like the story people need to step back from situations and find the “18^th” camel in and come to mutual grounds when it comes to a negotiation.

            Stephen Stuart gave the next video I watched and he discussed the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). In the video he said the best thing to remember is to not bargain over your position. Any negotiation should produce a wise agreement, it should be efficient and it should improve the relationship between parties, not damage them. A wise agreement is one which meets the legitimate interests of each side to the extent possible and resolves conflicting interests. Basically this entire speech revolves around the BATNA and one key fact he pointed out was that a party should not accept a worse resolution than it’s BATNA and that care should be taken to make sure that deals are accurately valued, taking all considerations into account.     

            Margaret Neale gave the next video I watched and she talked about getting what you want in a negotiation.  In the video she covered the basic outline of negotiations, one thing I took away from the video was that you have information that your counterparts don’t have, and that is what you should bring to the table. If they had all your information, they wouldn’t need you but because you have unique information and they have unique information, value is created between yourself and the people you are negotiating with.