How Culture Changes the Rules at the Negotiation Table.
In Today's "Post"-Global World, Success at the Negotiation Table Requires More Than Just Bargaining Skill.
This year, I am celebrating the anniversary of the publication of my first book, “Bargaining Across Borders: How to Negotiate Business Anywhere in the World”. FYI, I never liked that title very much, and fought like hell with the publisher to change it, which they refused to do. I just felt that the word “bargaining” was too limiting when it came to a discussion about something as big as global negotiating, and I feared that the subhead promised more than what one book could deliver. They were probably right to keep the title as is, at least from a marketing perspective (first-time authors rarely win editorial arguments with publishers), the proof being my anniversary celebration these many years later, and the many books sold over those years. Thanks to all of you who’ve read “Bargaining…” and for those of you who are negotiating business around the world who haven’t yet read it, I promise it is even more relevant today than when I first wrote it. Get yourself a copy. After all, it even won the National Library Association’s “Best New Business Book of the Year” when it was first published! ‘Nuff said.
Since its publication, the world, of course, has changed, evolving from the global world where we found ourselves having to suddenly negotiate across cultures, to negotiating in a “post”-global world, where cultural differences PLUS other, post-global, forces were also affecting our success at the negotiation table. So, in celebration of the book’s publication anniversary, I thought this would be a good time to re-post an article I wrote a while back about how to negotiate in this now very complicated post-global (I refer to it in the article as “quantum”) matrix of forces that affect even the most skilled business negotiators among us.
What I mean by quantum forces is that it’s no longer enough to know about the culture that your colleagues on the other side of the negotiation table represent. That’s now a given requirement, and any global business negotiator worth their salt should be intimately familiar with all the important cultural differences that can affect a negotiation, as my book states, “anywhere in the world”. However, at today’s “post”-global negotiation table, you can’t be sure that individuals represent traditional cultural behaviors, and assuming they will might more likely result in a bad case of cultural stereotyping at the least, and an unsuccessful negotiation, at worse.
How to negotiate these new, quantum realities? You need a road map. Let’s start with the article, right here. Full disclosure: I am a mathematically-challenged theoretical physics nerd, fascinated by all things big-bangish, Einsteinian and Quantum mind-blowing. Maybe you are, too. Maybe not. Take a deep breath, and jump in anyway…you won’t regret it. Here you go:
Just a few years ago, it seemed as if professionals in the cross-cultural consulting field were raising their glasses in celebration. After years of spreading the gospel, the word was out and accepted: Working, studying or just plain traveling beyond one’s borders required an expectation for and an understanding of behaviors that would be different from those encountered at home. In short, culture mattered. And in just about every area of human activity that crossed cultures, it seemed that cultural differences had to be factored into the equation as a new and vital consideration for success. This, of course, included the process of negotiating, for business or otherwise. It was no longer enough to rely solely on studies of effective negotiation behaviors, for once we negotiate across cultures, cultural differences would certainly affect the gospel of good and bad negotiating behaviors. Recognizing the different ways that different cultures negotiated became an important global skill.
But in those few intervening years, globalization has so challenged the relevance of culture that its role is again being questioned, albeit for new and different reasons. If we are all speaking English, more or less, does culture matter? If we are all doing business by a global set of rules, more or less, does culture matter? If global corporate culture is in fact more powerful than local national culture, does culture matter? Predictably, the old questions regarding cross-cultural negotiations have also resurfaced. Do cultural differences really matter when negotiating in a world already so globally interconnected? Do cultural differences really affect the processes of negotiations? Has the mantra of multiculturalism receded to just a dull background drone in the face of what really goes on at the global negotiating table - and in the face of political pushback on the concept itself?
From Newton to Einstein
Let’s get in a time machine and travel not too far back to a world where
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