Smart partners negotiate fair deals because they know that lopsided deals are fragile and that most value accumulates in long term trust relationships.

You can tell a lot about a potential partner by their opening offer.

Negotiation Tips

-You want leverage.<br/>-The person who creates more value has leverage.<br/>-The person who can walk away has leverage.<br/>-The person who is irreplaceable has leverage.<br/>-The person who has a second option has leverage.<br/>-The person who knows the numbers has leverage.<br/>-The person who everyone likes and wants to work with has leverage.<br/>-The person who asks for more, gets more.

And finally, most negotiations are not one-time affairs. The person people continue to like at the end of this negotiation is in a better position for the next one.

• Finding a good deal, the right business, the right people, the right investors, or whatever is just like dating. You must go to the market and talk to a lot of people, make a lot of offers, counteroffers, negotiate, reject, and accept.

Small deals rely on promises and contracts. Big deals rely on alignment and trust.

In a nutshell, I was looking for meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I quickly learned that the best way to do that was to have great partnerships with great people. To me, great partnerships come from sharing common values and interests, having similar approaches to pursuing them, and being reasonable with, and having consideration for, each other. At the same time, partners must be willing to hold each other to high standards and work through their disagreements. The main test of a great partnership is not whether the partners ever disagree — people in all healthy relationships disagree — but whether they can bring their disagreements to the surface and get through them well. Having clear processes for resolving disagreements efficiently and clearly is essential for business partnerships, marriages, and all other forms of partnership

Moral of the story: Make offers.

A firm bargain and a right reckoning make long friends.

Because I was viewed as being fair, I was able to build long-term partnerships.

The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of reciprocal concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.

The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.

The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.

...the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.

Focus more on making the pie bigger than on exactly how to slice it so that you or anyone else gets the biggest piece. The best negotiations are the ones with someone in which I say, “You should take more,” and they argue back, “No you should take more!” People who operate this way with each other make the relationship better and the pie bigger — and both benefit in the long run.

The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace.