A day of rest

Saturday. A day of rest for most.

For MBA students, the 'rest' means 'rest of the assignments and readings that I didn't get to last week'. *Sigh* there are many pages to be read and written today.

First up - a self-review of my negotiation style. As we learned in class, there are two types of negotiations.

1. Win/Lose (Distributive)
2. Everyone Wins or Everyone Loses (Integrative)

The key to winning in the Integrative situation is that the outcome of the negotiation is interdependent. In order to win, you need to know what you want and piece together what the other party needs in order to come to a mutually satisfactory result.

I'm actually torn. I started this paper two weeks ago and have spent a lot of time reflecting on it (some might argue TOO MUCH time). I was a negotiator in a professional capacity for a number of years (media planning, remember?) Negotiating dbertising rates seemes, on the surface, to be a distributive bargaining situation - i.e. I need the cost to be as low as possible and the salesperson wants to make as much money as possible - I Win / They Lose.

As usual, nothing is black and white and as I became more senior within the organization, I was negotiating package deals more and more. This, I think, leans more toward Integrative. Yes, I still want the most value as possible, but there is the flexibility to package up their offer in multiple ways so that we both win.

I thought writing this paper would be a breeze. The fact that it hasn't been signals to me that this is a class in which I learned a lot.