jordan willms on business, entrepreneurship, technology and the web

Negotiating has a bad rap. "Negotiation" conjures up images of a "coke'd out" business man from the 80s aggressively and maliciously winning a deal by screwing the other party at the table.

The reality is that negotiation is much more 'touchy feely' than that. Furthermore, it is not applicable just in the business realm but in every facet of your life.

Take, for instance -- deciding which restaurant to with your friends: Everyone has different positions and underlying interests on what, where and when they would like to eat. Or, perhaps you are negotiating with your spouse to decide if a re-location it doable for both of you.

So, without further delay, here are my top 10 tips for negotiating based on the book Getting To Yes.

1. Plan your negotiations

You need to plan and organize for a negotiation like you would plan for a presentation. After that, throw on the other party's hat to try and determine what statements, questions or issues they will bring to the negotiating table. Once you have these, think through them and plan responses to each of them.

2. Keep the relationship healthy, even if the negotiation isn't.

I love learning. I love reading about new techniques, models, or different ways of thinking which challenge the various preconceptions I have.

One ritual I current have is printing out an article and reading it on the commute home on London's tube. While the rest of the smoldering hot traincar are listening to iPods or sleeping, I am reading, highlighting, making sidebar notes and thinking about how the article applies to anything else in my life.

There are many places on the web where you can find free and powerful knowledge on the web. The following are some of my favourite resources for knowledge and thought leadership.

1. McKinsey Quarterly - They may be consultants who generally write about issues for large corporations, but these guys definitely know how to write good thought leadership on Marketing, Innovation, Economic Studies, and Technology. Most articles are free, but some articles require a McKinsey subscription (which is still well worth it).
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"The leaner you are, the easier it is to change. The more massive an object, the more energy is required to change its direction. It's as true in the business world as it is in the physical world." - 37 Signals

“Competitive Advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks” – McKinsey Quarterly, 8 Business Trends to Watch, Dec 2007

Some buzzwords....

Video conferencing, Telecommuting, Teleconferencing, Virtual Worlds, Social Networking, Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks, Micro blogging, Locational Awareness, Web 2.0, Crowd Sourcing, Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Friend Feed, Content Syndication and RSS Feeds, Visual Application Development, Open Standards Based APIs, Cloud Computing, Facebook Applications. The list goes on.

The list of recently hyped up innovations is long, wide and converging at an increasing rate. But what do they all mean? Where are they taking us?

Today I stumbled on a great find: planhq.com. Planhq promised to help you build a complete and successful business plan, and Turn your ideas into a startup.

So, if you are having a little trouble putting together a business plan, and need a web based wizard interface to finish the job -- Planhq seems to be a great tool. They also have a 30 day trial, which is more than an adequate amount of time to get in, collaborate, and see if the tool can fulfill its value proposition.

Apparently, some people have been struggling to find original (and complete) copies of Swanson's controversial Unwritten Rules of Management. (One of the Personal MBA books.). As such, I've included it below.

Sixty years before Raytheon CEO William Swanson published his Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management, a UCLA engineering professor, published a book called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering. More than half of the rules in Swanson's book were completely plagiarized.

Putting those facts aside, the information provided is still chalk full of management goodness.

1. Learn to say "I don't know." If used when appropriate, it will be used often.
   How many times have you been in meeting with someone who felt compelled to contribute even though her or she obviously did not know what to say? Silence is golden in these circumstances
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