Why Negotiate?

Negotiation is an alternative to several other decision-making alternatives.

Other methods of decision-making include persuasion, instruction, coercion, litigation, mediation and arbitration. Each has applicability to a variety of different scenarios and is more suited to some situations than others. Negotiation is appropriate when we need to secure the consent of others in order to get what we want. We would have no need to negotiate if their consent was not needed and could possibly have used instruction or coercion instead. The world has changed over the last 30 years or so and negotiation has taken over from previous more authoritarian methods of making decisions. "Take it or leave it" approaches no longer work in open societies and our success as business people nowadays depends very largely on our ability to negotiate. The accumulation of assets on a personal level and the standard of living afforded to ourselves and our families is without doubt highly correlated to our expertise as a negotiator. Whether we like it or not we negotiate several times each day and in most instances do not even realise that we are negotiating.

Successful negotiators are successful people. And successful negotiators aren't born - they are trained.