Chapter 4

Prenegotiations Planning

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

—Benjamin Franklin

It is widely recognized that systematic planning and preparation are critical elements of successful business negotiations. Experienced executives devote substantial time to these functions before sitting down at the negotiating table. As a general rule, the more complex the transaction to be negotiated, the longer the planning period. The preparatory phase is also lengthier for international transactions than for domestic ones because of the difficulty of gathering all necessary preliminary information.

The most common business negotiation mistakes, shown in Figure 4.1, reflect insufficient preparation. A majority of these errors can ...

Get Practical Solutions to Global Business Negotiations now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.