Learning Objectives

• 1. To understand the importance of distinction between a meeting and a negotiation meeting

• 2. What are disastrous outcomes and how to manage them

• 3. To understand the art of probing in negotiation

• 4. Evaluate the importance of timing in making offers

• 5. Overview concepts of empathy, trust and irrationality. Study their importance in the context of negotiation

Opening Profile: Starbucks and Kraft Foods

Back in 2013, a three-year negotiation and dispute between Starbucks and Kraft Foods over the distribution of Starbucks packaged coffee in grocery stores was finally resolved. On November 12, 2013, an arbitrator determined that Starbucks had breached its agreement with Kraft and ordered the coffeemaker to pay the food giant $ 2.75 billion.

After negotiating an agreement in 1998, Kraft began selling Starbucks packaged coffee through grocery stores. In 2010, with sales of its packaged coffee reaching about $ 500 million annually, Starbucks offered to buy Kraft out of the contract for $ 750 million. Starbucks wanted greater flexibility to sell the single-serve coffee pods that were hot at the time. The company’s agreement with Kraft limited Starbucks to selling pods that worked only in Kraft’s Tassimo machines.

Kraft objected to the deal termination, but Starbucks broke off the business relationship, nonetheless. Since then, Starbucks’ share of single-serve pod market and grocery-store products has grown significantly. The parties’ dispute over Starbucks’ termination of their partnership moved to arbitration when the two sides were unable to settle it on their own.

The business dispute illustrates how the fluid nature of marketplace trends can cause negotiated business agreements to become undesirable over time. In their original agreement, Kraft and Starbucks would have been wise to agree upon set times for renegotiation, during which they would have had leeway to revisit existing deal terms in the face of changed economic and industry conditions. They could also have negotiated conditions for ending the agreement early, such as cancellation penalties and other forms of compensation.

Sometimes you and your counterpart can draft the agreement on your own. Larger agreements and dispute settlements, on the other hand, typically have legal provisions drafted by a lawyer or a third party.

My name is Ellen Rubinstein. I was left in the baby depository at the Patras Orphanage in March 1958. A note was attached to my body that read, “Her name is Despo. She was born 1/5/1958. She likes to eat.”

How did I find myself from that orphanage to the United States?

Gilbert and Carole Alexander were close friends of my parents. In 1957, Carole lost a daughter at the age of two to cancer. They did not want to risk another birth and decided to adopt. They knew there were many Greek orphans available, and the cost of adopting a “white” American child was too much money for a middle-class family to handle. Somehow, through a Jewish organization and a reference, contact was made with a woman named Rebecca Issachar, who could secure a child for adoption from Greece. Rebecca Issachar was the sister of a Greek-Jewish lawyer, who would guarantee an adoption from Greece at a reasonable price. Her brother Maurice Issachar, active and prominent in Athens, could handle the adoption process with the Greek courts and have the acquired baby flown to New York in just a couple of months of time. The Alexanders hired Rebecca and her brother. Three months later, a baby girl, whom they named Jayne, became part of the Alexander family. ( Jayne and I have remained friends and we have visited each other numerous times over the years.)

After desperately trying for ten years to conceive, my own mother decided to call her friend Carole Alexander to help her make contact with Rebecca Issachar to begin the process of adoption from Greece. Within months, by May 1958, I, too, was adopted with the assistance of Rebecca and her brother Maurice. He, along with several others, was charged with illegal adoption practices in the State of New York one year later. The charges were eventually dismissed because a legal loophole provided that adoption by proxy was considered lawful in the Greek courts.

To be exact, I arrived at LaGuardia airport from Greece on May 26, 1958. Waiting to greet me were my new Jewish family: my parents, both sets of grandparents, my uncle and my aunt.

I am Maria.

On May 13, 1953, ten days after I was born, I was placed in the baby box just outside the orphanage in Patras, Greece. The orphanage became my home for three years until I was adopted by Richard and Ellen Pace of San Diego, California.

Meeting the Paces for the first time was a bit of a spectacle where almost nothing went as planned. Within minutes of meeting me, Ellen had a pretty good idea of the challenges she would face. I was going to be a handful! I had communication issues, food issues, and trust issues. My response to most things directed at me was to scream at the top of my lungs in Greek, much to Ellen’s consternation. But in six months, the communication issues were resolved, and the food issues were beginning to improve. My trust issues were negotiated by keeping everything I owned in plain view. I could finally call something “mine” and it was a very special feeling.

Richard was a history professor and Ellen an executive assistant at a mortgage company. Ellen was a Scandinavian beauty who grew up in a loving home with parents who adored her and nurtured her academic and musical talents in every way. In stark contrast, Richard was a tall, handsome Texan raised by two mentally unstable parents. His father drank too much and was home too little and his mother beat him every day for insignificant infractions. As a high school student, he endured a traumatic shock when his father took his own life in his law office. Such destructive child-rearing left Richard ill-equipped for life as a husband and father.

After the war, Richard and Ellen moved from Bisbee, Arizona, to San Diego, California, where they purchased a home and started planning a family. For years they tried to have a child, but Ellen could not get pregnant. Richard’s patience was exhausted, so he blamed Ellen for their fertility problems. Twelve years later, there was still no baby and they had all but given up hope. A fertility test finally provided the answer. Dad was sterile! With their dream of having a biological child shattered, they looked at adoption as their final chance to have children.

War again? The phenomenon that is as old as humanity and whose pathology has long been uncovered is once again at the centre, yesterday as today. Wars irritate the consciousness of a respective generation, and the necessity of writing about war leads back to antiquity. Even Thucydides, the chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, was shocked by the pathology of human destructiveness. War, in this view, ‘has always’ plunged people into an abyss ‘which is itself and in which no one awaits it, no god, no civitas either, to lead it home to peace’ (Metz, 2012, p. 45).

War needs to be rethought. As many concepts and theories about its existence are ready, many questions remain unanswered (Geis, 2006). But as soon as war breaks into everyday life as a reality and it can no longer be ignored, the questions become more urgent.

Two decades ago, a consensus of modernity was questioned in this context. If possible, so the criticised agreement read, war should be kept completely out of the present household. But, ‘those who no longer wage war […] wrote Herfried Münkler, for example, in view of the wars in the Balkans in 1999, ‘must also no longer think war’ (Münkler, 1999, p. 678).

The ambivalence remains unresolved to this day: war is considered unacceptable, an extreme evil. However, the refusal to think of it as a phenomenon and to outlaw it as a means of war leads to a moral dead end.

The accusation leads the present reflection into a broad field in which a loss of orientation threatens. For all the uncertainties in the field of geopolitics, which cannot be resolved here, a particular cognitive interest stands in the foreground. In which categories is war to be grasped as an object if one wants to understand it? What contribution can we expect from philosophy and hermeneutics if we place war at the centre of reflection – and always presuppose its necessary ostracism in social orders?

The interest is thus less aimed at a normative justification, but rather at a determination of a relationship with indeterminate consequences. One might assume that this task is associated with clear answers. In the simplest terms, war exposes the brute force of man, his bestiality and unreasonableness. The quest for power, booty, honour, territory and possession forms the basic pattern of the terrifying love of war (Hillman, 2005; Münkler, 2002).

Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in the spring of 2014 and the outright invasion of its neighbor in February of 2022, military aggression and the political machinations of Vladimir Putin have dominated discussions on Russia. With tens of thousands of people killed in the conflict thus far, including many women, children, and elderly, a topic such as religion in Russia seems perhaps crass. But, in fact, the Kremlin’s military adventurism and Russian society’s relationship with religious belief share a common critical factor—the question of identity—both Russian and Ukrainian. Additionally, both Russia’s irredentist position vis-à-vis its neighbor to the west and the evolution of its church–state relations towards a relationship of quasiestablishment can be traced back to its Soviet past, from which even after three decades it is still recovering. For during its 70 years in power, the Communist leadership did more than rearranging lines on maps and shuffling populations to and fro; it sought nothing less than the secularization of the population under its control. While in the end that population rose up against the regime, the dismantling of the Soviet system has proven harder than anyone ever expected, and the effects of its secularization policies more profound and complex than Marx, Engels, or Lenin could ever have imagined.

It is this history which makes Russia such an interesting case to apply Peter Berger’s “two-pluralisms” paradigm for the understanding of the relation between modernity and religion. Anyone even slightly familiar with contemporary Russia can attest to the fact that myriad forms of religious beliefs and practices are ubiquitous across Russia today, not just various Orthodox groups but Pentecostals and Baptists alongside Muslims of just about every strand, from the most pacifistic to the most radical. Clearly, Russia today is not a society easily characterized as secular. But this should come as a surprise, because for 70 years the regime had closed off civil society almost in toto and carried out far-reaching policies of forced secularization. Once these policies were liberalized and eventually lifted in the final days of the USSR; however, religion underwent a renaissance, resulting in the complex religious landscape present in Russia today.

The Death Census provides quantitative evidence on deaths in normal times and deaths during the early course of the Famine. This is the statistical spine of the work, and the numbers are potentially of great significance, relating to different parts of the country and different social and economic conditions. But some problems need to be addressed. In the first place, many parish priests were not in the habit of keeping burial registers, which helps explain why so few records are to be found in the archives. Of those that did keep registers, we might wonder if the priests were providing a comprehensive record of burials, even in ordinary times. When famine was ravaging their local communities, it is easy to imagine that overworked clergymen, some themselves weakened by faminerelated disease, might feel they had more urgent tasks than keeping a record of deaths and burials. As we noted, John O’Connell acknowledged as much when first introduced to the idea of a mortality count. We might also wonder if some clergymen failed to understand fully the instructions issued by the Repeal Association. Moreover, some might have been tempted to exaggerate famine mortality to score a political point or to secure financial or food aid for the famished amongst their parishioners. Clearly, the validity of the survey needs to be appraised.

The Death Census

Although the Death Census was conceived originally as a national survey, these plans were quickly scaled back; and, in the end, responses were received from one hundred parishes. This represents one in ten parishes, as there were just over one thousand Catholic parishes in the country in the 1840s. Viewed as a sample of the total this is quite a respectable sampling fraction. A more significant limitation is that the sample is far from being a representative one. A glance back at Map 2.1 confirms that the returns were geographically skewed. The constituent parts of the western archbishopric of Tuam are well covered – helpful as western parishes suffered heavily – and the south and south-west of the country are reasonably well represented. There are scattered returns from the north of Ireland.

Nearly every textbook on the history of economic thought singles out David Ricardo as one of the top scholars in economics. When studying his biographical details, however, students are surprised that only in his final eight years Ricardo was able to work like a ‘normal’ scholar. In all the earlier decades of his career he had to concentrate mainly on his business activities in the noisy and stressful networks of the Stock Exchange in London. In 1786, at the exceptionally early age of fourteen, David Ricardo was already employed there as an assistant to his father Abraham Israel Ricardo. Their collaboration got into difficulties in 1793 when David married Priscilla Ann Wilkinson, a Quaker. David's Jewish parents found this marriage unacceptable and from then on David Ricardo had to continue on the Stock Exchange on his own. In a short time, he became one of the most prosperous and influential dealers there. From 1806 on, his excellent financial standing enabled him to participate in the biddings for the large British loan contracts. Ultimately, he became a co-contractor for seven British loans, the first time in March 1807, and the last time in June 1815, a few days before the Battle of Waterloo.

In 1813 Ricardo had already planned to change his lifestyle, and in 1814 he had bought Gatcombe Park (today the royal estate of Princess Anne), about hundred miles from London. Ricardo's correspondence of 1814 revealed that he preferred the quiet Gatcombe over the noisy Stock Exchange:

When he finally gave up his activities at the Stock Exchange, Ricardo's business successes had made him probably the richest economist in history. Sraffa (1955, 102–4) reports that at the end of his life Ricardo owned about £275,000 of landed estates, £200,000 of sums lent on mortgage, £140,000 of French bonds, and various other items. According to Sraffa the total value must have been between £675,000 and £775,000.

Several English archives in London and Cambridge are still very useful when researching some features of Ricardo's business activities.

It gives me great pleasure to write the foreword to this excellent book by Dr Vimal Babu and Dr Robert Hisrich. I have known both authors and particularly Dr Babu through their extensive academic and research endeavors, as well as their international consulting work.

When I look back on my career, I realize that a person’s potential to solve problems and overcome obstacles is not in itself enough to make a contribution. Rather, to leave a mark, this potential must be harnessed and given expression through effective human behavior. After more than two decades of professional experience, I am convinced that good negotiation is a particularly important aspect of human behavior that can favorably influence the outcomes attained by an individual.

Moreover, it doesn’t matter whether you’re negotiating with a person from a different field or industry, what matters is how you structure your negotiation to meet your needs. This is particularly true for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs have to deal with a variety of different stakeholders in the context of their work. As a result, they have to be adept at negotiating when they collaborate with others and need to accomplish their goals through the involvement, commitment and engagement of others. Entrepreneurs are savvy negotiators when they can persuade, influence and convince people with enhanced trustworthiness, transparency and authenticity in their actions and responses.

There is a lot in this book to recommend to readers. There are chapters on the basics of entrepreneurship, conflict management and communication, as well as the psychological and behavioral dimensions of being an entrepreneur. There are also chapters on negotiation and entrepreneurial ventures that cover topics such as the process of negotiation, considerations for entrepreneurs who are women and how cultural diversity affects how entrepreneurs negotiate. In general, the authors have done well in selecting the most essential aspects of negotiation in the context of entrepreneurship with a focus on evidence-based discussions, real-life examples, case scenarios and thought-provoking questions as well as a rich reference list of readings to follow up with.

It’s clear that both authors have a wealth of knowledge that they can draw up.

This edited volume is published during a time of fundamental uncertainty in our world. Gone are the days when policymakers and researchers could rely on stability to provide explanations of conflict as a consistent, focal reference point in the international system. While the behaviour of states is still influenced by anarchy, the early twenty-first century world is hardly stable. The combination of climate change, forced migration and COVID-19 crisis continues to create a world in flux with the most vulnerable too close to the dangers of life-threatening natural disasters or sea journeys to flee the prospect of physical harm and far removed from the promise of a vaccine.

This unevenness in protection and access, which defines the fragility of life on planet Earth, prompts us to consider the disparities that are the result of new technologies and their applications throughout our world. The main reason we introduce three alternative levels of analysis to those in Waltz’s Man, the State, and War is to explore the changing nature of agency as a counter to structure, identity as a reference in relation to sovereignty and peace as more than the absence of war. Waltz’s images, as well as his assertion as a defensive realist that states can never have enough security, are that conflict may be understood to be caused now and always by human nature, the state and the international system. His third image, the international system, as the privileged level of analysis in a neorealist environment defines the literature in the Western core of international relations.

Learning Objectives

• 1. Understand the role of planning and scripting in negotiation

• 2. Exploring priorities of negotiating parties and utilizing winning strategies

• 3. Review concepts of BATNA and ZOPA

• 4. Importance of offering alternatives and de-anchoring negotiations

• 5. Tactical challenges and neutralization of dirty tricks

Opening Scenario: Simon & Schuster vs Barnes and Noble

When months of negotiation with publishing house Simon & Schuster reached a standoff, Barnes and Noble attempted to gain leverage by significantly reducing its orders of Simon & Schuster titles and engaging in other hardball negotiation tactics, such as refusing to book the publisher’s authors for in-store readings. Given that Barnes and Noble sells about 20 percent of consumer books in the United States, Simon & Schuster editors and their associated agents and writers were “apoplectic” about the bookseller’s decision to use them as a bargaining chip.

As the last major retail bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes and Noble has been pressing publishers to make steep concessions to enable its survival against Amazon.com and other online retailers. The bookstore chain reportedly sought significantly lower wholesale prices for Simon & Schuster’s books and tried to charge the publisher more to display its title in its stores. Simon & Schuster said it simply could not afford to abide by Barnes and Noble’s terms.

The two companies later issued a joint statement saying they had resolved their disagreement and looked forward to jointly promote Simon & Schuster’s books. Though details of the agreement remain unknown, any gains they achieved would be undercut by the profits each side lost during the months of impasse, when Simon & Schuster books were missing from display tables and shelves. Such penalties often end up undercutting both parties to a negotiation.

Planning and Scripting in Negotiation

Planning is an essential strategic entrepreneurial activity. In the case of negotiations involving entrepreneurs with other entrepreneurs and organizations, planning is even more critical. The reason for the claim is that entrepreneurs oversee their own decisions and do not have the brainpower afforded to large corporations. Large corporations can form committees to oversee negotiation planning and have set a standard of procedures for negotiations.