The Power To Negotiate

The power to negotiate. Bringing together a start-up has many perils as is evidence by the large percentage that fail before they ever get to be a start-up. The facts about this increasingly important phenomenon in commerce tells many stories of failed friendships, broken marriages, lost opportunities and wondrous successes. Today’s installment comes from with all the worn and usual caveats of concealing the names because the tale is not done – so don’t burn your bridges – that is just yet. Don’t for a second think that my current venture of Changed Life Ltd is the sole source for this tale. I’ll be the first to admit that I suffer from being a serial dreamer, planner, entrepreneur, and learner with an alpha dog personality. So my life is littered with events that this article is being drawn. I’d go so far and bring in the three failed marriages and the many, all too many failed romances as other attempts to form that more perfect union – a start-up.

The first feature of the start-up is the state of those coming into its formation. The roles they stake out as those they claim to fill. It’s the in the birth of the idea is where the tragedy begins.

It’s more like an evil seed.

The conversation starts – really it’s the first round of the power negotiations – we all begin to generate ideas about how the world – defined vaguely as people we know or know about – need this or need that. In the case of the charter school I started it was how parent’s needed more input into how their children where being taught or in the case of my many romances it was how the roles between modern lovers need more openness. In the case of the charter school what I was really saying was that I discounted the value of any of my kid’s teachers to teach my kids how I wanted them to learn – so I would take that over by starting my own school. The lover thing – I’ve gotten that wrong so many times I’ve simply lost track of what I’m actually saying.

You get the idea. The ideas flow and the conversation continues.

Somewhere down this path – could be a month or few days or even that day – one of you sees clearly how one of their deep and abiding dreams can be given birth. I’ll call this person the thought leader. Leadership is not a once and forever title its simply speaks to a contributor or motivation to move from wandering to that person that points – lets go this way.

Over time this feature – of lets go this way – becomes a major bone of contention. It is not always so easy to see what way or whose making the call for course correction.

In business, information is power. Information about an industry or rival creates competitive advantage. Information about a deal or contract Increases bargaining power. Information creates asymmetry: one party has insight the other party lacks. In law and business, favorable information asymmetries mean more money–lower costs, better terms, higher profits. Unfavorable asymmetries portend lower profits… or worse. So what we have in both business and other endeavorers between people is the constant balancing act of what’s to be known and what’s to be valued.

Before I go any further I need to situate my role in this descriptive article. The following position places the writer – researcher/observer – in different states of behavior. What is going to be difficult for me is to stay true or authentic within the role I select. Maybe if you decide to comment you will tell me how well or poorly I pull off my role.

Symmetrically Descriptive 

A researcher might be interested solely in describing the behavior of all the parties, without having any interest whatsoever in prescribing how they should behave.

• How do real people, with all their idiosyncrasies and bounded rationalities, actually behave?
• How do they learn?
• How is trust created?
• How is it destroyed?

This is the primary interest of storytellers, historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and positive economists. Not a player in the mix is an obvious feature as well. 

Symmetrically Prescriptive

Game theorists – most applied mathematicians and mathematical economists – examine what ultra smart, impeccably rational; super-people should do in competitive, interactive situations. They are not interested in the way erring folks like you and me actually behave, but in how we should behave if we were smarter, thought harder, were more consistent, were all-knowing.

Asymmetrically Prescriptive/Descriptive

The researcher in this area is concerned with studying and understanding the behavior of real people in real conflict situations, so that he can better advice one party about how it should behave in order to achieve its best-expected outcome. This type of analysis is prescriptive from the vantage point of one party and descriptive from the points of view of the competing parties.

Externally Prescriptive or Descriptive

One might investigate how in fact intervener would behave in the negotiations processes. What are the similarities and differences in the descriptive behaviors of these people?

There’s that word again – “asymmetrical”. I’ll claim the asymmetrical role because my status in the examples are personal and closest to the prescriptive sense opens within this article for me as therapeutic venture and my hope is that it is descriptive for anyone that is thinking of starting up some venture or the other.

It is revealing that I see forming any kind of personal relationship as a task of negotiation with knowledge/power as the resource that is at stake between the parties neither money nor sexual favors – just power.

Theoretically, the scene of a failed relationship of power (not to fret, I will make the picture of what power looks like to me fairly clear – but not just now) has the following features.

We shall assume that by analyzing the consequences of no agreement, each bargainer establishes the threshold value that he or she needs. The seller/leader has a reservation price s, that represents the very minimum he will settle for; any final-contract value, x*, that is less than s represents a situation for the leader that is worse than no agreement. If x* is greater than s, then we can think of x* – s as the leaders surplus. 

The leader wants to maximize his surplus. The buyer has some reservation price, b, that represents the very maximum she will settle for; any final-contract price, x*, that is greater than b represents a situation for the buyer that is worse than no agreement. If x* is less than b, then we can think of b – x* as the buyer’s surplus. 

The net of all this for our purposes is that between either a pair of people or a team these basic rules always apply. There is something wanted by each party that if it is not received it has a value that is lower than not reaching an agreement at all.

No partnership, no romance no friendship.

The issue is all too many times the conduct of this game is not at all this abstract! In this abstraction each bargainer knows his or her reservation price, but has only probabilistic information about the other party’s reservation price. Very often, this we all know from experience, the parties have but an imprecise feel for their own reservation price and make no formal attempt to assess a probability distribution of the other part’s reservation price.

So what you end up witnessing is a dance of temper, passive aggressive, procrastination and other forms of inaudible behaviors that frustrate all and need decoding in their own special way. Not that I’m all knowing at such interpretation of this knowledge, I just know that what the situation calls for.

Those of you that are aware that I’m the CEO of an addiction clinic and executive coach of long standing mite think that I should be a guru of such techniques. Well the truth is that my eyes or any coach’s eyes are better suited for looking out on the world not into our own world. Then again this article is apart of my self prescribed therapy.

When in doubt – write.

OK – we have contoured the ground on which the start-up is to spring out. Now we turn to one of my favorite subjects and the heart of what those in this dance are contending – Power.

Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding the start up’s culture, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of a space for doing a dance that flows–a powerful space. The objective for understanding this form of power is to prudently manage the terrain on which the conflict of the firm’s ongoing negotiations with its stakeholders, independent contractors, staff, and then other forces engaged in the various networks of significance where financial performance and reputation, take place.

From Michel Foucault’s kaleidoscopic standpoint, power is a multiplicity of force relations. These entanglements shape the processes which, he further describes as the turmoil of human tensions (through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses). Recognizing the support which these force relations find in one another, thus they form a-sort-of chain or a system, or on the contrary, they produce disjunctions and contradictions which isolate one system from another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the organizational ritual apparatus, such as the formulation of corporate policies and rules, and lastly in various privileges and titles?: showing up everywhere.

He goes on to say, “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” We could go so far as to equate power to politics and say as Foucault does “that politics is war pursued by other means”.

We (as would be business learners) stand for the necessity of–”In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.”, as outlined in Sun Tzu’s stratagem. The simple product of efficient and effective puts emphasis on breaking your enemy’s resistance “without fighting” – should this be seen as passive aggressive?

This means to stagger and make judgments about the order of engagement. Hence Sun Tzu goes on say that,” the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.”

The following propositions situate the power to which Foucault and Sun Tzu describe:

Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away–it simply is;

· Relations of Power thrive in any space with respect to types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but their immanence is always contested ; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibrium’s which occur, and conversely they are the internal conditions of the differentiations;

· Power comes from your basic stand; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing difference between leaders and followers at the root of power relations;

· Power relations are both intentional and non-subjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that “explains” them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives;

· The rationality that characterizes power is spelled-out by the observable tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, become visibly or allegedly connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their explanations elsewhere, unknowable, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is the case that no one can be found there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them.

Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always “inside” power, there is no “escaping” it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the vagueness of language in any case or as Foucault reminds us “that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner”.

If it is true that cynicism is seen as Machiavelli’s crime, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince/leader, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships: nominalistically.

Our story of starting something up is not about heroes or masters–the nominalistic view is our choice. As Harold Morowitz describes it “life is a property of planets rather than of individual organisms?” We look at processes and networks that conspire in the creation of reality. We all have influence all the time–just a bit–all the time. Whither we pay attention or not–we are responsible.

Yes, there is mystery, that-not-withstanding–an effect can be had. In real life, the bitter fruit is realizing that we must all share responsibility for keeping an eye on the world. So, from this view the leader that would transform the ongoing negotiation is required to be proactive – despite the tactics of passive aggressive delays and stalls.

This kind of leader stands for a present that is a springboard to achieve a greater expression of possibility. He or she incites new expectations in his or her people and sets empowerment processes in motion through enlisting others to carry and move the empowerment out into the start up organization and beyond.

But with this all said- the leader’s strategy for behavior shifting has to be carried forward. The last point that needs rising is the immanence of demonstration within himself and the team must continually be demanded. They have to be in pursuit of results confirmed by evidence. The heart of the matter is demonstrated engagement and net criticism: the start up becomes a firm. So as for me, my reservation price in a start up is getting things done with an eye towards all those faints, and jabs that would take me away from this aim – even if I have to start all over in order to get something done!!!

I’m what my handle states – an Oldude. The problem with this acknowledgment is my thinking and ambitions have not quite got the message of my “oldness”. I’ve started an online behavioral clinic and my rant is about how to improve long term happiness – For the World. My thing, I believe I can change the world – isn’t that a hoot. The way I intend to change the world is to foster a wider and deeper appreciation for “hipness”: The daring, flair and grace of Jay z; the political savvy of Cornel West; the creativity of Mos Def with the business and cultural daring of Richard Simmons. I’ve thought enough – being a philosopher of sorts – and trained hard with some of the sharpest minds ever on the planet – Cornel West and Michel Foucault to know the total absurdity of trying to change the world – but I do and I will. There it is showing my age again. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Levy_Rivers