Behavior Creates Value

Any time you embark on a new deal, you are going to run into the situation depicted in the picture below.

This picture describes the way in which your behavior towards your counterpart in the deal can affect the overall value derived from the deal.

The first layer is the law: This is the bare minimum standard of behavior that you have to obey in order to avoid a trip to your friendly, local slammer. I won't punch you in the face if I disagree with you and you won't spraypaint profanity-laced slander all over my car if I ask more than you think I should. Life isn't necessarily peachy at this level of behavior, but at least we're all still able to live with each other.

The second layer is the contract: This takes the law one step further. We accept that the law of the land applies at all times, but we want to work together to accomplish a shared goal. In order to get there, we need to be able to ask more of each other than the law would require. To that end, the parties agree to create some additional laws that will apply to to their situation while they are working with each other. Life gets somewhat better here. An agreement helps create certainty and a good agreement provides guidance on how the parties will solve their problems and ultimately how the relationship will wrap up once the shared goal is accomplished. 

Finally, we have Deal World: This is where we at WieseLaw believe true value resides. This layer takes into account the law and the contractual relationship between the parties; however, Deal World goes further. Deal World is a personal standard of behavior to which you hold yourself, your team, or your company accountable. We encapsulate this idea with a slight twist on the phrase from the Notre Dame football locker room: Every Day I Play Like A Champion! 

This relates back to our post What's Your Sentence? This is the standard of behavior you are striving for in all you do - especially in your deals.

Deal World Rule #10 - Listen Until You Feel It

 image credit: Kevin Walsh (kevinzim - flickr)

Good negotiators know how to ask the right questions. But great negotiators have a far more powerful weapon in their arsenal – they know how to listen, truly listen, to the answers. Mental understanding is not enough. You must listen till you can feel the story that the other person is experiencing. What they say and how they say it opens up a window into their world – skilled listening allows you to look inside that window. What’s the point in planting the right question if you don’t reap the resultant fruit?
 

Listening effectively is one of the golden tools of differentiation. Most people think they have this tool. But few do. If you listen effectively, your deals will prosper. Here are some quick tips to becoming a true listener:
 

1. Do not begin with the end in mind. When listening, temporarily open your mind. Start with a blank canvas. Don’t assume anything. Ask and let the others paint the picture. Take in the picture without pre-conceived notions.

2. Understand the context. Figure out the other person’s situation and analyze the surrounding circumstances. Understand how this individual sees the issue, what he or she is trying to communicate and why.

3. Be focused and let them finish. Attention is the one of the scarcest resources on the planet. It can be excruciating to allow the person to finish without interrupting. Let them finish. Do not multi-task while listening! You sacrifice focus if you multi-task. You cannot simultaneously e-mail and listen. It is a big illusion that you can divide your attention. Slow down and totally focus on the questions and on the answers.

4. Get to the end of the thread. People often answer questions inadequately (or answer a different question than the one asked). Others usually accept the incomplete answer and move on. But you shouldn’t. Ask “why” until you get to the real answer. Generally the real answer is usually 3-6 “whys?” deep.

5. Ask questions like Colombo. Colombo (an awesome listener) was always working to get simple questions answered that told a story. Prepare like a good detective and ask questions aimed at eliciting answers capable of forming a clear picture of the entire story.
 

6. Affirm and Confirm your understanding . After you’ve listened, affirm and confirm your understanding -- ask the person: "So what I heard you say is ..."

*Some of these ideas are discussed on a cool web site: Communication Nation – How To Listen.

If you really start to listen you will really start to learn. People who learn more develop more expertise and do a better job. Listening creates alignment with others and fosters effective results. Do you truly listen? If so, congratulations. If not, start today.

Bringing Your Team To The Negotiation Table

 Image Credit: Michael Sohn/The Associated Press

I admit it, I've got World Cup fever. I have done my best to watch as much as I can to see soccer/football at its best. One of the amazing lessons of the World Cup is how much pure talent can be negated by teamwork. Take for example Italy, France and Greece for example. They are ranked 5th, 9th and 13th in FIFA World Rankings, yet they were unable to advance within their groups at the World Cup. These teams had many players on some of the World's top club teams and were unquestionable favorites coming into their matches. And yet, teams like South Korea and Japan were able to overcome huge gaps and talent to advance within their groups. It might be tempting to say it was the result of poor refereeing or even pure luck, but taking into account that each match lasts 90+ minutes there is plenty of time for teams to put into play a carefully thought out and well executed game plan that plays upon the strengths of its individual team members.

See the segway in action there? This same thinking can apply to your negotiation teams. However, much like anything in life, you can't just show up with a crack team of professionals and expect things to work out just because you have "all the right pieces" at the table. 

In order to get the most out of your team in negotiation situations, it's important to think about how to properly use your team.  Allow me to offer a 3-phase suggestion:

1. Discuss the situation with the group, capture data/knowledge about the other side, brainstorm outcomes and discuss the negotiation timetable and process. This is where you discern the lay of the land, nail down a manageable timeline and BE CREATIVE! This is a great time to air out different ideas from the group - you've gathered them together to draw upon their collective knowledge, so be sure to let ideas be heard!
2. Evaluate team strengths and weaknesses and assign roles accordingly. Despite the fact that we all have to do things we don't enjoy doing almost every day, there are facets of nearly every job in which your team members shine. Make sure they are spending time doing things they do well instead of wasting time trying to become better at things in which they're weaker.
3. Convene after the negotiation to capture lessons learned and to discuss what went right/wrong and how things could be done better in the future. This is probably the most important step. Moving forward, it's important to catch and keep all the information possible to help out in the future. Often times one team member may catch an essential piece of data missed by other team members. If this information isn't shared and learned going forward, the same mistakes will keep happening!

The team approach is not always an easy one and certainly not always necessary. However taking the right approach can lead to amazing results! 

Good luck to all the teams and nations in the World Cup and Go USA!

Begin With The End In Mind

One of the best ways to avoid being stuck in a bad deal is to consider - from the outset of negotiations / drafting - how to wrap up the relationship with the other party if things don't go as planned. Recessions happen, key people leave to go work somewhere else, products and services become obsolete and so on. 

Nearly all contracts provide for some sort of endpoint, this is what is commonly referred to as the "Term" of the agreement. This is your basic, if-all-goes-according-to-plan endpoint. Many contracts will also have an "Evergreen" element. That is, unless one of the parties specifically requests an end to the contract, it will automatically renew at the end of each Term. In planning your exit strategy, note any deadlines for notice to the other party if you do not want the Term to auto-renew. Just having a simple reminder on your calendar with enough lead time to make a decision about such auto-renewals can be extremely helpful. 

Next up is allowing for some kind of termination "for cause." Terminating the Term for cause usually follows a pattern of notice from one party to the other about a problem along with some time for the party in default to make good on the problem. If the party in default hasn't brought things back in line after the allotted amount of time the non-defaulting party can then terminate the contract. 

There are also many events that may warrant immediate termination or at least provide for a timeline for terminating the contract. These would include events such as one of the parties entering into bankruptcy, one of the parties being acquired by a third party, or even changes in the law that affect the parties' contractual relationship (especially important in contracts within highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare). 

Finally, you may want to consider allowing for a simple termination of convenience. That is, one or both parties may want the ability to end the contract for any reason or no reason if the parties can agree to an appropriate lead time to wrap up the contractual relationship. There may be viable reasons for building in termination fees and contingencies for ongoing services during the transitional period through termination. 

Having an idea of some of the options available to you is only the start of your overall exit strategy. There are still several other options to consider, these include, but are not limited to:

1. Confidentiality of the termination itself;
2. Transfer back to original party or destruction of all confidential data; 
3. Knowledge transfer; and
4. Right to hire service provider personnel.

These ideas should provide you with a basic roadmap for forming your own exit strategy heading into your next contract. Just remember to begin with the end in mind!

What's Your Sentence?

Recently, we held a breakfast event to talk with some of our clients about our vision of "Deal World" and how our clients could take the ideas we presented to remain relevant and profitable in light of the changed circumstances imposed upon so many businesses striving to keep going strong despite the persistently weak economy.

So what do we mean we we talk about Deal World? Simply put, there's more to almost any transaction than the four corners of the physical contract. These considerations include the following:

1. Metrics
2. Return on Investment
3. Implementation
4. The Next Contract
5. Relationships
6. Deal Review

 In asking the question about remaining relevant and profitable in the new economy, we reached out to others for their answers to that question. One of our favorite answers was from Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Drive. This was his answer:

“The key, I think, is to stop treating people (including ourselves) like horses and start treating them like human beings. Instead of trying to bribe folks with sweeter carrots or threaten them with sharper sticks, how about giving them greater freedom at work, allowing them to get better at something they love, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose?  The results might surprise you; indeed, they might change the world.”

In order to drive toward our ideal, we identified three key areas of consideration:

1. Mindset - You have to be ready to make the necessary effort.
2. Skills - You have to identify your strengths, your value-add.
3. Design - Great implementation doesn't just happen, it's the result of a great plan!

Finally, we asked our participants to take these lessons to heart. We asked them to identify within themselves a sentence to describe how they approach their work. Click the image below for an image with all the amazing sentences we got back.

Hopefully this inspires you to go and figure out your own sentence and move forward! Good luck!

Some things I've learned about Twitter (Part 2)

Ok, we covered some of the Twitter basics last week, now I want to talk a little about some of the more "advanced" features of Twitter. The beauty of Twitter is that it provides a wealth of information, but that's also it's curse. Without ways to narrow the stream of information to derive meaningful information you will end up wasting a lot of time. 

Trending Topics

Twitter tracks it's own "trending topics" which is a fancy way of saying these are the most popular topics being discussed on Twitter. There's probably a confusing algorithm somewhere that figures these things out, but for the purposes of this post, it's enough to say that this is the insta-buzz of what is happening in the world. A web-tool that I like to look at in conjunction with Trending Topics is What the Trend. This website attempts to briefly explain why a topic is trending and provides other useful information regarding trending topics. 

Recently, Twitter has taken steps to make this more relevant with the release of location-specific Trending Topics. Not every city is represented yet, however, you can at least specify a country if your city isn't listed. Going forward, this will be valuable tool for tracking what is going on in your own hometown without having to monitor thousands of twitter accounts and filtering international results that may not be relevant to you.

#Hashtags

Hashtags can be one of the more confusing pieces of Twitter. Many times, you'll read a Tweet and you'll see a hashtag embedded in the post.  A hashtag begins with the pound sign (#) and includes the word immediately following. For example - #learning #Twitter #TGIF and so on. So, why are they important? The most important reason I've found for using a hashtag is an attempt to organize Tweets from different sources around a topic or an event. For example, #sxsw is a tag to identifies a post relating to the annual South By Southwest conference. If you attended the conference, chances are you saw people pounding out Tweets on their handheld gadgets and one of the easiest ways to follow the conference was to setup a search for the #sxsw hashtag.  Otherwise, you would be looking for specific speakers, topics, location, etc., if you wanted to stay on top of the happenings down in Austin.

One of the major problems is figuring out what the hashtag even means. In a world where you have to communicate your message in 140 characters or less each character has to convey the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of space. Let's just say that acronyms abound in this world. So how do you get the most out of this feature?

• Don't go overboard - not every Tweet needs a hashtag. 
• Give them some context - especially if you are using an acronym. (e.g., Can't wait for the Social Media Conference next week #SMC2010)
• Be sure the hashtag adds value to your Tweet - both to yourself and those who will read your Tweet.

In our business at WieseLaw, we are constantly on the lookout for trending topics and hashtags relating to Contracts, Negotiation, Mediation, Attorneys, Lawyers, etc. Utilizing trending topics and hashtags is a great way to manage and search the information coming in from all corners of the world in order to derive some meaningful connections.

There are literally thousands of tools, apps, widgets, etc. out there to take advantage of Twitter and to help you make sense of what's being said. I hope these two blog entries have given you a jumping off point for becoming part of the conversation. Good luck!

Some things I've learned about Twitter (Part 1)

OK, let me say, first and foremost: I am NOT a social media expert. There, that feels so much better. Having said that, I have been plugging away faithfully, trying to learn about what works and doesn't work so well in the realm of social media and I like to think I've learned a few things. I'm going to focus specifically on how I view and use Twitter to narrow the focus a bit.

Lesson #1: Find a Good Way To Manage What You See

One of the funny things about Twitter is that the basic interface provided is practically unusable once you start following more than a handful of frequent updaters. The problem is that you will see so many tweets pass by with each refresh that you will miss most tweets throughout the day. There are a couple of ways to deal with this problem.  First, you can keep your list of people that you follow down to a bare minimum. But, this pretty much defeats the purpose of participating in a social network. Second, you can use some of the functionality built into Twitter combined with the plethora of desktop applications available.  For example, I use the list functionality in Twitter to categorize people I follow. I have a list for other attorneys, people who live in the Twin Cities/Minnesota, writers, etc. I combine this with Tweetdeck in such a way that each list has its own column so I can easily find out what the other attorneys are talking about or what is going on in the Twin Cities.

The primary takeaway here is that you need to figure out a way to take the firehose of information and filter it down to something that a human can actually understand. Tweetdeck isn't your only choice either, find what works for you!

Lesson #2 Be Mindful of What You Say on Twitter

In the early days of working with Twitter I really didn't know what I was doing and it showed. I had a hard time figuring out what I could say that was meaningful in 140 characters. I still can't claim that I'm some kind of Twitter master, but I sure know what doesn't work. This feels more like a list, so here goes:

• Don't mindlessly repeat quotes from other people. Especially if they only tangentially related to what it is you do in the real world. This isn't to say that an inspirational quote or two is a bad thing, but definitely keep it to a minimum and, if possible, be sure it ties into your business and/or reason for being on Twitter. You and I know Ghandi was amazing, I just don't need to see every thing he ever said up on my timeline EVERY DAY.
• Don't let your first contact with a new person be a sales pitch. I'm not 100% sure where I heard this, but treat Twitter like you would a party, mixer, etc. Twitter is a great place to make connections, get interesting ideas and build friendships. If you met a person in an informal setting such as a party and the first thing they said to you was "Learn how to grow your Twitter following and make ca$h!" I'm pretty sure you'd think they were a bit off.
• Don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone is interested in you. Take an interest in others! It's a simple thing that goes a long way to boosting your reputation. React to what others are talking about and contribute to the conversation.

Stay tuned for Part 2, I'll talk a bit more about Twitter Search, Trending Topics, Hashtags and what I think works in the Twitter world!