Negotiation.

The framework

1. 01

   List every negotiation you're in, including the ones you haven't been calling one.

   Open the calendar, the contracts folder and the renewals list, and write down every live negotiation plus everything closed this quarter. Then add the ones with no meeting attached: the supplier who has raised prices twice while you said nothing, the agreement renewing itself in eleven weeks, the salary conversation you've been rehearsing since March, the co-founder question you keep describing as something to sort out properly one day. Those are negotiations. You've simply chosen to run them by drift, and drift has never once produced a good number.

2. 02

   Grade the preparation, not the result.

   Outcomes are noisy. A weak process against a weaker counterparty still produces a signature, and it teaches you precisely the wrong lesson. So mark each deal against everything this elective handed you, in four groups rather than one long line. Setting up: did you shape the table before the first meeting, price their dependence on you rather than count your own strength, estimate their walk-away and not only your own, write a specific target with a justification instead of a floor, and settle which standard of fairness applied before arguing the number. Their side: did you list the interests sitting behind their position, take their chair for ten minutes, ask a question they had to solve instead of restating your own, and find out who had to approve it behind them. Widening it: did you test whether the two of you ranked the issues differently, price each issue both ways, put more than one shape on the table at the same cost to you, write a term that pays out differently depending on whose forecast is right, and do that work before the splitting started rather than after. Pressure and process: did you know who set the first number and what justified it, who held the clock and whether it was real, what a pressure play or a broken promise was answered with, and how many other bidders sat in a process somebody else wrote the rules for. Count the boxes, not the dollars.

3. 03

   The concession log is the only honest record of what you did.

   For every closed deal, write what you gave, what you received in the same breath, and how quickly each move followed the last. The pattern shows up fast: concessions handed over without a named return, moves that grew instead of shrinking, every issue settled at the midpoint because nobody tested whether the two sides ranked the issues differently. Add the limits you called final and then moved, since that is the row a counterparty remembers longest. A midpoint is what you get when a meeting runs on the assumption that both sides want the identical thing.

4. 04

   Two standing rules, and somewhere to keep the record.

   A quarterly review that produces insight and no artefacts is a pleasant hour. Convert what you found into one rule for the flaw that repeats, and one shared instrument nobody skips above a named deal size: a prep sheet holding the alternative, the target with its justification, the standard you'll argue from and the issues ranked by what each costs you. Store the closed deals where a successor could read them. Then book the next review before you close the page, because negotiation stays a personal talent in most organisations for one reason, which is that nothing in the calendar ever asks about it.