13. Negotiations

Negotiation is a dialogue intended to resolve disputes, to produce an agreement upon courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, or to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests.

In the business sphere negotiation is the way to achieve your own goal via the art of speaking and persuading. But negotiations can be conducted as easily as we consider them, especially in case when business is made between international companies or partners. In this very situation business people should prepare themselves for the plenty of pitfalls, and the only way to avoid them is to gather the necessary knowledge about the national characteristics of business partners and the way they may influence on their behavior. Now I will speak about the certain advices that can help you while conducting negotiations. Preparation is the most important part of negotiations, except dialog between partners by itself. In preparation phase it’s useful to make any kind of researches about your business partners, their strong and weak points, the way they got used to make the business and all other relevant information, though if your approach to preparation phase is too fanatic, this may ruin your negotiations. Another important moment in negotiation is the technique of conducting negotiations. People usually don’t like persuasive rhetoric, when partners are too tough and hard-edged or in other situation when these partners push on them too much. Language should be conformable to the style of negotiations.

As we see now negotiating is a rather difficult process and not everybody can take part in it. So which characteristic should the person have for becoming a good negotiator? First of all, the individual must be tolerable and respectful for the partner; he should be also very gifted in speaking art and perhaps the main thing – person must have a clear head and pointed brain for being able to make quick decisions and resolve disagreements.

As I’ve told before negotiating is much more difficult when we speak about international business partners who both try to achieve their own purposes. In this case negotiations can take more time that it was expected.

Chinese people for instance tend to prolong negotiation for creating a friendly relationship between partners while the Americans try to finish negotiations as quickly as it’s possibly that why these negotiations don’t usually last more than 2 hours. By giving these examples I try to emphasize the importance of taking in account national characteristics of partners.

At the end of my work I would like to reset the main points of my speech………

Hope my advices about negotiating will be useful for you and will help for you in making business with international partners.

Thank you all for being here today. If you have some questions, I will be happy to answer them.

14. International management

15. Setting up business

Many people are attracted to the idea of running own business. There are no particular principles for start-up to become a successful entrepreneur. But every entrepreneurial venture needs to have following basics without which no business can survive for long: product and services that has been tested, extensive market researches, an efficient supply chain, a motivated team and adequate funding. Business environment is also essential. Many small and medium-sized business owners complain that government red tape is a real headache. Bank financing is very expensive, bank and financial institutions are generally risk-averse. Another way for entrepreneurs to raise finance is venture capitalists.

After funding every entrepreneur needs to think about team-building, even if business owner is a talented person, he can’t carry out all the tasks. He may hire top talent (expensive approach) or find young and energetic workers.

In rapidly changing world it’s hard to make a choice through ideas coming up the market. It’s better for companies to start up on the top of successful product or process innovations; otherwise they may face problems with survival.

Building a good customers base, adequate funding and strong management team help start-ups to survive first two years. After company met first goal – survival, it may think about expansion. Start-up owner may plan to go into partnership, float the company on the stock exchange or continue to keep it private. However expansion means culture changes, and none can feel these changes better than company’s founder.