{"id":1571,"date":"2012-06-12T10:47:22","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T00:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/knowledgetoday\/?p=1571"},"modified":"2012-06-12T12:35:29","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T02:35:29","slug":"negotiation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/blog\/2012\/06\/negotiation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Negotiation Two-step"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From the Knowledge@Wharton today\u00a0blog<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When he was an engineering student at the University of Pennsylvania, entrepreneur Tal Raviv helped to found a company called Dropcard near the Penn campus. Two of his co-founders stayed with the startup – which changed its name to Ecquire – for several years, but eventually reduced their shares in the company “out of recognition that Ecquire was getting further and further conceptually (and technologically) from Dropcard,” as Raviv explains on the Ecquire site.<\/p>\n

Raviv, who is currently Ecquire\u2019s CTO, recently decided to ask the two original co-founders if they would give up their shares \u2014 which now amounted to just 0.5% of the company \u2014 “in order to keep our corporate structure simpler [and] cleaner, and [to] reserve the stock for future employees we want to attract.” Ecquire<\/a>, whose tagline is “productivity as a service,” describes itself as a company that “uses contextual information, or data that you already have and own from different places, to automate annoying tasks that you have each day.”<\/p>\n

But how to work out a deal that would accomplish this? Raviv notes that while at Penn, he took a negotiations class offered by Richard Shell<\/a>, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics, in which he learned that \u201cthe best negotiators question what the demands are really about. They don\u2019t see negotiation as a zero-sum haggle; instead, they look for opportunities to be creative.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that spirit, Raviv decided that \u201cmoney would be nowhere near as valuable to his two co-founders as the opportunity to have Raviv act \u201clike a \u2026 clown in public.\u201d His co-founders, he added, had always been \u201ctransparent about what they thought was fair, given the time elapsed since their contributions.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he gave his colleagues\/friends a choice: \u201cWe could haggle over a valuation for the stock and buy it in cash,\u201d or they could choose a song and Raviv would dance to it in the middle of Tel Aviv\u2019s busiest intersection at the busiest time of the week.<\/p>\n

His colleagues went for the beat. (see video below)<\/p>\n