TITLE : BARGAINING ACROSS BORDERS: HOW TO NEGOTIATE BUSINESS SUCCESSFULLY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD

Preface

This book is meant to serve as a guide on your journeys. Inevitably, the most beneficial journeys are the ones that occur within yourself. This book practically insists that to reach out we must first reach within. Therefore, this book is meant to help you to begin looking inward. The first step to looking outward when negotiating with those across the table is understanding oneself.

In this sense, the book has a behavioral bias. Throughout the book, wherever possible, we have tried to present academic or theoretical information in a manner that relates to practical business issues. The purpose of making the information as practical as possible is to enable you to behave more effectively. Therefore, you will have ample opportunity to analyze, compare, and generally test yourself, your own tendencies, and your own ways of negotiating and doing business against other ways of Americans and non-Americans alike. This will help you to identify your own style and your options and to make intelligent and effective choices. We hope that by the end of the book you will have increased your behavioral options, thus enabling you to be well-armed when walking into a negotiation with people who do business differently.

While the word bargaining appears in the title, we want to quickly state that bargaining is not being used as a substitute for negotiating. In fact, bargaining is just one aspect of the larger process of negotiating. However, for many Americans negotiation and bargaining are the same. Hopefully, by highlighting this conflation right up front we are already beginning an intelligent discussion of just one of the many for midable differences of perception that can arise between cultures when they sit down to negotiate-or bargain-with each other. This book is not meant to be just one more guidebook to bargaining, to negotiation, or to international business. Rather we would hope that many of the topics discussed in this book could be used as guides to better communication cross-culturally, between yourself and your "foreign" associates. In this sense, as negotiation is but one aspect of the larger issue of international business communication, we could have just as easily called the book Business Across Borders.

In trying to make the book practical, we have used as many "critical incidents" or "snapshots" of business and social scenarios as possible to highlight cross-cultural communication and negotiation problems. In turn, our hope is to allow you the opportunity to analyze and to develop the necessary perceptual skills to "read" international business situations. In light of this goal, many of the international snapshots we have used have, by necessity, been altered, simplified, or modified in some way to draw attention to (or in some cases, to mask) the specific issues being discussed. For this reason, these scenarios may appear skewed or may carry an air of simplified unreality. Certainly, no retelling of these kinds of events can carry with it all the complexities of human interaction and communication and, fortunately, our goal here is to eliminate much of these elements that are external to the issues being examined. We hope you will grant us the license to make these modifications. They exist solely to assist you in your goals of achieving better communication and negotiating skills.

We have put much effort into limiting the prescriptive nature of the book since one of its premises is that prescribing appropriate and effective behavior regarding international business communications is not the preferred method for developing success. We would rather that this book helps you to build on the methods, styles, and successes you already have. Most of us have had a good deal of experience negotiating in life with our work associates, spouses, friends, family, children, and so forth. We have, no doubt, already developed particular styles of our own, certain notions of proceding, and ways in which we are more comfortable in handling these situations. The purpose of the book is not to invalidate these conclusions, built up so carefully through the rough and tumble of real-life trial and error. We hope instead that you can build on what you already bring to the table, recognize some things about what you already do, and make some reasonably intelligent decisions about it. In addition, we hope to help you discover possible options that you may not have realized you had or employ options in ways that you had not previously recognized. In short, we hope this book puts more on your quite possibly already large plate.

The book is divided into three parts, paralleling, we hope, the journey that we need to make when attempting to do business with people from other cultures. First, we need to be aware that differences, primarily cultural, affect our ability to do business with each other, and in Part 1, we discuss this issue of business and culture. Then, to understand "them," we need to first understand ourselves. Part 2 is devoted to looking at some very key "American" behavioral traits and comparing their effects in business with the behavior, attitudes, and underlying values of other important cultures. Part 3 takes a much closer look at negotiation per se and attempts to apply the information from the previous chapters specifically to the processes of international negotiation.

By the end of the book, you will have increased your cross-cultural business and negotiation options. We hope you will also have increased your appreciation for the diversity of possibilities of human behavior that exist when we venture forth out into new cultures-and the expanded difficulties, yes-but also the expanded opportunities that such diversity provides when we begin to do business with each other.

Dean Allen Foster