Shift the axis of dispute

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If, as we contrarians like to, we see a negotiation as not a straight, two-dog tussle between buyer and seller, but a multi-dimensional game of passive-aggressive rent-seeking that is merely staged within the intellectual construct of a bilateral negotiation supposedly between a buyer and seller — think of the negotiation as a kind of papier-mâché ecosystem on which a totally different struggle for memetic survival is waged — then possibilities open up for those who genuinely seek to move the negotiation on.

Remember the array of interests here. There are many competing agendas — as many as there are players in this drama; more in fact, since any agent has his own interest and his principal’s to juggle — and the interested you would think should predominate, being those of the notional “buyer” and “seller” — should we call them “hosts”? — are in practice the most weakly held.

Imagine the battlefield is populated not by loyal soldiers with an unwavering unitary commitment to the defence of the realm, but hastily-roused rabble of rowdy, but confused, mercenaries, not really sure what’s going on, whose side they’re on, where they are meant to be standing or how they even came to be in the middle of this fight in the first place — but grateful for the livelihood it affords them, all the same. Each of these agents — the negotiators, salespeople, professional advisers, credit committees — each one has her own private agenda, and that is to make themselves look like what they are doing is necessary — to vouchsafe, as far as possible, that livelihood. What they do doesn’t have to be necessary; just to seem that way to whomsoever should be paying their bill. That bill should be as large as it can be without seeming out of proportion to the value of the negotiation.

The person having dominion over payment of that bill won’t be the buyer or seller, for each is an immaterial shadow: a juridical thing that has no bodily extension, and cannot but operate through its worldly agents.

Thus every part of the buyer and sellers mortal existence is attended to by agents: even the remuneration of the agents. Our corporate overlords are really invalids: helpless, feebleminded hosts upon whom a rich ecosystem of rent-seeking agents make comfortable homes.

Now, a negotiation between buyer and seller where all concur, at once, that “we are agreed, then” will not put many coppers in a rent-seeker’s tin. This suits the sales teams perfectly: their rent is due upon completion. As soon as they happens they can claim their sales credits and move on. That is just what they would like to do, indeed, and they quietly resent the docs process for making it so hard. But they are resigned to it: the legal eagles, negotiators and credit officers have mouths to feed. They will therefore busy themselves providing for hypothetical contingencies that could happen, should the sky fall in on our heads which, if dealt with, may permit the “client” to sleep at night. The idea is to make a bit of a fuss about these things but never too much to get in the way of someone else’s rent extraction. As long as everyone gets a decent go, all will be well.

But there is an ever-present risk that your careful fusspottery will, in stating your own red line, inadvertently cross someone else’s. Remember, it won’t be your counterparty’s: it is a dumb sheaf of papers filed with a registry.

I’m taking a long time to get to the point, but it is this: there are all kinds of conflicting interests in a commercial negotiation, and the least of them is the one between your client and theirs. If you can present your outcome in a way which appeals, say to sales, you can shift the “axis of dispute” from its usual resting place — between opposing credit departments, with sales and negotiation teams as reluctant hostages in either side — to one between their credit team and their sales team. Their sales team, remember, is most likely to be on your side: They want the deal done as fast as they can.

See also

• Ultimate client
• Behavioural psychology