Negotiation Reflection Essay

Roleplays during the past two months were awakening experiences allowing me to recognize my weaknesses and strengths. How I negotiate improved gradually, but not drastically. As learned new, different shortcomings from every roleplay, I put more emphasis on not making same mistakes in the previous negotiations. The biggest takeaways are to prepare well in order to claim value and move away from ‘positional bargaining’.

In my first role play, Accounting for Aces, taught me a lot of things even though it was just a simple role paly. What I did was a total disaster. As Negotiation Genius recognizes that most common and costly mistakes in negotiation happen due to lack of preparation, I should have set specific goals, assess my BATNA, and tried to gather information that other has in order to figure out how high a price I might be able to negotiate and reach a mutually satisfactory result. Since I did not recognize that walking away can be my BATNA, I could not move away from unsatisfied offer. Now I put more emphasis on claiming values in first stage because clear understanding of BATNAs and reservation values gives me more leverage.

Also the first role play gave me a lesson of when and how to make first offer as it can establish an anchor and I can more easily lead the negotiation. Unless the counterpart is an expert, it is usually better to make first offer as both G2Y and Negotiation Genius say. However, I think how to make first offer is more important step. Since the effect of anchoring can be substantial, the one making the opening should have carefully evaluated it. I made my opening same as my budget since I didn’t have concrete idea of what is appropriate value for the used textbook. In the end, this kept restricting me from lowering the price since it was not low enough to offset counterpart’s anchor. After this experience, I try to make aggressive but reasonable targets so that I can capture more value, as Negotiation Genius recommends.

During Accounting for Aces, I confronted lies and stubborn counterpart. I did not do a good job to defend against lies and persuade her. If I looked more prepared, if I signaled her that I have ability to obtain more information, and if I asked some indirect questions, I could have eliminated her temptation to lie that she already promised her best friend to give her textbook, and move on to more interest-based negotiations. When dealing with stubborn negotiator, finding out their real interests and weakness is important. In order to this, moving away from positional negotiation would have