Rockefeller’s advice – 7

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Peace and blessings be upon the Master of the 100 and the Master of the 100. Muhammad and the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him and upon his Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, are very much in harmony. From the principle of number seven, John D. Rockefeller says to his son, master negotiation with this framework. Number one, understand the environment. Number two, know your resources. Number three, find the opponent's weakness. Number four, clarify your goals. Number five, read their emotional state. Read their emotional state. He said, information is ammunition, emotion is opportunity. So he's talking about how to negotiate. Now, I want to share with you a very nice quote. And they said, you do not get what you desire. You get what you can negotiate. And this is very true in life. Many times we find people who are competent, but they do not get what they deserve. And all they can really do is complain and moan and groan about it and say, oh, you know, I should have got this. And I didn't get it. I say to them, ask yourself, why did you not get it? How can you get it? Because this quote, which I mentioned for you. I'll repeat that. You don't get what you deserve. You get what you can negotiate is a very, very, very true thing. So the point is, why didn't you get it? Because you could not negotiate it. Now, I just mentioned to you John D. Rockefeller's negotiation principles. Number one, understand the environment. Number two, know your resources. Number three, find the opponent's weakness. Number four, clarify your goals. Number five, read their emotional state. And he's talking about, therefore, then this is emotionless. He said information is ammunition. And emotion is opportunity. What I would submit to you is, again, my framework on this is different. My framework is in negotiation. The thing to think about. The way I look at it, when I negotiate, in my mind, I don't necessarily say this, but in my mind, I say, well, how can I help you to get what you want? So when I'm negotiating with another person, my thinking is, how can I help you, the other person, to get what you want? Now, you might say, well, this sounds crazy. Because in a negotiation, you should be worried or I should be worried about what I can get. My submission to you is that any negotiation for it to be successful, unless it's a very negative thing, just a one-way thing, like, you know, somebody is holding you up. It's a holdup. The guy is pointing a gun at you. There, you're not going to say, how can I help you get what you want? Although that might bear some thought. You know, I'll leave that with you. Tell me how you can make it work even there. But you might say, well, you know, right now, I need to get out of the situation. So how can I overpower this guy? How can I, you know, neutralize him? But other than that, in normal situations, for a negotiation to be successful, the most successful negotiations are win-wins, where both parties get what they want. And this is, in fact, possible. This is, in fact, possible. It's possible in far more interesting ways. This is, in fact, more interesting than we like to imagine. But since most of us have been conditioned or trained in the win-lose way of thinking, we never get past that. So we are always looking at, how can I get what, how can I get out of this? How can I get, what can I get out of this? Not how. What can I get out of this? And in the process, I kill the golden goose. That's okay. and rip open its belly and get all the eggs. The thing to remember is that in a good negotiation, both parties get what they want, and at the end of that, they also have a good relationship with each other. Now, I use this framework always in my family business consulting, and also in other places, but family business consulting, because my focus always in family business-related negotiations is how can we build a business while keeping the family together. Anybody can build a business by breaking up the family. That's a non-brainer. Anybody can do that. Just support or back one of them or teach them some trick or some way of getting the better of his brother or sister, and... And the whole family breaks up. This person walks away with the goose that lays the golden eggs, and, you know, there's chaos, blood and gore everywhere. What makes absolutely no sense. My way of looking at it is that the family comes before the business. The business, the family needs the business. The business does not need the family. Even if the business is sold to somebody else, it will still run, but the family will be without their business. So, therefore, keeping the family together is very important. And that happens only when negotiations are handled in a win-win way. One of the ways I do that is by helping them practice two things. One is I get them to sit down and I say, write down, write down what is your goal in this business? What are you trying to achieve? So, there's a first point of beginning. Uh, what are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to achieve? What do you want from this goal? Um, and since you write it down, we are not asking you to necessarily share it just now, but write it down. What's your goal? And then depending on what they write, many, in many cases, I've seen that when they write their goals, you can see it clearly that both goals are achievable. Um, and in, in one case, I remember all I did was I told them to achieve. I told them to achieve. I told them to exchange their papers. You know, you give your, what you wrote to your opponent and the opponent in this case is their cousin or their brother or somebody, uh, and take theirs. And then they look at it and they look at each other and have a big laugh because this is what you want. Well, okay, sure. Have it, you know, take it as my gift, but because you did not identify it, you didn't really define it. Uh, you thought you were fighting. You thought you had to fight. You had, you thought you had to kill your brother, which is a nasty thing to do anyway. So, uh, I'm going by the, in, in my last, uh, uh, last podcast, I had talked about the Bindaud, the, uh, you know, way of doing business. I'm, I'm going by that. So we say in this negotiation, what do you want? Second thing is what I do. And I've done this with, uh, management labor negotiations with CITU communist unions in Kerala. I sit them down and I say, look, for example, I'll tell you what happened. Okay. Okay. I, first time I, I went there, uh, to make a long story short, the unions came. I, I, I did the bit of a history, uh, you know, this history study for myself. And I found that what used to happen was that the wage negotiation, um, would be done. It would be valid for three years, but the process of it, the whole process of coming to an agreement usually took almost a year. So one. One year of haggling and backing and forthing, um, and doing that whole period, the, you know, the unions put pressure on the management. So they would have work stoppages and they would do all kinds of stuff. And then they, yeah. And then they would, uh, eventually some agreement would be reached. And when the agreement is reached, obviously every wage negotiation, there is obviously some increase in wage negotiation. But because it hadn't been paid for a year at the end of the year, when there is an agreement, there was a big pressure on paying back wages. So this was this played havoc with the, uh, with the company's cash flows. So when I went there and I became the head of the, uh, Kanyakumari plant association, uh, president of that. So I called the unions in October and the, the, the wage. So. The wage settlement was due to be renewed, uh, in December. So I called them in October and I said, please give us your charter of demand. So the union said, well, you know, we still have two months. I said, no, no, give it to me. Now I want to see what he is. So it's okay. They brought a week later, they brought the charter of demands. Um, he was in the, in the, uh, the head of the, of the, of the CIT union there and, uh, uh, Perumal PP Perumal was C. Perumal. Was. The general security. So they came and with them, you know, their own, some of their people. So they brought it and, uh, I read the whole thing and I said, okay, I agree to all your demands. Now the demands are so outrageous that, uh, when I said, I agree, uh, says, uh, how is that possible? So I said, if it is not possible, you know, it is not possible. You are saying this, you know, it's not possible. Why do you give me these divorce? Why are you giving me demands that you yourself know cannot. Cannot be done. Cannot be agreed upon. So he liked Luke. See, she brush and so on. So I told him, look, do me a favor. Uh, let me tell you what my, um, my requirements are. So I said, tell me something before I, before I go to the requirements. I said, tell me, uh, do you want the companies? Do you want the. plantation companies to survive or you want them to be finished? To be dead? He said, no, no, no, of course not. We want them to survive because our membership, our members are workers there and, you know, they... They give a long story. They're workers, they earn their wages, their food depends on it and their children and this and this. I said, I completely agree with you. The companies need you and you need the companies because we are interlinked. The company cannot survive if the workers don't come to work and the workers cannot survive if the company is not there, what will they do? They have no other skills, there's no other work here. So, we need each other. So, let's do this. I will tell you what I need with regard to keeping the company alive and well and making a profit because we are not a charitable institution. We are a business institution.