Crispin Nkya
MBA / Finance Student
Business Strategies/ Marketing/Strategy Development and Implementation
Negotiation is defined as the bargaining (give and take) process between two or more parties each with its own aims, needs, and viewpoints seeking to discover a common ground and reach an agreement to settle a matter of mutual concern or resolve a conflict (Negotiation, nd) . All this done in an attempt to start and maintain mutual discussion and arrangement of the terms of a transaction or agreement (Lewicki, Saunders, & Barry, 2015).
Two party negations involves two parties working together trying to reach a consensus. Negotiation here can be straight forward in which both parties come to the table knowing what they want and are willing to give and take from each other to get the deal done. A good example of this is when Walmart and Amazon Inc had to negotiate on whether the Kindle Fire tablet should still be sold at the Walmart stores and finally had to due to the negotiations appearing to be one sided because with the new Kindle Fire HD customers can shop on the devices for more than just digital books, pushing Amazon into further competition with Wal-Mart stores (Walmart Stops Selling Amazon Kindles, 2012).
Multiparty negotiations is defined as that in which more than two interested parties are working together at the table to achieve a collective objective (Lewicki, Saunders, & Barry, 2015). The negotiations here are especially harder due to the various pressures from the difference audience who are probably demanding the best and highest outcomes for their side while the other side might be demanding flexibility and reasonable outcomes. The system of trading players within different teams and clubs in the United States is a good example of a multiparty negotiations where by the multiple parties which includes Owners, team presidents, agents , Commissioner’s office , managers and the scouting departments are all fully involved before making a choice to either invest or reject on a specific player (Bowden, 2011) .
Coalition is described as combination or alliance, especially a temporary one between persons, fractions or states (coalition, nd). It can be an awesome negotiation technique because of the power of numbers and can be seen all around the world with in different work places where there are different labor unions that give workers a voice and power that they would not have otherwise. Apart from being the sole fighters for average workers in pushing for higher wages, paid leave, health insurance and retirement benefits standard compensation, these coalitions have a track record in raising standards and safety in workplaces is obvious and indisputable (Shulman, 2009).
Social complexity occurs when the amount of data/information that is needed to fully describe the system is so dispersed that it cannot at any moment be collected at one central point and brought into discussion so as to reach a consensus (Decision Making in a Complex and Uncertain World, nd). There’s evidence that the disaster of the Challenger would have been totally avoidable should they had an open communication culture and not “Killing the messenger” tactics which put a lot of engineers on a tough time. They failed due to lack of openly discussing potential technical difficulties due to way the communication structure was shaped and this incident shows how lethal any break of communication can be for any organization of any magnitude and how leaders showed always been keen and have a revolving door culture to not only be profitable, survive or compete but also to maintain sanity for their employees who in most times know more about the day to day activities and what needs to be changed (Lewicki, Saunders, & Barry, 2015).
Group think is a situation that occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment by ignoring alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that dehumanize other groups (What is Groupthink?, nd). Not taking away the fact that the program had never set up a rule to prevent a launch when the temperature dropped below a certain temperature which is also a major problem but the failure of communicating to either Jesse Moore, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Flight, or Gene Thomas, the Launch Director after a meeting at the Thiokol factory in Utah, which had built the solid rocket boosters and the engineer consensus presenting to their bosses that they should not launch Challenger in the freezing weather that had blanketed the Kennedy Space Center shows how bad the communication pipeline was at the time (Harris, 2017). This goes out to be one of those disasters that not only changed how NASA looked at it’s strategies, but also a lesson for many other companies on how vital an open communication should be be implemented across the whole organization .
Many great organizations fall prey to exactly what caused this misfortune and of all the places it happened to NASA which is a group of high skilled, best in the game individuals and among the most trusted experts in the world. It’s true that the culture at the time was not to open your mouth when you have bad news or one will face the wrath of the high management but I personally think that anytime there’s a chance to loss of life, one should have the courage to be break the norm and speak their mind out. If I was at the meeting and knew the inside information that the engineers had beforehand I would have definitely brought it up because I know the least that could have happened would have been words or reprimands but at the end of the day there would not have been a loss of life.
Bibliography
Bowden, J. (2011, July 28). What it takes to make a trade. Retrieved from ESPN: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/6800306/mlb-how-trades-get-done
coalition. (nd). Retrieved from Dictionary: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/coalition
Decision Making in a Complex and Uncertain World. (nd). Retrieved from Future Learn: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/complexity-and-uncertainty/0/steps/1832
Harris, H. (2017, January 26). NASA, the “Challenger” Disaster, and How One Phone Call Could Have Saved the Crew. Retrieved from The Portalist: https://theportalist.com/nasa-the-challenger-disaster-and-how-one-phone-call-could-have-saved-the-crew
Lewicki, R. J., Saunders, D. M., & Barry, B. (2015). Negotiation (7 ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education.
Negotiation. (nd). Retrieved from Business Dictionary: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/negotiation.html
Shulman, B. (2009, February 3). The power of unions. Retrieved from La Times: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-oew-shulman3-2009feb03-story.html
Walmart Stops Selling Amazon Kindles. (2012, September 20). Retrieved from HuffingPost: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-16/wal-mart-agrees-to-acquire-bonobos-as-amazon-steals-spotlight
What is Groupthink? (nd). Retrieved from Psysr: http://www.psysr.org/about/pubs_resources/groupthink%20overview.htm
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