Lessons in Leverage: What International Merchants Taught Me About Business Negotiations

  • Date: 09-Jun-2021
  • Source: Newsweek
  • Sector:Economy
  • Country:Egypt
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Lessons in Leverage: What International Merchants Taught Me About Business Negotiations

For over thirty-five years, I've been traveling the globe, striking up negotiations and sealing deals, from Russia to Zimbabwe and Indonesia to Bosnia. Nothing in my education or prior business experience equaled what I learned first-hand from my travels.

Today's global business environment brings people together from across diverse cultures. If business people and leaders want to succeed, they must navigate an often quite bewildering maze of cultural expectations, customs and business practices. It takes savvy and down-in-the-trenches experience to learn the essential insights for conducting business with anyone, anywhere in the world.

My experience has taught me some enduring but simple lessons of global trade. One of the most crucial is the importance of leverage. Leverage is your power to influence the outcome of a negotiation. You can use leverage to bring someone to the negotiating table, haggle for a better deal and more. When it comes to leverage on the international stage, there are two lessons you need to learn: You have to understand what leverage you possess, or can possess, and you need to know the perception of that leverage across the table.