Yet a difficult journey can still lay waiting, so I wanted to mention this important point: negotiate the difficult among the easy.

As you negotiate, use your list of outstanding items to determine which ones qualify as “difficult” to negotiate and which ones qualify as “easy.” Some examples of traditionally difficult items include dealing with termination, exit clauses, and property rights ownership. Some examples of traditionally easy items include establishing the governance structure, clauses and warranties, and indemnification, and overall roles and responsibilities and term of agreement.

Once you have gone through and separated the difficult from the easy, plan your negotiation approach to interweave the two categories and openly discuss this process with your partner. You may find it surprising to realize that what you perceive as hard, they perceive as easy. Still, together you can agree not to address the difficult stuff all at once, so you each don’t get frustrated and find yourselves not making any progress. If you’re stuck on something, agree to knock out a few of the easy negotiations points and then get back to the difficult. This keeps the wheels turning, the momentum going, and everyone feeling content that the negotiation is moving forward.

Another critical aspect of negotiating is asking questions. Many studies show that the best negotiators are the ones that ask the most questions. On average, the best negotiators ask four times as many questions as the not so successful negotiators.

Keep yourself open to learning what’s going on behind the positions being expressed by your partner. Go deeper, ask questions that matter and engage both of you to understand what the business needs to be successful – after all, you should be well aligned at this point that you have common and mutually enriching goals. If not, then you have actually never been partnering in the first place and it’s better to go back to square one – hopefully that’s not what’s going on.

Staying close in relationship with your partner will allow you to engage in deeper inquiry. Learn to listen for underlying emotions, – fear, concern, greed, jealously – discuss them freely, and see how you can mitigate the risks or address the differences in tangible and innovative ways.

Keep in tune to these emotions and ask questions that reflect upon them appropriately. This is undoubtedly the work of leadership in partnerships and is undoubtedly a lifelong process.

One of them is following the Platinum Rule.

We all know the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.” But for contract drafting and negotiations, I tend to prefer the platinum rule: “Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you.” So you see there how the platinum rule merely takes the golden rule and turns it into the negative. “What’s the big deal about the negative?” you might think.

Well … there’s a big deal actually. The negative provides limits to work from and not the airy-fairy and happy-go-lucky wants that are never actually put into practice using the golden rule. In negotiations, rather, the platinum rule helps to cuts out the BS, and that’s really helpful.

When you encourage people in a contract negotiation setting to think about what they don’t want done to themselves rather than what they do want, the conversation becomes much more productive and real solutions can developed and applied.

I think maybe it has to do with the fact that it’s easy to think about what you should do unto others. You should be nice to them, of course. Thinking in terms of the golden rule, you would say things like, “We should be transparent because we want to be open about all the aspects of the business and we choose to do this because it results in better alliances.” But contract negotiations aren’t always about being nice or about promising transparency. They’re about ensuring that everyone at the table can be content with the stipulations of the agreement. So when you say “do not unto others,” you create clearer boundaries for what should and should not be done in this alliance.

In applying the platinum rule, you aren’t saying things like “I should be transparent,” you’re saying things like, “I don’t want them to lie to me, so I’m not going to lie to them.” The effect is completely different because the spirit is more defining. You aren’t asking for an esoteric concept like transparency. You’re promising not to lie.

It’s a strange phenomenon, but the platinum rule tends to build a more reciprocal relationship that helps to balance out the fairness in the agreement. Through the platinum rule, you can see more clearly what it would be like to be in the other person’s shoes and can determine more accurately how your actions would and should affect both their business as well as the relationship.

Partnering is about recognizing and acknowledging that you don’t know everything, but that you are open to figuring it out as you walk alongside your prospective partner. It’s about collaboratively solving problems that exist in the market and/or simply creating something new. It’s about inviting your potential partner into a possibility. How do you do it? Here are four tips.

1. Present your story – Reveal to your prospective partner the general story of why you are looking for a partnership. State the goal, explain what’s happening in the industry, and then propose where you believe the partnership will take you. This story is the transcendent reason – the “for the sake of what” – that you are engaged in this meeting and (hopefully) the business to come. Voice the great opportunity that you see – the grander vision of potential where they could be a part.

2. Demonstrate your focus on partnerships – Show your prospective partner exactly how you have made them central to your growth strategy. Share with them the foundational values that drive your proposed business. These could include shared investments, transparency, goal alignment, flexibility, and accountability and measurement systems. Whatever values you choose to present, make sure they’re authentic. Maybe even reveal the details of the partnerships you currently have in place for your business (if any).

3. Bring the partner into the picture - Don’t just talk about yourself. Talk about your prospective partner. Let them know why you are thinking they will make for a good partner. Ask them questions about your assumptions regarding their challenges. Consider tying your assumptions to the struggles currently experienced in their industry. Explain how and in which way each of you could benefit from collaboration.

4. Invite them into the potential - Once you have established who you are, who you think they are, and why you think you could create something great together, invite them to be a part of the potential partnership. Share with them your proposed partnership development process. Explain how, if you do see a fit, each party would commit to working together and building something amazing.

Once you have shared all of the information above, you will ask your prospective partner directly whether the opportunity seems interesting to them. More than likely, you will receive a yes. Why? Because you have shared information with them in such a way that suggests you’re not asking them to buy your product. Rather, you have asked them to think through the potential you have seen and to consider whether they might be interested in creating it with you.

1. Take a deep breath

Sounds simple but you would be amazed how effective this first step tends to be. Remember, not everyone in the room is going to have the same level of knowledge on the subject that you have. You can’t expect them to keep up with the pace of your own mind. If you’re met with blank stares or silence, just take a moment, breathe deeply, and then ask if anything is unclear, voice what you see and engage proactively.

2. Start meetings with a Check-In

Holding a Check in and Check Out process for each meeting is simple but goes a long way toward ensuring that everyone is on the same page at the start and the end of each meeting. As the team leader, go around the room at the beginning of each meeting and ask each person at the table to say their name, role, what their role is, and what is up for them in the moment – what is important to them. But before you pose the question to the team, share your own thoughts, those that come directly from your truth and from the heart. This allows people to settle into the group and connect authentically to what is going on. The more each person shares what is real for them, problems they face, and opportunities they see, the more they get to know one another and the more potential for real work. Be careful not to make a Check-In your typical “rank and serial number” process that pervades corporate meetings – make it real and keep it that way.

3. Normalize

Starting slowly in the beginning (and returning to that slow pace in the end) is always good practice, but that doesn’t mean you should move at a snail’s pace. It means you should get a sense of what’s going on. At times when things are speeding too quickly, a little slowing down allows for the missing element of connecting to happen, while when the tempo is slow, a bit of speeding up also energizes the teams. Don’t go too fast and don’t go too slow – stay present to what’s really needed at the level of tempo and tone. Keep a pace that best allows for the free exchange of ideas and concepts and stay aware if people are being left out of the conversation or their points of view are being isolated.

4. End meetings with a Check-Out

Just like with the start of the meeting, it is important at the end of each meeting to ensure that everyone is exiting with a sense of stability. At the end of each meeting, go around the room to do a Check Out, reiterating the expectations moving forward for each person, which of these expectations require immediate action, which expectations are pending, and most importantly, how each person is feeling at the moment from the conversations. Discussing expectations ensures that everyone is clear on their upcoming tasks. It boosts accountability. And it better assures that things will actually get done and more importantly allows you to see potential pitfalls for future meetings.

The faster you go in an alliances business the greater the risk for mistakes, for missing things, or worst of all, for not connecting enough with your partners to get to the bottom of issues that inevitably come up. Pushing the tempo and attempting to meet deadlines just to close the deal only works in sales and alliances aren’t sales. But this tendency to want to speed things up happens across all levels and at all phases of alliances building process.

When an alliance enters the negotiation process, for example, there is often a push from both sides to get through it as quickly as possible. The thinking seems to be that if you move quickly through negotiation, there will be more time to get down to the creating. But as we already know partnerships and alliances are about relating and it takes time to build the kind of real and functional relationships necessary for cross-organizational excellence and for really striking the best negotiation possible for all parties.

Teams also tend to move too quickly during two very important times in any given meeting: the beginning and the end. At the beginning, people are either getting to know each other or breaking the ice. At the end, people are trying (sometimes desperately) to figure out everything that has been said, everything that is expected of them before the next meeting, and everything that they have been promised from their counterparts. If you move too quickly during these critical junctures, you are bound to increase the level of tension and anxiety in the room and more importantly miss important pieces of information.

Yet this common symptom is easy to diagnose. You know that you’re moving too fast when you realize that the people in the room are unresponsive. If you pose an important question to everyone in the room and you are met with only silence, there’s a good chance that you’re moving too quickly for everyone to follow. Alternatively, if you find that the questions you pose are returned with answers that indicate a misunderstanding, odds are you have moved too quickly to properly explain yourself.

So how do you slow down? We’ll discuss some tips in our next post.

​The problem with the typical cotton-candy-and-ice-cream comments regarding transparency is that it assumes there is only one type of transparency: the one where your pants are at your ankles and you leave yourself exposed. But there’s a vast in between.

Transparency is important, certainly, but don’t confuse the word “transparency” with “I have to tell them everything; I have to state my opinion and then bend over backwards to come in line with what they want.” You can’t share too little and you can’t share too much. You have to find the point of conscious engagement, where you authentically and directly share your interests, wants and reasoning. It is through your communicating, your tone and your connection to the other person that the point of authentic relating is reached.

The fully transparent often find their needs going unmet – or worse, they are perceived as weak, ultimately losing the respect of the other party. I remember I was working with a financial services firm that had forged a partnership with a large Chilean travel services company. The new partner came in transparent, saying, “We would like for you to change your pricing structure for our partnered product. We would like you to waive the 40 thousand peso annual fee on your credit card.”

This relationship was likely to be tremendously profitable for both companies involved. The common reaction – particularly for those that think of their partners as clients – might be for the bank to do whatever was asked by the new partner, just for the sake of transparency and harmony. Fortunately I had my backbone for support. I said, “No. We can’t do that because we would be shifting the market for five different markets that have had an annual fee for years. It would have a devastating effect on our business model.”

​Still, even with this evidence in play, my client started hemming and hawing about how it might work. He chewed it over endlessly – taking on their comment as if it was his and as if he owned it, getting nervous about what might happen if we disrupted the demands of our new partner. He would tell the partner that he would think about it, run some numbers and then weeks would go by with no decision. It turned out to be a case where the indecision cost the relationship more than would have the initial clear and concise no.

Remember, it’s not the lack of transparency that kills trust; it’s the wishy-washiness and the incapacity to establish authentic engagement that does it. If you object to something, being transparent means airing those objections positively and without judgment. Tell them why you must say no, obviously, but by all means, do not cave if you feel you must not cave.

​The flip side is also true. If you need something from your partner, don’t give information just to receive information. Take responsibility for your own issues and hold them responsible for theirs. Co-creation requires people with spines, people capable of having different visions but complementary wants, goals, and strategies. Overall, it’s about mutually beneficial responsibility.

First, we need enough credit cards in the market and enough places to accept them; but if we don’t have enough merchant acceptance points, then the credit cards are useless and they won’t sell; and if we don’t have enough credit cards, then we won’t get enough merchants to join. You can replace credit cards and merchants with any systemic relationship and you’ll get the same thing: the chicken or egg parable, that sense of not knowing what “can” or “should” or “has to” come first in order to make the project work.

What you’re really battling in the chicken or egg dilemma is your own fears of the potential for failure – and without failure, you’ll never learn anything. Ask yourself what is causing the fear. You never hear an entrepreneur talking chicken or egg. They just say, “How can I get this done? What’s next?”

If you dwell too much on the concepts and not enough on the action, you’ll get stuck on the fallacy of the chicken or the egg. Remember, the question of which came first is a question for philosophers, not for doers. You have to understand that there is something deeper than the conceptual framework.

So have the courage to commit and take the necessary steps toward actual work. Ask yourself “What’s the first small thing we can do in order to get ourselves out of this dilemma?” Take that step. It doesn’t matter how big or small that step is. Just do something. Get out there. See what it’s like in the marketplace. Get in a car and drive around. Talk to customers face to face. Do something that’s physical. Stop talking about the business on a piece of paper. Start creating something physical that you have to deal with.

The partnership between the bank and the telecom operator resulted in the successful launch of the Tcho Tcho Mobile e-wallet — a product that allowed Haitians to access and transfer money using cell phones, following the earthquake that hit the country in January 2010. The introduction of the new technology also helped increase financial inclusion in a country where most people don’t have access to a bank or ATM.

We would like to thank ASAP for the recognition. We feel honored to have received this award and look forward to continuing forging creative partnerships.

I’ve seen this a lot working in integrated partnerships. Partners focus on what they can do two to four years from now rather than working on the product they’ve set out to create together. In other words, they focus on how they will benefit from future business operations before they even get their first product right.

This may sound trite, but I can tell you that many deals fall on their faces almost entirely because the teams get enamored with negotiating the future without first dealing with the present. There are several ways to get around this common problem:

• Build the foundation of alliance cooperation: Genuinely think through the established policies, procedures and teams that will take advantage of future opportunities that are either planned for or that come up.
• Plan only for the products that you’re ready to roll out right now, and during the initial term of the alliance. If for example the contract term is five years, but the product suite may not all launch right away, then negotiate what’s, say, two years out but not all five years into the future.
• Work toward deeper clarity for the specific roles and responsibilities of each partner.
• Establish the alliance governance/cooperation structure in terms of who will lead what, how decisions will be made, what ongoing meetings will be held, and how new products, marketing, or activities will be planned for, decided upon, organized, and launched.
• Plan for problems – for how to resolve them and for building the cross-functional teams that will make those resolutions happen.
• Determine the tools that will be put in place to ensure the relationship is functioning well and that culturally the two organizations understand each other.
• Establish a reasonable and fair exit clause – one that I tend to use “no one can leave with the business in their pocket, at least not without paying for it.”

Many alliances executives will try to justify to themselves why their own situation is “different.” They will provide excuses for why they “have to” think into the distance, even as their projects stall out in the present. This is a dangerous line of thinking. The next time you find yourself thinking that it’s okay for your team to spend its time talking about the running before you start walking, remember that thinking about future products before you figure out the present is like buying furniture for the baby’s room before you even get married. So don’t spend your time on future concerns when there are pressing matters in the present. Do what you must do now. Take small steps. Get things done. Plan for only what is right in front of you. Do this and the future will take care of itself.

The task of developing partnerships requires that we let our guard down a bit, that we become less concerned and fearful that we’ll give something away or say the wrong thing leading the other party to take advantage of us. We’ve discussed thinking outside the box and leading productive innovation sessions and I’ll tell you that there’s no better way to get those ideas flowing and reduce overall stress than with some good chocolate.

There is a good deal of research on the positive effects of chocolate on the brain. Chocolate causes the release of certain neurotransmitters that help to trigger positive emotions in people. Good chocolate – defined as chocolate with more than 60% cocoa – actually increases the levels of endorphins released into the brain and causes the release of serotonin, which reduces pain and decreases stress. In addition (and perhaps most importantly), chocolate causes the release of phenylethylamine. This so-called “chocolate amphetamine” causes changes in blood pressure and blood-sugar levels, which leads to feelings of excitement and alertness – much like the feelings you get when you’re in love.

In a recent World Café session with a major retailer client of mine, we served up a round of truly amazing truffles at each of the three tables. By the end of the session, everyone was in good spirits. The London-based VP of Finance was looking at me like I was some kind of god, having facilitated such an amazing session. Little did he know that he had been drugged from the start with the tantalizing dark chocolate truffles that I picked up from my hotel that same morning. This was the day I learned the power of chocolate. It had just seemed like a good idea at the time – and well, I’ve been using my secret weapon ever since.