Best Business Advice I Ever Got

During one of my first contract negotiations, I received an email from the other company's representative completely changing the terms and conditions we had agreed on. This was an important Agreement we really wanted. I had already reported the substantial progress to my superiors. A deal was imminent, and now it looked like it was going to implode. For whatever reason, the email I had just received was hostile, unprofessional, and ended with a "take it or leave it" proposition. I was livid, to say the least.

I wrote a scathing reply and it was a masterpiece! It took 47 scrolls with the mouse to get to the bottom. It even quoted emails that proved many of my counterpoints! It took about fours hours to write, but it was goooooood. I felt better, so it HAD to be good. I was ready to hit the send button. Negotiations with this idiot company would be over, but I was sure my email would leave my opponent in shreds!

I never sent the email. I'll talk about what I did instead, a little later in this article.

I'm pretty sure almost everyone has entered into an email war at one time or another. A lot like the old "Point/Counterpoint" segments on the old 60 Minutes, but with more venom. The best business advice I can give to anyone is the advice I got that day. Don't send email written in anger, rewrite it after you calm down.

As I continued my career, what I learned that day grew into a bigger business concept for me. Simply put, I call it the "What would the Japanese do" concept. Japanese business etiquette is to never be rude, avoid the word 'No', and always take the blame yourself to avoid embarrassing the other party.

Looking back, I have to say business negotiations have gone smoother, with less stress, and with more success by following this concept. The success may take longer, but we should all be in business for the long haul, not the short run.

At a software company I worked at we kept getting the same bug report, which is a notification that there is a defect in the software. We kept getting this one over and over from our sales office in Japan. It said that our software program would crash when a 2" diameter steel ball weighing 5 pounds was put on the 'C' key of a keyboard and left overnight. Our support department at first replied with "Don't put a 5 pound ball on the 'C' key". The reply from our Japan sales office was "Yes, but customer says it is still not fixed". This went on for a long, long time. One of our support people even wrote a long email basically saying the bug report they kept sending was stupid, we weren't going to fix it , and the customer would just have to keep the stupid 5 pound ball off the keyboard. You probably guessed it, the reply from Japan was simply "Yes, but the customer still reports the problem is not fixed". This obviously was a problem that needed to be looked into.

On a visit to Japan I met with the support people there. What I found out was that the customer with the problem had lost a lot of time and money when he left the software running overnight and something heavy fell on the keyboard. He would not use the software again, nor pay for any upgrades, until the problem was fixed ... and passed the 5 pound ball test. We easily fixed the software by adding a check to see if any key was pressed for a long time. Everyone was happy. Had our Japanese support department participated in escalating the email war, the problem would still be there.

In my earlier case, I now know I followed the Japan concept without knowing it yet. I deleted the long angry email and instead wrote a reply that started with "I am sorry, I must have misunderstood our previous meeting. Our sides are further apart than I had hoped. I hope we can find a more mutually beneficial arrangement in the near future."

We completed and finalized our Agreement within 2 weeks, to both party's satisfaction and benefit. Never writing an email in anger was the best business advice I ever got.

Comments

[Steph]

Hi:
I stumbled across your site when searching for tips on Outlook distribution lists and stuck around to read awhile. Congrats on a nice looking site with lots of good information that I look forward to perusing over the next little while.
Just a small thing, in the article above I think your spell checker did not understand that you wanted the word "imminent" instead of "immanent." I only mention this because it's the only typo I could find, and I'm really good at finding typos in other people's text! (Sadly, not in my own though. Don't look at my web page...)
Regards,
Steph