A Negotiation with a Twist
08 November 2016
Bülent Araslı
Managing Director, Inter Kordsa As usual, we also agreed in writing and what we had discussed and agreed. We quickly drew up the minutes of the meeting – a one-page, hand-written document. The purchasing manager o‑ered to make photocopies of the minutes before we all signed them, and he left the meeting room to make copies. We drank our last cups of tea. It was time to go to the airport. Although some 15-20 minutes had passed, there was still no sign of the purchasing manager. We decided to leave the meeting room to look for him. The building was almost silent. The working day was already over, only a few employees were left and they were getting ready to leave the office, too. Hoping one of them might have seen the purchasing manager, we approached an employee and, with a certain anxiety, asked him whether he had seen him or not. The answer came as a shock... The purchasing manager had already left the office. This was hard to believe. To be certain, we asked the same question to another person. We waited in the office for some time, just in case. Nothing changed. It was an unbelievable situation and there was nothing we could do. We rushed to the airport and luckily we caught our plane. While we were looking for some free space in the overhead lockers for our hand luggage, a passenger in one of the back rows of the plane, who was trying to hide his face with a newspaper, caught our attention. The purchasing manager was sitting about 10 rows behind us. We had two choices: greet him over the newspaper and say hello, or act as if we hadn’t seen him. Without much thought we chose the second option. It was clear that the situation we were in was not a normal one. After a few days, and with the help of our representative, we learned the background of the story. After leaving the meeting room, the purchasing manager hadn’t felt comfortable with the content of the agreement and decided to fax a copy to his boss in the company headquarters in the capital city. After seeing the agreement, his boss (a well-known personality in the industry for his hot temper) was furious and told him to find a way to correct it immediately. The purchasing manager, however, could find no other way to follow his boss’s instructions than to simply disappear. After a while, we set up another meeting. This time the purchasing manager’s boss also joined us and we ended up negotiating exactly the same agreement as before. It was the 1990s... We were trying to deal with several challenging matters in a Middle Eastern country. Our customer, one of the largest tire manufacturers in the region, had invited us to discuss a series of technical and commercial subjects as well as possible new business opportunities. We took the first flight of the day, arriving early in the morning in the town where the customer’s factory was located, about two hours from the capital city. I had the feeling that due to our busy schedule we would again not have much of an opportunity to wander around this city that is famous for its historical and natural beauties. We planned to return on the evening flight. As soon as we reached the factory the meeting started. By noon, and following some lively discussions, we had reached an agreement on the majority of the agenda items to the satisfaction of our customer and in line with our targets. However, long discussions continued on one particular topic that had both technical and commercial aspects, and even before making this trip we knew that reaching an agreement on this critical subject might be difficult. Our Middle Eastern way of negotiations continued until late afternoon. The long day and complex discussion topics began to drain the energy of the purchasing manager with whom we had been negotiating since early morning. Our arguments were accepted one by one. Before official working hours were over, the moment we had been waiting for arrived... We came to a fair agreement, as we had planned. Both parties were happy. As people of a shared culture, we shook hands and embraced each other to celebrate the fruitful result.