Relativity

RELATIVITY & CONCILIATION

IT'S ALL RELATIVE:

BUSINESS IS ALL IN THE RELATIONSHIPS....

Home team to strategic partners, competitors to targets, alliances to disputes, who are you dealing with and how can you make it work ?

You need to understand how your people and ideas connect with others, not only in creating new value but in securing existing value.

And doing it right...

AND THE DISPUTES

Don't turn a blind eye to encroaching problems and festering disputes. Resolve them early. Come to grips with the other side's reality.

Disputes arise not just when things go badly bad, but when expectations mismatch, interests harden, or rules go unenfoced up to the tipping point. Litigation costs, for both sides. It costs in dollars, distractions, fears, reputations, and unexpected changes in relationships even on the same side of the dispute. The costs can cost for years. The court records and financial pages are filled with lost value and litigation expenses.

MEDIATE YOUR WAY OUT

Mediation doesn't have to be just another adversarial process. It is not a mini-trial. It should come to answers for both sides. It shouldn't just split the difference or merely quantify a problem which is truly functional, operational, behavioral or simply wrong. It shouldn't make the bad worse.

Lay Your Groundwork > Do Pass Go > Who's on Your Team?

You don't have to ride straight into a vortex. I can help you understand who and what you are working with and how you can derive the best outcomes. With so many flush years recently behind us, business teams had gotten used to moving forward, leaving the details to one side, even letting problems fester, and simply tolerating an inevitable vortex of unexpected events, surprise contingencies, changing conditions, and short term zig zags. They themselves undermining the long term stride towards their goals.

Don't follow their path. Look forward to the post-deal environment long before the term sheet. Think and plan ahead with multiple scenarios. Flow chart what could happen and what should happen next. Learn to think from the other party's perspective and anticipate what that party--and your stakeholders might and might not want and might and might not do.

Will the contractor prioritize your needs first? Will it meet your expectations? How do you ladder out your needs with requirements of performance and accountability? What would the lender say? What flex can you tolerate in the deal? How much flexibility will changing market, commercial, logistical,technological or legal conditions require? Think through alternatives. Assess, reassess and assess your situation again. Don't make assumptions. Know what you need and what you need to know. Act smart .

If you are dealing with "issues," look ahead to fend off the alternate worst case scenarios. They won't happen just by your looking at them, but you need to examine them to decide how your tolerances, costs and benefits balance and how you can make the best decision and take the best action. There is no "right" answer, just a best possible answer. "Not Applicable" is not the right answer.

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Strategic Alliances: It's Not Who You Know, But What You Know About Them

Sometimes what you need to make your product really grab a niche or cover the globe is not more capital or driven productivity but a strategic alliance.

In partnership with a business or another entity, the value you have and the relationships you nurture can be levered exponentially. As you focus on what it is you do and where you think you are going, it can be very difficult to pick up these potentials on your radar. Out of your region or out of your specialty, there can be synergies you miss. I can bridge the gap and spot the synergies. Don't work bare when you could capitalize on a strategic alliance.

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Conciliation: Come to Terms

Business conciliation is a structured process in which each side separately itemizes its concerns and its requirements; a neutral hears both sides, finds common ground between the sides,and identifies what each side will yield to the other for an amicable outcome. Each side can document as much as it wants of its grievance to the neutral, to be shared with or kept confidential from the other side as it wishes. The sides need never meet or they may work it through together with the neutral. Success comes when the neutral finds enough give and take, enough equal ground, even enough reconciliation between the sides to carve out an agreement.

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Neutral Evaluation:

When You Just Need Someone Else to Sort It Out

You know what you think is wrong; they know what they think is wrong; you even recognize that the other has several valid points. You just can't derive the resolution. It takes someone creative to find an answer. A neutral can review the positions of both sides, from the history of your commercial relationships to the chronology of your dispute, and give a balanced recommendation for a reasonable and fair outcome.

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You Just Need Someone to Keep You Talking: Facilitated Negotiation

It's gotten tangled. Too much has happened; you aren't quite sure who did what to whom or even the facts and sequence of events. Yet you can still talk to each other. You just cannot talk it through to resolution. You need someone to help sort it through and to guide the questions and the answers which you t get confused or would think of the next day or next hour. A neutral can keep you in face to face conversation, keeping both sides on track, refocusing each side on what it and the other side want and need, and reducing the emotional content so that both can see beyond emotion and unrealistic expectations or irrational demands.

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Ethical Strategies

Ok, it's a jungle out there and you can get lost, as much unable to see the trees for the forest as the forest for the trees. You have to plan your tactics strategically, but now more than ever you have to keep your mind on the ethics, your own and the other guy's. When the competition is all about money and capturing value for your own, it is easy to lose track of which other values have to fit in.Taking only the highest money path can cost you in the end. It can cost you happy integration. It can cost you tomorrow's merger, tomorrow's IPO, tomorrow's transaction, or tomorrow. When it all gets too convoluted, let's talk.

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