Negotiating
Often times negotiating is a tough job where you continually have to be aware of tricks and pitfalls coming your way, however occasionally it is sheer pleasure as you and your counterpart, while clearly on opposite sides, both love the battle but at the same time do see eye to eye.
Still, my most enjoyable negotiations happened in Shanghai as MD in the People’s Republic China for a French catering company. I had already concluded near-identical joint-venture negotiations/contracts with local state companies in Shekou (near Shenzhen) and Zhanjiang (main land north of Hainan), both Cantonese speaking areas and used this (anonymised) document to start my discussions in Shanghai.
However, in this era where Mandarin was far from ubiquitous, they found our document hilarious and loved to point-out the idiosyncrasies in it: while the varied Chinese dialects sound utterly different from one-another and have a different syntax, their characters typically have the same meaning - our meaning was therefore clear, the run of our sentence however very crooked -.
Enhancing the fun was the fact, as my interpreter - a fluent French speaker who had actually interpreted for Charles de Gaulle when he visited Mao Zedong – soon explained to me, that I was not really negotiating with any of the people who seemed of any import, but with the clerk taking down the minutes. When she asked her colleagues – she never spoke to me - so-called clarifications, she was actually dropping hints on which way to turn.
In the end my negotiations were successful - as they were in the cases listed below - and I could start operating in the yellow sea, supplying ConocoPhillips with our exquisite food.
Some of my Cases
Collective Agreements with 4 Unions, including a Monthly Fkexible Pay Structure
See also: