With my recent layoff from BEA Systems, I now have a lot of options to choose from! What should I do? What do I want to do? As I’d sent out a batch of resumes to three recruiters who had called me, I immediately got a first and second round interview with the company Salesforce.com, [...]

Recently, BEA Systems (the company that I work for) was acquired by Oracle. Everyone was all smiles as the stock price went up, giving us a nice gain. Of course, that was until we found out that there was a mass reduction of the number of positions available. Unfortunately (or fortunately as I’m finding out), [...]

On my way home from a going away dinner for my supervisor today, I had a chat with my coworker as he drove me home in his car. Apparantly, they had some sales discussions with EBay about the product that we’ve developed at BEA (Aqualogic) a few months back. The negotations were intense, with [...]

Business is probably one of the places where generosity’s returns can be seen monetarily pretty quickly, as multiple deals occur over the course of a year. People who like how you do business come back to you time and time again, eagerly and happily, yielding direct gains for your company. Here’s an example we recently [...]

While the previous examples have all illustrated generosity by taking less than you normally do, this goal can also be accomplished by giving more than you are supposed to! The general point is that if the other person feels like he is getting a good deal, he’ll come back to you over and over [...]

Here’s a real world case study regarding a deal WM Media was in last year, in which generosity would have been the better road to go. I’d written about it previously in Seven Mistakes In One Day. The Problem In the deal, we’d acquired a website but without the license, which we’d understood would come [...]

As I racked my brain, it occurs to me that this isn’t the first time the taking less than your fair share concept has been encountered! It had made its first appearance in a negotiations class that I took in college. The Negotiations Situation Imagine there are three research companies A, B, and C. Because they’re [...]

Today, as I talked with my girlfriend, we came up with one of the most important concepts in my life that will probably make me happier and richer than anything else I’ve ever learned. I hope this idea is as inspiring to you as it was to me! A Situation To Test Your Generosity Imagine yourself in [...]

In the previous conversation skills article, we’d talked about some ways to have a better conversation. In this article, we’ll delve in depth into what for some is one of the most uncomfortable parts of a conversation: silence. Do you often feel the need to say something when there’s a silence? Do you feel awkward [...]

Are you faced with a seemingly impossible situation or dilemma? Do all the solutions seem inadequate to you? Here’s something to think about! An Interesting Problem Pretend for a moment that you are a kid playing in a sandbox with some other kids. You are all running around, laughing, having fun! Yay! They’re all a lot of [...]