Negotiation Speaker Says Business Survival is a Martial Art
January 26th, 2010 |
Nearly anyone trained in the martial arts has a good laugh when watching evildoers attacking good guys in the movies. The hero faces dozens or even hundreds of foes, and each one lines-up and takes a shot at the champion, who smartly and deftly disables each in turn.
“Why don’t they attack, simultaneously?” I keep asking myself. Because it’s a movie, dummy, and the hero must win.
I believe this silliness is emblematic of our business challenges. In the slow, pre-Internet polite economy in which we’d participate, we could seemingly fend off one competitor at a time.
“Company X’s price is 10% cheaper? Okay, we’ll show them. We’ll cut our price by 15% Aha! Take that!” We’d take about a month to go to press with another dead-tree brochure, and our foes would take about the same to respond, and so went our competitive cut-and-thrust.
Quaint, wasn’t it?
Just today, I read an article in Time Magazine that noted how until quite recently American architects could bill clients about $10,000 for certain designs. Now, these can be outsourced to China, and returned in a day or two, for about $600.
Thus, it isn’t as if Architect “A” is competing against “B” in the old-fashioned, hand-to-hand combat, sense. If they’re competing, it is on an entirely different level, one that involves world-sourcing, and super-fast turnaround times, as well as inconceivable price-plunging.
Where are the profits?
Short answer: In innovating.
We have to do something new, or something we’re used to doing but in a very novel way. And when we have done this, we have to quickly invent again, because the half-life of our market preeminence will be measured in days, weeks, and if we’re lucky, in months.
Welcome to the martial art of business survival, where challenges are coming at us from all directions, simultaneously, and relentlessly.
Dr. Gary S. Goodman is a top-ranked negotiation speaker, telemarketing speaker, and customer service speaker at Google, and a distinguished, sought-after sales speaker, motivational speaker, and attorney. President of Customersatisfaction.com, he is a frequent TV and radio commentator and the best-selling author of 12 books and more than 1,700 articles that appear in 25,000 publications. President of Customersatisfaction.com, Gary conducts seminars and speaks at convention programs around the world. His new audio program is Nightingale-Conant’s “Crystal Clear Communication: How to Explain Anything Clearly in Speech & Writing.” His web site is: http://www.customersatisfaction.com, and professional speaking, seminar, and consulting invitations can be addressed to: gary@customersatisfaction.com.
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