NEGOTIATING DURING HARD TIMES ***SOLD OUT***
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Session 1.  9:00am - 12:00pm. Negotiating Training Session. 12:00 - 1:00pm Lunch
Session 2.  12:00pm - 1:00pm. Lunch.  1:00 - 4:00pm Negotiating Training Session.
Deloitte & Touche office (26th Floor Conference Room), 50 Fremont Street, San Francisco

Looking for a way to sharpen your negotiation skills? Sign up for the Wharton Club of Northern California's "Negotiating During Hard Times", presented by Eric C. Gould, a negotiation expert with more than twenty years experience. Based on his extensive research and modeling of great Silicon Valley negotiators, this seminar will teach you how to enhance your power and improve your outcomes. This is not a sit-back-and-listen seminar--you will learn through active exercises and in the context of relevant examples to:

• Work better deals more quickly and efficiently
• Get people to the table
• Avoid concessions and decrease your losses
• Exceed your aspired outcome values
• Employ methods of fairness
• Tame the most difficult negotiating beast
• Build long-term business relationships

This seminar - and its presentation style - is designed for people who live and breathe the Silicon Valley business world, and it will be best appreciated by those involved in:

• Licensing arrangements
• Patent agreements
• Distribution deals
• Venture capital funding and investments
• Purchase and sales agreements
• Business partnering relationships

Register Online
Date: Saturday, December 6
Time:
Session 1.  9:00am - 12:00pm. Negotiating Training Session. 12:00 - 1:00pm Lunch
Session 2.  12:00pm - 1:00pm. Lunch.  1:00 - 4:00pm Negotiating Training Session.
Place: Deloitte & Touche office (26th Floor Conference Room). 50 Fremont Street in San Francisco.
Fee: $45 for members; WCNC members only for this event. Limited to 20 people. Reservations will be taken on a first-come, first-served basis, so register early! Requests for refunds after 4:00pm Thursday, December 4th are at the discretion of the WCNC.

Eric will discuss questions such as:

1. Do tough, hard-ball negotiators make better deals?
2. Where is the line between looking out for yourself and being nice? Does being nice hurt your outcome? Might being nice hurt your counterpart's outcome?
3. How can you use negotiation to solve problems, and keep the negotiation from becoming a problem in its own right?
4. How come, in retrospect, deals often seem like they could have been a little better? Do you get most of what you want most of the time? How much value do you routinely leave on the table? How can you build deals to incorporate more value for everyone involved?
5. Why do you choose to reveal some information and hide the rest? Is it important to demonstrate your power? What do you risk by revealing your true interests?
6. What should you do when bad behavior pits people against each other? How can you drive the discussion back to the issues and curb childish games without taking an authoritarian stance that alienates your counterpart?
7. How do you get buy-in? How come things go along so nicely until the terms have to be firmed up, put on paper?
8. What changes when more than two people are involved in a deal? How can you minimize the complication of internal negotiations, within your own ranks and theirs?
9. How do people's emotions really figure into business deals? How can the discussion be kept tied to the objective facts?
10. What about difficult negotiators? How can you compete with the expert negotiator who has ten tricks in every pocket and is firing them into my blind-spot?

Eric Gould
Eric Gould has become Silicon Valley's top negotiation consultant through a unique understanding of technology and human interaction. He works with leading technology companies to enhance their professionals' and attorneys' communication and persuasion skills. His teaching cases are distributed by Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation. His clients have included: Apple, Netscape, Palm, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati,, MacAfee, Brocade and Paypal.

Mr. Gould has also developed numerous technologies and products over the past 25 years, including the first LAN based email service and the first print spooler both of which were sold to Sun Microsystems. He was also responsible for the first commercial remote network access product then sold to Farrallon Computing, software development tools sold to Symantec, operating system utilities sold to Peter Norton, a virtual file server purchased by Novell, and an online software updating service sold to CNET.

Mr. Gould is currently involved in defining and identifying acquisition targets for technology companies and personally provides seed capital to the next generation of technology start-up firms.