In a recent article written by politico, they try to paint Trump as a bad negotiator because of deal he made in the book, "Art Of The Deal".
In the article a Harvard business professor says:
“What should have been a great deal on a book about negotiation actually is one of the most interesting pieces of evidence that he’s not a good negotiator.”
They cite that because he paid his writer so well. In it, Trump gave his writer a 500K cash advance and half of the royalties. They in essence describe him as someone who is being generous, and try to make that into a negative.
This is what the left don't seem to get. Making a deal isn't always about being shrewd and sucking as much as you can out of something. This is what's called a FAIR deal, something Democrats don't understand with their "my way or the highway" scorched earth tactics. Those interactions can no longer even be described as deals. They are more accurately, the will of others forced upon people.
When it comes to things like world trade, deals are supposed to be fair, not one sided, like they are now.
So which is it liberals.....Trump is a bad negotiator because he isn't always shrewd to the point of screwing other people over, or is there not an imbalance in the way China treats the US on world trade? It's like by proxy and subconsciously, liberals praise China for screwing the US over and consider that what China is doing to the US makes them "great deal makers", rather than bad actors.
At no point, though, in the past nearly half a century—from the shrewd, well-timed talks that led to the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to the agreements behind The Art of the Deal and “The Apprentice”—did Trump’s negotiations in real estate and entertainment circles prepare him fully for the degree of nuance and complexity he now faces as president.
Say's who? If anything he's shown flexibility and the ability to adapt to many different types of deals.
You know what people are sick of in politics? Nuance and complexity! The definition of nuance is literally: "a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound". If you want nuance, go to a wine tasting or art gallery. This is government, this is policy, this is rule of law, this is the will of the people. These aren't things that should be like navigating a room of frosted glass windows trying to tell what's on the other side.
Part of making a deal is having a clear picture of what both sides want. Not a nuanced picture, a CLEAR picture. Most people don't know this, but when Rocket Man's people blew off Trump (something you won't hear in the MSM), that is what prompted Trump to cancel the summit.
People were waiting to meet with their N. Korean counterparts as an official meeting that was setup, and they just flat out never showed. So Trump made it CLEAR that this was unacceptable, and announced he was cancelling the summit, while giving them the opportunity to come to him if they decided they wanted to talk. He didn't pussyfoot around pouting about why N. Korea didn't call him, he didn't say "What are your demands to come back to the table N. Korea?". He took ACTION, he made his intentions clear, he made the benefits clear, and he made the consequences clear, and he got results, didn't he?
I'm only surprised they didn't cry foul that Trump hired someone to write his book, as if that would be something out of the ordinary.
Throughout the article, they claim to have interviewed some people who work for Trump:
“We used to get the subcontractor, and we used to sit ‘em down, and we used to say, ‘OK, what’s your best price?’” Barbara Res, the Trump Tower construction manager, told me. “And they would tell us, you know, $5,650,000 or something, and we would say, ‘OK, go in with $5,800,000, and Trump’ll beat you down. Because Trump had to get his pound of flesh. And he had to believe that only he could do that.”
That's just basic haggling. Someone offers a higher price, and you negotiate to a lower price. But I find it disconcerting that an employee would basically tell someone to high ball a price to their boss, just so that it can be negotiated down to the price they first gave. That to me sounds like someone who should be fired, since they are effectively sabotaging the attempt to make a deal before dealing even starts.
But again, making deals aren't always about being shrewd. In construction, you often get what you pay for, for better or for worse. Not to mention, in order to have a building built, you obviously need to make more money from the building itself, than it costs to build it otherwise you wouldn't bother to have it built. So a 200,000 quibble is quite insignificant in the face of millions of dollars in profits, and good works are often more successful and less problem free the more money you have on hand. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of Mexicans building a house with hammered nails rather than screws and braces (Which happens quite often in California).
At their core, deals are about benefits. You've got something I want, I've got something you want. We trade. We both benefit. If I don't benefit, why would I make a deal? If I've got something you want, and you've got nothing to give, that is not a deal. Yet that's exactly what has been happening in world trade with places like China. We've got something they want (consumers), yet stifle the ability for the US to trade with China by having steep tariff's on American goods, while also undercutting the US with artificially deflated currency, stock markets that are only allowed to change a few percentage points before the government shuts it down to mitigate losses, and stealing intellectual property that costs billions of dollars a year to research and develop.
We often refer to things as annually, and that gives us a number, but it's not a fixed number. China steals over 600 billion annually in intellectual property theft alone. That means in the last 2 decades, we're looking at Trillions of dollars in losses, with a big fat T. That's not even counting the losses due to the bad trade practices from China. We often don't know what we lost if we never had it. But how about the national debt halved? Just 2 years of China not screwing us on intellectual property theft and trade could have paid for both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as if they cost us nothing. Just ONE MONTH of the trade deficit being fixed is enough to BUILD THE WALL!
But it goes on to say:
But Res often was impressed.
“Damned if Trump wouldn’t get ‘em down to $5,500,000,” she said. “So sometimes he actually did better than we did.”
How?
“No. 1, maybe he was a little smarter than we were with the sub,” she said, shortening “subcontractor.” “No. 2, there was the star factor, you know? We didn’t have that, but Trump did. And No. 3, he was very good at ‘futurizing.’ He called it that. It’s getting somebody and making them believe they have a future with the company and so they should therefore take less money or do more work or whatever. The last thing he said is he would put them on the map—and, you know, Trump Tower did put a lot of subcontractors on the map.”
So first Trump is bad at deals....but now he's good at deals? They said their best deal was 5.65 million, told to upscale it to 5.8 million so he could haggle them down, and he brought them down to 5.5 million. Sounds like a fucking deal to me!
It makes you wonder though, is this a bad employee....or is her presence part of the deal making process? She asks them their best price "in confidence" before they think a deal is even being negotiated, Trump now knows their "best" deal. They're told to ask for even more thinking that they're going to get at least what their first offer is. And BAM, they're off guard, haggled down to a price lower than their initial "best" price. Clearly 5.6 wasn't their best price.
You always have to get your pound of flesh in these types of deals anyways, because the first offer is always the highest. That's why it's called "what the market can bear".
'Futurizing' is pretty common place in deal making. Yet they try to make "futurizing" sound like it's some stupid eccentricity Trump has that toots his own horn. If a business is set to do a lot of business with you, you charge lower prices. That's what's called ECONOMY OF SCALE. It's why big corporations like Walmart, can out price pretty much any local chain. A big part of why it works, is because it is an X increase in profit over a shorter period of time. If I'm doing 10 big transactions/projects with a company over a year that are going to bring me more profit than I would have otherwise made hoping to sell my services to various other companies, I'm going to give them a better deal. Maybe without them, I do half those projects over a 2 year period. So do I hold out for 5 projects over a 2 year period and make less money overall, or do I do those 10 projects in a year and make essentially twice the money I would have otherwise made, in half the time!
Economy of scale is everywhere. Buy more of something, get a better price.
Now Trump is the president. And the people who know him and have worked with him and the experts who have studied his negotiating skills are unsurprised he’s having some trouble in his new role.
“He’s dealing with people that aren’t just trying to make money,” Blair said. “They’re elected politicians, heads of state, that have their own very demanding constituencies. It’s really very different than a strict dollars-and-cents motivation that he was dealing with before.”
So again, which is it?! First Trump is bad at making deals because he didn't have a dollars and cents motivation to haggle down his book deal with his writer, yet when it's convenient, they describe him as the opposite. Is he both dollar and cent motivated, and not, at the same time!? Clearly, each deal requires different tactics based on the nature of the transaction and what you need, and in some cases, what you already have.
For example, why would a millionaire mow my lawn for minimum wage if they're a millionaire? Why would I mow my own lawn for that matter? My time would clearly be worth more and better spent doing other things. If I'm making $50/hr, spending an hour doing something I could pay someone $10 to do, seems like a waste of my time, unless I'm doing it as a point of pride or a leisure activity where the value of my time is trivial and self determined.
I wouldn't think "Oh I can't see that 1 hour long movie because it's only a $15 a ticket event, my time is worth $50 an hour! I could be making more money in that time!". Or "Why would I eat a $3 cheeseburger when I'm a billionaire, clearly I could be having way better $100 cheeseburgers whenever I wanted!". But this is exactly what liberals think having wealth is. "Only the best for me and never any less, I will never eat a $3 cheeseburger again! It's beneath me!".
I may have gone off on a tangent, but the point is, not everything is about dollar cent motivation.
Trump had the leverage. And he used it. But this level of discipline and focus started to dissipate in the mid-‘80s—starting, ironically, with Schwartz’s The Art of the Deal deal.
Or maybe he wanted to ensure he got a good quality book from a happy well paid writer. In this case, it seems like he didn't need the best deal, and again, you often get what you pay for.
It's not like Trump needed the money to make the best deal. With half the royalties being the writers, that gives the writer more incentive to do a good job for the success of the book.
This book clearly wasn't just about churning something out to make money, it was personal. It would be like if a person wrote an autobiography about themselves just to make money. It would be soul-less. Does that sound like a book anyone wants to read? No, people write autobiographies to share themselves, their struggles, their passions, their insights, their good works, with the world.
Some of the best book writers don't do it for the money (although everyone's gotta eat), there is gratification in having something you created read and enjoyed by a lot of people. It's the very reason I take the effort to write this very piece you're reading to begin with. I'm clearly not doing it for the money. But that just goes to show the perspective of the leftist media. It's all about putting out that next piece of anti Trump material, so they can get more shock, more views, and hence, more money. For them, their popularity is tied to their ability for it to make them money, rather than being tied to their humanity.
Submitted June 03, 2018 at 11:27AM by preferredfault https://ift.tt/2JfAthX
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