Thursday, October 6, 2011
Pemberton In-Class Activity
This in class activity easily taught me some of the aspects of negotiation, and how sometimes you must work with a competitor if it can help you I the end. My group chose to work with our competition after the first negotiation period, as we both came to realize that cooperating could help us to both maximize our profits. While business is cut-throat, sometimes you must comply with competition in order to help yourself, so both groups came together and worked to maximize profit. The end of the activity also taught me the value of trust, and not to have too much of it. The group that represented our competitors chose to dishonor hour agreement, leading to an enormous profit for themselves and leaving us with only a slight profit. So while they cooperated to that point, I and my partner should have realized the profit opportunity was too high and should have also changed our choice for the last week of the simulation.
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I think the trust aspect of the scenario complicated it all significantly. It would be great to reach a negotiation and have both sides stick to it, no questions asked, but that's unrealistic. When my group negotiated with our competitors, we insisted that the score cards were filled out during the first negotiation so that nobody could pull tricks on the other team. While many teams were double crossed at the end due to the desire for potentially hire profits, we were both safely making profits. It's less exciting, but essentially we had a contract that we couldn't back out of. As a result, both teams were equally profitable and nobody was left feeling like they lost in the end.
ReplyDeleteMy group took on the same method as yours. We decided to help each other out and stay closed, which would leave us both earning the same about of money. Trust was the main factor that we were basing our future income off of. This exercise proved that the saying "business is business" and in the end my partner and I ended up getting stiffed. They were looking to make money just as much as we were, to in the last open/close stage they went against our agreement and earned 4x the profit.
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