Steven P. Cohen and his organization, The Negotiation Skills Company, help executives further their business goals by teaching them the benefits of cultural sensitivity.

by Peggy Cope

Steven P. Cohen, president of The Negotiation Skills Company (pictured at left), is a lawyer by training, but when asked about the actual practice of law, he will tell you, “In my entire life, I have behaved as a lawyer for maybe a day-and-a-half.” The graduate of Columbia Law School, Brandeis University, and Henley Management College says he went to law school to learn how to deal with lawyers.

Cohen also trained in the art of negotiation, advanced negotiation, and mediation at Harvard Law School. A good portion of his early career was spent in real estate, and he spent a dozen years in politics and government, serving as the City of Boston’s Washington lobbyist during the Nixon and Ford Administrations. Currently, his dance card is kept very full with speaking engagements and writing.

The Negotiation Skills Company (TNSC) provides consulting and in-house training for corporate clients on a truly global basis: 85 countries on almost every continent. Its clients represent business sectors ranging from healthcare and banking to utilities and defense manufacturing, and the training is both rigorous and customized. Cohen is bringing his skills to bear as a keynote speaker at FAO Today’s FAO Summit in New York City on June 3.

What led Cohen to a life of negotiation was pure serendipity. “When I stopped being in the real estate business, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” he said. He had signed up for the Harvard course in negotiation, but he had no idea why. At the end of the course, Harvard put him on the advisory board for its program in negotiation. He took that as a sign.

His philosophy was to empower people to solve their own problems and not have to rely on outsiders. For a time, he wavered between negotiation and mediation, but reasoned that: “Mediation is solving a problem that already exists. Negotiation, hopefully, is a way of preventing problems from occurring.”
The common thread linking everything Cohen has done is relationships, the linchpin of good negotiation. And relationships are essential when two companies are trying to work together, particularly if they are on opposite sides of the globe.

“The one commodity everyone is trading is information,” he said. “You are getting information on people’s cultural habits and preferences, as well as information about pricing, specifications, speed of delivery, quality control—you’re getting all those things. They’re learning about you, you’re learning about them.”

The best way to derive information is to ask questions, said Cohen. “Let’s say you are dealing with a person in a country where you cannot tell by the name whether the person is male or female. You don’t want to write an e-mail or make a phone call and say ‘Mr. So-and-So,’ only to find out it’s a woman, or vice versa. You have to find a gentle way to say, ‘Waldo is not a common name in my country, and I have no idea whether it’s a male or female name in your country.’”

Information on this level may seem simple-minded, but it will color the relationship a company is building. “It’s all about establishing the relationship. If you are going to have a relationship with a person you might never meet, you have to get off on the right foot,” he said.

Cohen uses his negotiation instincts and knowledge automatically. He also picks his battles, and finds it helps in business as much as in life. “Sometimes I say ‘I don’t want to push on this, the issue might not be worth it.’” He went on to give an example.

TNSC, which creates a lot of printed material as part of its operations, produces one piece it hands out at conferences. The printer the company uses for much of its work printed this piece improperly once, to the tune of 5,000 copies. Cohen called the head of the printing company and said, gently, “You blew it.” The printing executive offered to generate 5,000 perfect copies free of charge. After some thought, Cohen said he would use the 5,000 copies that were wrong, and when they were done, begin using properly printed ones. He paid the plant for both sets of 5,000. But why?

“The negotiation in my mind wasn’t about his having screwed up: Now, when I want something from him, we always go to the front of the line,” he said.

From Differences Come Benefits
For companies that are working through the outsourcing of finance and administration, particularly if they are doing so on a global basis, negotiations and relationships are key.

In any negotiation—which will always be cross-cultural when you are outsourcing a business process—you are looking for ways to derive benefit from a variety of differences, according to Cohen. “Clearly, if people in another country will do the same job less expensively, that’s good. But you must also be concerned about the quality of skills, materials, software, all that.” Companies outsourcing to lower-cost geographies must keep sight of quality even while seeking to lower costs. In addition, they must keep an eye out for compliance issues that arise from offshored work.

But even aside from the implications of errors that directly impact functions being performed by a third-party provider, Cohen emphasized that creating a good relationship with supplier companies and their individual employees can have a strong impact on business. Sending a Christmas card to every employee or treating them to a New England lobster dinner may be grand if they are based in the U.S., but in another country, such well-intentioned moves could turn into divisive faux pas. Yet foreign gestures, even blunders, can forge important bonds.

“I was working in India, and their sweets are different from ours,” said Cohen. “We have a confectionery store near where I live [in Boston], so I took a bunch of candied ginger dipped in dark chocolate, and I gave some to an India woman I was working with, and said, ‘Try this.’” The woman’s initial doubt turned to glee, as she tasted the treat. Cohen split the candy with her on the spot. A friendly moment generated business benefits. “She made two business decisions that were highly favorable to me that I didn’t even ask for,” he noted.

Cross-cultural errors carry the potential to create problems—or new opportunities to learn. Cohen had dinner with an Indian colleague and his wife at a nice restaurant, which was well air-conditioned. On leaving the restaurant, he kissed the man’s wife on both cheeks, and because his glasses had promptly fogged up on leaving the restaurant for the humid street, he failed to notice her outstretched hand waiting for a handshake. Cohen and his colleague’s wife were mortified. But later he told the colleague how embarrassed he had been, and the colleague related his own tale of offending an Indian woman who lived in the U.S. by shaking her hand rather than kissing her!

“If you look at cross-cultural negotiations, you have to learn as much as you can of the taboos of a culture you are dealing with. What they don’t want is more important than what they do want,” Cohen emphasized. He noted two cultural versions of the Golden Rule. The Christian edition is proactive: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In contrast, the Jewish version notes: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”

“We have to be careful not to be ‘proactive’ when working with other cultures,” he said. That means not approaching any business relationship from a viewpoint that says, “We are better than you, more developed, we have better cultural norms.” Said Cohen, “You have to remember not to be a pain in the ass, culturally.”

When approaching someone from a different culture, Cohen said, he might say: “We’ve never met, I don’t know anything about you or your background, and I want to be careful not to do anything that would offend you. It would be a huge favor to me if you would act as my mentor and tell me if I do or say anything you find troublesome.” Chances are they would never tell you that you’re chewing your gum too loudly, he said, but you have shown your good faith.

The principle applies whether it’s your first time dealing with people from different cultures or from different industries. “Get them to run you through it so you don’t offend them or make a fool of yourself. And in that order,” said Cohen. “It’s a way of showing respect before talking about your own self-interest.”

In cross-cultural negotiations, he said, the old question from Vaudeville applies. “If a man says something and his wife is not there, is he still wrong?” Even with that degree of relationship (husband/wife), there are cultural differences. “If you can be sensitive to them in your own household, maybe you can be sensitive to differences when you are dealing with folks who are a million miles away,” he said.