By Samuel Dinnar and Lawrence Susskind
We all know the statistics. Most start-up businesses fail. While many experts attribute the high failure rate to the risks associated with innovation, we have found that an equally significant cause is the mismanagement of key relationships, and more specifically, the way that founders and entrepreneurs negotiate.
Being the leader of a start-up company entails a range of negotiations with partners, potential partners, investors, and others at various stages of the growth process – from the “seed” stage when the business is just an idea to later stages when the company is generating revenue and facing expansion challenges. Through the research and interviews for our book Entrepreneurial Negotiation: Understanding And Managing The Relationships That Determine Your Entrepreneurial Success (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), we have discovered that successful entrepreneurs are those who, although they make mistakes when negotiating, are able to recover and learn from their errors.
Related website: Vienna School of Negotiation
About the Authors
Samuel Dinnar, co-author of Entrepreneurial Negotiation, is an instructor at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As founder and President of Meedance, he provides global consulting services and serves as a mediator specialising in business conflicts that involve founders, executives, investors, and board members. To learn more, visit: www.EntrepreneurialNegotiation.com or www.meedance.com
Lawrence Susskind, co-author of Entrepreneurial Negotiation, is a professor of urban and environmental planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founder of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and the founder of the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more, visit www.EntrepreneurialNegotiation.com
