Prof. Dato’ Dr. Noor Azizi Ismail
Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world. We tell and listen to stories daily with people close to us; our spouses, children, colleagues, bosses, and subordinates. Some people share their stories on social media platforms, and they reach out to a much bigger audience in a matter of seconds. Joshua Weiss in his book, The Book of Real-World Negotiation, said stories stay in our memories better than theories, concepts or facts. That is how knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.
When I was Vice Chancellor of Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, I remember telling a story about a young but vibrant university located in a faraway place, northeast of Peninsular Malaysia. It was during an International Think Tank Forum in Beijing in 2019. I was seated next to the Presidents of Cornell University, the National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Peking University, four World top universities. Unlike those universities, UMK has no big achievements to shout about. The best we can do is to share our story, our big dreams, our plans and our strategies to become one of the best entrepreneurship universities in Asia, and maybe one day in the world. We then invited them to become part of our interesting journey to make our dreams a reality. Amazingly, after the presentation, a number of professors from several top universities came to approach me to discuss potential collaborations.
Storytelling and Negotiation
Storytelling is a powerful way to build relationships. That is how conversations begin. We share stories, we establish networking and then we collaborate. Collaboration is the key to success. We also use storytelling to negotiate. We may not realise it but we regularly negotiate in our everyday life, at home and at work. Over the past thirteen years as an academic administrator, I have negotiated with many parties at different levels.
I learned to negotiate formally in 2011. I was then the founding Dean of the Othman Yeop Abdullah Graduate School of Business, University Utara Malaysia. Being a newly established business school, I believe the fastest way to grow is to network with renowned professors and collaborate with world-top business schools and learn from them. I remember spending three nights writing the nicest email that I could write and sending it to ten professors from the world’s top ten business schools, inviting them to become part of the school. Eventually, six professors responded, and two from Judge Business School, the University of Cambridge and London Business School, agreed to visit our school and become our distinguished adjunct professors.
We negotiated their flight tickets and honorariums. The professors told me they normally fly First Class for a long business trip which will be very costly but we managed to persuade him to fly in Business Class. They also agreed to a small honorarium we offered, more like a token to them. I still remember one of the professors whispered to me at the airport while waiting for his flight back to London, “I agreed because you write a nice email and I like your dreams”. That put a big smile on my face. We organised two seminars during their visits and invited the Chairman and CEOs of GLCs and MNCs to attend. More than 100 participants attended and that was a big boost to our new school, far worth the money we spent.
I then approached 20 CEOs of GLCs and MNCs. My task is to persuade them to become our Industry Advisory Panels. They are important to provide valuable inputs and feedback to the school while at the same time helping to increase our visibility and branding. They were CEOs and I was just a young and inexperienced business school Dean. I remember one of the CEOs arrogantly asked me, where is your business school compared to Harvard Business School. I calmly replied that we are nothing compared to HBS but he and other local CEOs can definitely help us to become one. We shared our plans and strategies to become of the best business schools in the region. Eventually, we managed to persuade ten of them to sit on our Industry Advisory Panels.
As Deputy Director General of Higher Education at the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, I was tasked by the Minister to negotiate with Alibaba to sign an MoU with one of our public universities and run e-commerce series of training for Malaysian entrepreneurship educators and students, and that include negotiating the training costs. Alibaba is a big name and to persuade them to work with us requires a strong commitment from our side and some added value to them. Our team helped Alibaba with inputs to develop customised training programmes which were later launched and benefited many participants from our local universities. On the other hand, Alibaba has two training programmes which can be offered to other universities in the region. It is a win-win deal.
In February 2018, I accompanied the Minister of Higher Education at that time, Tan Sri Idris Jusoh to Istanbul. He was scheduled to deliver a ministerial talk at Eurasia Higher Education Summit (EURIE). Since several ministers were invited to speak, the organiser informed us, a day prior to the event, that each minister will be given only 10 minutes to speak with no slide presentation allowed. We have prepared a 30-minute speech on Redesigning Higher Education: Malaysia’s Experience with PowerPoint slides. Tan Sri Idris said he will not give a 10-minute speech. We immediately contacted the organiser to request a special time allocation for our minister but it was rejected. We got back to our drawing table and decided to contact Dr Mustafa Aydin, the Chairman of EURIE. I was given the task to lead the negotiation. We laid out reasons why Malaysia should be given a special time. Alhamdulillah, we finally received confirmation that our minister will be given a special 30-minute slot and a projector will also be prepared for the slides presentation. It was midnight when I received the text from the organiser. The next day, Tan Sri Idris Jusoh delivered a wonderful speech and received a standing ovation from more than 3,000 participants from more than 30 countries. It was well worth the effort.
Of all the experiences, one that I remembered the most was my negotiation with Rezzen Sdn Bhd, an educational consultant, and a good partner to Universiti Utara Malaysia for almost a decade, delivering our MBA and DBA programmes to students in Kuala Lumpur city centre. However, the university decided to end the partnership for several reasons. Ending the partnership was a big deal for Rezzen as they might be losing the business, and we do not want that to happen. As a Dean, I was tasked to lead the negotiation. It was a tough experience. Dato Dr Salih @ Vincent Lowe, Managing Director of Rezzen was one of the nicest persons I have known. As an alternative to MBA and DBA, we offered Rezzen to run our executive training programmes. The negotiation did not work well but we avoided going to court due to our good relationship. We maintained our close relationship until he passed away a few years ago.
Key Principles to Negotiation
I have no formal training in negotiation. I learned mostly from the ‘streets’, the trial and error, and observations until I recently found the right book on negotiation authored by Joshua Weiss. He shared five principles that great negotiators do to maximise the value in negotiations, which I will summarise in this section.
The first principle is preparation. President Eisenhower once said, “I have found that plans are useless, but planning is everything”. The first reason is, what happens in a negotiation is partly contingent on the actions of the other. Second, negotiations are rarely linear and full of unexpected twists and turns. Thus, having a specific plan of action rarely works effectively. While negotiators need to be clear on the end goal but they must be flexible on how to get there.
The second principle is about mindset and the importance of cultivating the relationship between two parties. Negotiators need to bring a mutual gains thought process to the negotiation table that puts them in the right frame to envision potential solutions and freely explore possibilities that meet both their and the other negotiator’s needs. The mutual gains mindset ties directly into the importance of relationship building. Good negotiators will seek to meet their short-term interests while preserving the long-term relationship.
The third principle is creative problem-solving. In difficult scenarios, negotiators need to envision the negotiation process as a creative problem-solving endeavour. When negotiator engages in creative problem-solving, they need to free their mind from their traditional constraints and must be able to engage in innovative explorations. It is about connecting the dots. These connections will bring a new reality to the forefront and different workable ideas to light. According to William Plomer, “creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected”.
The fourth principle is managing the emotional side of the negotiation. Humans are full of emotions. It is almost impossible to keep them out of the negotiation process. What is important is how does one let the emotions in with some control? In negotiation, it is important to learn how to manage not only our emotions well, but at times, manage the emotions of our negotiation counterparts so that their emotions did not overwhelm them and become an impediment to the negotiation’s success.
The fifth and final principle is uncovering the hidden dimensions. Astute negotiators will look for hidden dimensions during the negotiation process and will assume there is more going on than just meets the eye. Many of the covert dimensions such as cross-cultural elements and other psychological factors may impact or drive the negotiation process. They are far from obvious and require a lot of exploration and investigation. Hence, the ability to read and understand body language will be an advantage in the negotiation process.
Conclusion
Learning to be an effective negotiator is a journey, not a destination. Along the journey, we will encounter many notions about what effective negotiation looks like. Here are the lessons I have learned. First, I understand the importance of storytelling to convey your dreams, ideas and arguments. We build relationships via storytelling to gain trust and confidence. Second, negotiation is not about winning or losing. It is about building a long-term relationship with mutual benefits to both parties. Third, negotiation is not about compromising something important to get the deal done. While compromise may be needed from time to time especially when a difficult issue remains elusive, good negotiators will explore all the underlying interests and sources of value that exist prior to compromising. Compromise is the last resort. Fourth, negotiation is not about exploiting and taking advantage of the weaknesses of the other negotiator. Again, it is not about winning or losing. Rather, it is about cultivating relationships and finding creative solutions. Finally, it is important to manage emotions. I believe being humble but firm plays a big role to strike a balanced deal.
Prof. Dato’ Dr. Noor Azizi Ismail, fondly known as Prof GG is a Professor of Accounting Information Systems at the Malaysian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship and Business, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan. Dr Azizi has vast experience in academic administration, having served as Dean of Business School, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Deputy Director General of Higher Education and Vice-Chancellor and President. He is passionate about leadership, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.
