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MYTH: ONE-SIDED DEALS LEAVE YOU SITTING PRETTY

"They'll fire you for losing before they'll fire you for cheating."  This is a truism that many fans believe about sports: winning is so important that it excuses anything.  Unfortunately, it is sometimes true. Even worse, this ethic has now all too often been carried over into the world of business, where it can do a great deal more harm than on
the playing field.

Cheating and lying have become acceptable parts of doing business in America. Usually it does not go so far as someone's actually committing a crime, but takes the form of trying to screw people with one-sided deals.

Hollywood is famous for one-sided deals. When someone wants to screw you in the film world, you know what they will say to you? "Trust me!" It's just accepted in Hollywood that the other guys want to screw you, and if you're not shrewd enough to screw them back, then too bad for you. In fact, there's an accounting firm in New York whose sole job is to audit television shows and film productions so that people who own a part of them make sure they're not getting screwed.

It happens in other businesses, too. The people who do this think it's great to screw someone because it makes them shrewder or smarter than the other person. What they don't realize is that each time they do it, they're cutting off one more finger. Sometimes they get short-term gains out of it, but in the long term, they won't get substance and growth from that deal. Business is more than just next year.

It happens in professional football, too. There are general managers of teams that take an athlete or his agent and really think if they can screw him and give him less than the market price around the league, they've done yeoman's service.

In making deals, you buy and sell a lot. I don't want to steal from somebody. I may want to come back and make a deal with you tomorrow, or maybe next year. I'm going to do my best to look at the contract from both sides and make a fair, upright, handshake deal with you. I want to make out and I want you to make out.

There are different kinds of deals, of course. Sometimes you're dealing for long-term gains; other times for more cash into your company right now. But on down the road after the deal is made, we all determine whether the other guy tried to screw us. When I make a deal with somebody, I want him to be able to look at it five years from now and say, "Tarkenton made a fair deal with me."

There are two things involved here. One, the ethics.  Two, it's good business. If I've been honest and tried to make a fair deal and look at it from both sides so you can come out and I can come out, you are going to deal with me again, aren't you? But if you find that I'm a son of a bitch who made a one-sided deal with you where I made out and you lost your ass, you're not going to deal with me again. And you shouldn't.

Maybe what it all comes down to is trust. I think we need to reestablish trust in our business dealings by bringing honesty and candor to our negotiations. You can't bullshit or try to trick the other guy.  Your negotiating partner is probably talking not only with you but with some competition as well. Probably both of you are offering good products at relatively similar prices. That customer is finally going to buy from the person he trusts the most.

You establish trust with candor and honesty and by not using gimmicks or tricks. You can't be deceptive and win consistently. Sometimes you've seen someone start at ground zero and fly high right away. You say, "Shit, boy, look at them!" And you know that company or person is using dirty tricks and unethical tactics and that some things may not be completely honorable.  You get tempted to say, "God, maybe that's the way to do it, because look how well they're doing."

But most of the people I've seen taking off like that come down burning. Look at John DeLorean. He had everybody, including the whole British government, persuaded to invest in a company that soon went bankrupt.  Jake Butcher, developer of the 1982 World's Fair, had his banking empire collapse around him. David Begelman, the movie mogul who got hot at the top, was convicted of embezzling funds from Columbia Pictures.

One of the best ways to rebuild honesty and trust in your corporate life is to bring emotion back into business.  We need some entrepreneurial passion in the boardroom that makes people stand in their chairs and shout with excitement about some new product they have developed. I don't generally believe that cheerleading is the secret to business success, but I do believe we need a strong emotional commitment to our products and our services. That is the first way to develop trust in the marketplace.

An emotional commitment to my own business served me well recently when I realized that Exxon, the petroleum giant, was going to renege on a deal with me. I entered their conference room, opened my bag of chewing tobacco, spat into a porcelain coffee cup and said, "Well, I see the largest corporation in the world is here with their lawyers, and one of the biggest ad agencies in the world is here with its lawyers - and I'm here. Alone.
Gentlemen, that's a fair fight."

The difference was that I was fighting for my money and they were fighting for Exxon's. Because I'm not an unbending soul, I offered to let them out of the deal and settle for roughly six times their original offer. Whereupon I left for California, where I later got the news that the oil company had accepted. They realized I had a strong emotional commitment to my business and to my reputation - and that I wasn't afraid to show it and fight for it.

People have to know you are not bullshitting them.  When I told my teammates on the Vikings that I wanted their input in calling the offensive plays, they had to know I meant it. They would see right through me immediately if I only talked about it but did not carry it out. That kind of one-sided deal would have swiftly undermined my leadership.

The point of this chapter is: You don't want to screw the guy you're negotiating with. Business is always a two-way street, and if you dirty up one side of it, you're not going to be able to tread that way again when the time comes. If you make deals that are good for you but no good for the other guy, you're going to win for a short period, but somewhere down the line those one-sided deals will come back to haunt you.

FACT: One-sided deals will come back to haunt you; therefore, don't sell - let the client buy.

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