Mladen D. Kresic is President and Chief Executive of K&R Negotiations, a consulting firm specializing in structuring and negotiating business transactions in the computer, software, Internet and other industries. Mladen has over 31 years experience negotiating business transactions both as a lawyer and a businessman.
Show us a successful negotiator and we’ll show you someone who is highly conscious about how they communicate with others. It’s not about who can talk the fastest or prove that they know more than everybody else in the room—it’s about building credibility. This is crucial because credibility ultimately translates into leverage for getting the […]
Have you found yourself exasperated by a colleague or partner who won’t own his or her mistakes? The minute an error is discovered, they offer excuses and deflections instead of responsibility and solutions. This is not only a time-waster because you have to take extra steps getting to the heart of the problem, but your […]
K&R CEO Mladen Kresic Discusses Negotiation Know-it-Alls with Knowledge@Wharton Host Dan Loney (Complete Transcript) On Friday, May 20 K&R CEO Mladen Kresic joined Knowledge@Wharton (Sirius XM Channel 111) host Dan Loney to talk about how negotiators can keep “know-it-alls” from ruining their next big deal. (Kresic wrote on the subject in his 2016 white paper, […]
Delineating how and when senior management will take part in negotiations is an important factor in maintaining position and outcome. When a member of senior management’s personal timeline or motivations clash with an already established value argument, money can be left on the table. K&R Negotiations CEO Mladen Kresic used a deal from the firm’s […]
Fans of American football are watching with great interest the recent developments around “Deflategate.”1 Of course, the drama always increases when a superstar such as Tom Brady is involved. One of the controversial aspects in this evolving saga is the power of the National Football League (NFL) commissioner, Roger Goodell. Goodell handed the four-game suspension […]
Effective, persuasive communication is fundamental to building winning deals. When you are understood and believed, you greatly increase your chances of gaining leverage and having your value argument accepted by the other side. However, we make a mistake if our communication doesn’t recognize two kinds of value: Company value to the other side Personal […]
Thomson Reuters’ Legal Solutions Blog recently featured a guest post from K&R Negotiations CEO Mladen Kresic, who penned a piece about the importance of lawyers not getting too lost in legal terms and keeping an eye on their client’s business value: “When brought on as the legal member of a business negotiation team, it’s natural […]
In a 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled “The End of Solution Sales,” authors Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman identified a new way of selling being practiced by the cream of today’s sales professionals—usually B2B salespeople attempting to land complex deals. These prominent authors identified a small percentage engaged in what they call […]
On the eve of his November meeting with feared Russian light heavyweight Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev, the New York Times took a fascinating, in-depth look at the 49-year-old who was about to step in the ring against Kovalev: Philadelphia’s Bernard Hopkins. It was a chance to learn about the hard-won wisdom and discipline that had made […]
Forging a winning deal depends largely on your ability to gather as much information as possible about the other side’s market position, motivations and goals. This holds equally true at the organizational, departmental and personal levels. Better information means a more finely tuned value argument and increased credibility, both of which mean more positive leverage […]
