Email in-boxes are getting flooded with “Thanks for your business” and “Best wishes for the New Year” emails. While there is a certain mechanical nature to these, if you have a relationship, the sentiment is a reasonable one. So…if you are one of our clients, you have probably already heard from us, but… Thank you for your business. Our most sincere hope and one of the driving values of K&R is that we have provided a service which has had a positive impact on your business. Whether you are our client or not… Please accept our best wishes for success in the future, both personally and professionally. In addition to the daily concerns of our personal lives, we wish for improved conditions in the world on all fronts. At year-end many people look back, and then…

A client made us aware of this “rule” recently, which seemed worth passing on. Why? Because the rules for getting someone’s attention have changed. The rule: Do you have a key message for a client (or for your manager)? Keep the heart of it to 7 lines or less. Because these days, that is how much of the message a Blackberry™* will show without scrolling. If your message isn’t compelling by then, the reader will never scroll to read the rest of your message. You can stop here – this is line 7. I often start a negotiation skills training session with this message. “I’m going to cut 20% out of your email workload over the next 2 days. Turn off your phone. I believe you will find that 20% of the “urgent” problems that you would have responded to will fix themselves before…

A scan of most worldwide, business-oriented news sources will quickly find a set of stories about various national governments and Research in Motion (R.I.M.).  The government list will include (at least) Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, India, and Dubai, with references to the United States and China.  The core issue is this: Will R.I.M., which encrypts user email communications pretty robustly (to the point where R.I.M. says that even they cannot read users’ emails), give in to requests from the various governments to have access to said emails unencrypted, or will they risk having government-directed shutdowns of service? As negotiators, our interest is not in the final outcome, but in the analysis of the leverage at play, and how it changes with time.  Think of leverage in negotiations…