Don't Miss The Target

This past week I had the opportunity to play a couple games at Top Golf in Dallas.  If you haven't played before, it is basically a driving range on steroids.  The balls have a scanner on them and you hit the balls into the various targets on the range.  The targets are set up like dartboards with lower point totals on the outside rings and higher points towards the bullseyes.  It really becomes a game of precision and is a lot of fun. 

Several times throughout the course of the game(s), I missed the target I was going for and landed in one of the other ones.  Some of the games allow you to get points in the other targets, others give you negative points for hitting the wrong target.  

It made me think about how I set my priorities.  I always have a target that I'm shooting for, but what happens when I get off the mark?  Do I just settle for second-best?  I think sometimes it can be easy to just settle and say, "there's always next time."  We should never settle for second-best in anything that we do.  If we give our all, we can push ourselves to a target that is beyond what we think we can achieve.  Don't get me wrong, we're going to miss the target from time to time, but don't get discouraged - instead shoot for the bullseye next time around.  You'll be glad you did.

Conflict of Interest

I just got done reading a great book entitled "Negotiation Genius" by Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman.  I would highly recommend it if you want to tune up your negotiation skills.  Our entire management team read it and thoroughly enjoyed it.  

One of the quotes that stood out to me in the book was by Upton Sinclair.  He said this, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." 

This simple statement opened my eyes as I thought about people that I negotiate with on a daily basis.  In the commercial real estate industry, we deal with all sorts of people: engineers, architects, property managers, brokers, developers, attorneys, bankers, government agencies, and city officials just to name a few.  Each one is unique and different in his own way. 

Recently, I was dealing with a large issue on one of our development projects in Texas with one of the groups mentioned above.  It became very clear to me that Sinclair's quote was extremely prevalent in our negotiation.  The guy was afraid that he would work himself out of a job if he moved things along faster than they wanted to go.  Talk about frustrating, and talk about a conflict in interest!      

So how do you solve this issue that is outside of your control?  We had to try and solicit advice and expertise from people who did not have a stake in the outcome and who didn't profit from manipulating his behaviors and decisions.  Deepak said it best in his book, "Most of us view conflicts of interest as a genuine societal problem that must be remedied.  We understand that conflicts of interest can contort people's judgments.  Yet we have trouble believing that they affect our own judgments." 

When we enter into a negotiation, we have to remember that each one of us brings our own biases, and behaviors to the negotiation table with us.  Before we enter into the negotiation, we must realize our own fallibilities as well.  Not an easy thing to do, but something we all can consciously think about and grow from! 

The 800 Pound Gorilla

Yesterday I was in Dallas, Texas, and I had the privilege of touring some sites with Tom, the real estate broker for the 800lb gorilla of retailers.  I was amazed at how he viewed sites in a completely different way than I was accustomed to.  Let me just say that this guy is a stud; he has done over 300 stores for this retailer in Texas alone!  I would have paid some serious cash just to be able to get the schooling that I did yesterday, but thankfully he is a friend and wants our company, and me for that matter, to succeed going forward.  

Tom's just an ordinary guy.  He's a Texan to the core.  He works hard each and every day.  You see, when you're working with a client like he has, the ups & downs go with the territory.  I can't even imagine how much time it takes just to get the deals to go to contract, let alone the ones you work on forever that fall out of bed.  Working through them is hard enough, but these aren't deals that just happen overnight.  He has way more patience than I do that's for sure.  All that being said, the one thing that stands out more than anything is Tom's humbleness.  Even having done 300 stores for this 800lb gorilla, he remains humble to the core.  I never once heard, "yeah, I did this or I did that," in a prideful way.

At our company, humility is one of our three core values.  I constantly have to ask myself, "do I live that out on a daily basis, or do I let my ego set in and take control?"  The minute I do, everything else becomes futile.  I constantly need to work on being humble.  In the commercial real estate world, humility seems like a four letter word. 

I just appreciated the time I had with Tom, and how, unknowingly to him, he taught me more than he'll ever know!