The Deal-Making-as-a-Project (DMaaP) Revolution: Introductory Statement

I'm not a born bargainer. I've never been particularly excited about getting the better end of the deal in purchasing a car, a surfboard, or even a home for that matter.

And yet, the ability to negotiate effectively has served me well in my career as a business lawyer and as the head of contracts for global procurement for one of the world's premier financial services companies. Along the way, I've eagerly consumed just about as much on the topics of strategy, process improvement and dynamics of interpersonal communication as I could get my hands on. In this series of blogs, my focus will be on process improvement, with emphasis on a specific variety of processes - projects - and with that emphasis, on the discipline of project management, particularly as enhanced through the lenses of Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC) and W. Edwards Deming's System of Profound Knowledge (SPK).

Of the various TOC applications Goldratt developed, project management seems to be the one that required the greatest stretch from the basic concepts developed in his pioneering business novel, The Goal (1984), which focused on the shop floor of a manufacturing enterprise. While his later book, Critical Chain (1997) may well have been his most ground-breaking works, after The Goal, it left it clear to the reader that much work still needed to be done. That work has continued, with some success, even after his untimely passing, in 2011.

Over roughly the same period of time, the field of negotiation, as both a scholarly and a professional discipline, has seen rapid advancements and now shows some

signs of maturity. Still, the two bodies of work remain relatively distinct. The process (i.e., project) dimensions of negotiation seem to be unexplored in the field of negotiation while project management and TOC seem oblivious to the important reality that making a deal is in fact a project.

I'm staking the future of my firm on the premise that concepts from both fields have tremendous potential for the future of negotiation, the future of the legal profession, the future of business organizations and with that, the future of people and the planet.

-- Fred