Parley for Profit

Savvy negotiating pays off; the one thing more painful than PowerPoint; hammering home the value of a sound business plan.

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Negotiating has been the missing piece in operating my public relations writing boutique. Probably that has cost me about $150,000 annually. Then I read Rob Walker's "The Only Guide to Negotiation You Will Ever Need" [August] just before a consulting firm called to ask about my fee to ghostwrite a book. I did what the article told me to: I listened. I let the other party throw out the first number. The fee I did quote, and it was on the low side of the other party's ballpark, was $30,000 more than I would have quoted in the past.

The article on negotiation was the best thing Inc. has done for small business. Walker should negotiate a fee increase the next time he writes for you.

Jane Genova
Founder and President
Genova Writing & More
Westport, Conn.

All That Spam

E-mail, in its current form, is dead, and the fingerprints on its throat belong to some of the same "e-mail marketers" who complain loudest about being blacklisted [Hands On, "Caught in the Crossfire," by Ellen Neuborne, August]. Instead, those companies should help create technologies to guarantee sender identity, and to shift the costs of spam from the receivers to the senders, where they belong.

David Walker
Information Technology Consultant
Freeform Goodness
Ecorse, Mich.

Man vs. PowerPoint

What a great article about PowerPoint in August [Grist, "More Power Than Point," by Adam Hanft]. The forecasts and the strategic plan look so perfect and easy to execute on a PowerPoint slide--but why do I have that uneasy feeling inside? Probably because the presenter believes it is that easy--being an idea person who doesn't like to get his hands dirty with the not-so-clean execution stage.

Carl A. Fischer
CEO
Scout Records
Denver

The only thing worse than sitting through a PowerPoint presentation is sitting through one with hemorrhoids. The tool is not bad. What people do with it is.

Dennis Cutler
VP of Sales
Tools4ever
Great Neck, N.Y.

Clueless in Cyberspace

So many B2B exchanges died [Priority, "Why Online Exchanges Died," by Cara Cannella, August] for the same reason other businesses die: They didn't pay enough attention to their customer and sought only to advance their own agendas. Seriously flawed business models were still pursued even after it was clear their future was shaky at best. Blame greedy venture capitalists, arrogant management teams, and the inability of dot-coms to truly understand why business relationships succeed. The dot-com mentality reminded me of the adage "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Bob Markell
President
Paragon Equipment Corp.
Cleveland

Correction

In the September issue, we listed the wrong e-mail address for Stephen H. Zades, author of our cover story "Creativity Regained." He can be reached at szades@triad.rr.com.

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