Agreements

How does your business culture say no to entering into agreement? Directly, indirectly? Hard, soft? No response?

How does your business culture say no to entering into agreement? Directly, indirectly? Hard, soft? No response?

When deciding on whether to enter into an agreement or not how important is it to you to first get a lot of context information?

When maintaining an overview of your various agreements it’s important to do follow-up. Do you prefer frequent or infrequent follow-up? Give us a sense for too frequent and too infrequent?

What is your preference: a complete deliverable sent to you a little bit late or an incomplete deliverable sent promptly?

In your business culture, what are the signals that an agreement has been made?

You’re quite the handyman. As a teenager you built your own tree fort. You’re an adult now, married, three young children, just moved into a home built in the 1950s, offering all sorts of opportunities to apply your natural talent. 

You decide to build an outdoor deck. The spring is approaching and you simply can’t wait to get started. However, time is limited. The project’s success will depend on farsighted planning and disciplined execution. 

You’ll need an architect. Fortunately, your sister-in-law has an architect neighbor who designs houses and will create the plan. Because you’re particular about materials you want to purchase them from a specialty supplier. 

Thirdly, you’ll need some help. A few of the college-aged young men will be back in the neighborhood at the end of May. You’ll line them up as helpers. Lastly, you want your wife to keep the children away from the action so that folks can work without distraction.

So, you have more than a handful of things to organize and then to coordinate. And this means entering into and monitoring individual agreements with different kinds of people: the architect, the materials suppliers, the neighborhood college-guys, your wife. And all of this on a daily basis over several weeks.

If you are American, what is key to entering into and managing those agreements? 

If you are German, what is key to entering into and managing those agreements?

If you are neither American nor German, what in your culture is key to entering into and managing those agreements?