Greetings Negotiators!

How many times a year do you download something or open some file on the internet then wham! your computer stops working or works with a significant degraded capacity? I do it about ever six months.  One of my skill sets is that I custom build computers, develop LANs and am fairly masterful at tweaking a computer.  The advantage to me is that it only takes me one long night to re-install everything.

Yesterday I apparently asked my computer to perform an unresourceful task.  Last night I re-installed everything.  As I began to reinstall all the big programs “essential” to my daily tasks I was inspired to try something new.  I decided that I would load up on all the open source programs I thought I could manage and still run my businesses.

Once in a while I’ll watch CNN or some other mainstream news source.  It seems to me that this election cycle has a greater lather than ever before in my 43 (my birthday is in a few weeks) years of living in the red-white-and-blue-vote-for-someone sensation.  When I laid my head on my pillow this morning at 4am I was thinking about what’s wrong with politics and government.  Then as I thought for sure I was going to pass out from exhaustion I asked myself a fun question.  What would happen if we had an Open Source Government?  And suddenly what I thought was the error of our government was that it wasn’t open source.  I think it’s ironic that we (the people) require an ‘act’ to know what are government is doing that is “public”.  I refer to the Freedom of Information Act.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what open source is: Open Source refers to software that has a public license and is usually free to the public.  Because it’s code is open people who use this software all over the world are able to improve it and do so all the time.  The value of the “open” aspect is that each software product has hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands maybe even millions of volunteer programmers around the world improving any given software product daily.  Contrasted by Microsoft who only codes as much as it needs to in order to make a profit and look at the bottom line.

Open Source asks the question “Where, truly, is the balance between healthy competition and healthy cooperation?”  What aspects of your life are open source?  Are those parts more fulfilling or less fulfilling?  The Art of Asking Resoruceful Questions relies upon the open source-ness of your negotiating complement to reveal/share enough information with you that you can apply the appropriate Negotiating Response.  Sometimes a negotiating complement isn’t so “open”.  Turning a Negotiating Complement into an Open Source Negotiating Complement is very much a part of the power of a Negotiator!

If you would like more information on how to open up a Negotiating Complment or you have a question or comment, please feel free to email me at justask@yourownbestgood.com or leave a comment.

What would happen if you were to Negotiate to Your Own Best Good today?

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

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