The Japanese call it kaizen, "continuous improvement". Originally, an engineering technique designed to enhance yield and performance, kaizen has been extended by most superior Japanese companies to become a guiding principle of organization -- in research, product design and development, marketing, sales, and management. Many Western companies have also adopted kaizen.
Given the current interest in business kaizen and related performance-enhancing techniques, it is curious that this principle has not been incorporated into the literature on negotiation. Yet it is fundamental.
The practice of integrity involves continuous improvement at the margin -- an adjustment here, an extension there. We achieve this by paying attention at each step to our wins, any move made with integrity, to our losses, any falling away from integrity, and to our discoveries. It is a slow, undramatic, ant-like process where most of the benefits are hidden below the surface. And yet out of this work, one day appears as if erected overnight, a mighty citadel.
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