Robert Evans Quotes

We always find that taking a fairly hard-line position means our membership gets the best deal possible.

It's more important to fly midpoint in deals and work together than to try to haggle for the last dollar.

You can never in negotiations be totally predictable. The minute you’re predictable, they’re going to figure out how to take advantage.

Anyone who has ever negotiated an agreement knows that in order to get it, you have to be willing to walk away from the table..

The macro of any negotiation is that the only time you can cut a deal is when both sides are hurting. If either side is - is well and feeling happy, you can't get a deal. Then they go for victory. You need - if they're willing to settle for things the other side can live with, it's because they're hurting a little bit.

You must be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.

If you have to compromise, be sure to compromise up.

I'll take the deal, whatever you want to do.

The way you get deals done and the way you get good terms, is to have a competitive situation.

Personally criticizing a member of my staff hardly seemed like the way to negotiate a deal.

What I've learned - after working for, I guess, some time now - is when you're approaching a relationship like that, like, any working relationship, it's good to be open. To know that someone might have a different way of doing things and listen to them. And hopefully, you come to a common understanding.

It takes compromise to raise a child, especially with a schedule like mine.

There have been situations where I have lost movies because I've said, 'This is not a fair deal,' and I've walked away.

When you start to work with someone, there's a negotiation that takes place involving what's going to happen when you have a difference of opinion. Most attempts at collaboration never survive the negotiation. Merely being agreeable is not enough.

I've got my own mind, and I'll talk about it, but I'm willing to listen. I'm very balanced like that. If you don't want a guy who's balanced, who wants to win, and can bring people together well... I don't know.

You could have one idea in your mind, and afterwards you could be working with a team with different players, and you may not be able to achieve what you want to, so you need to adapt.

People can be sensitive, so if I need to, I'll suck it up and be more flowery. I'll do what it takes to get the outcome I want. As I like to say, sometimes you have to crouch to conquer.

There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

One good thing about being in business is you learn to compromise. And so you learn to strike a deal that maybe isn't what you were looking for but is better than what you've got.

The world itself is so full of changes - of negotiations, changes of position, seeing things one way, then another, gauging responses, status changes that can happen in an instant.

As a team, we're all inside a bubble. Each of us only has so much room to operate. You have to carve out your space and recognize that because of someone else's needs, you might have to compromise a bit.

I have been fortunate to collaborate with people who have been open to discussion. If I tell them something, they have always explained to me why they want it the other way.

What makes a three-man booth challenging is everybody's gotta give up a little something. Right? Because normally you'd have one guy being the analyst, and he's got the ability to go at his own pace and do everything and break down everything, but when you've got two people, somebody's gotta give up a little something.

From collaborating with other people, you make concessions, and those concessions are great because sometimes you are definitely wrong.

The principle of give and take is the principle of diplomacy - give one and take ten.