Negotiate the details of a trip to Disneyland with your 10-year-old daughter, or work out a global multi-billion-dollar business deal — the keys to consummating the transaction between buyer and seller are still exactly the same: the bid and the ask.

Understand the relational dynamics, and you can get the bid and the ask to fuse into a single “yes.”

This, in short, is the “art of the deal.”

You hear a lot these days about “value creation.” Here’s why.

You’ve got to understand what the players value. What they’re willing to pay for. What will make them loyal through the entire process, and still loyal after the transaction is completed.

This creates a pipeline for more business later.

Us? We’re ball bearings.

That’s how we often jokingly refer to ourselves.

The ball bearing is the pressure point in a joint, or between a pair of moving parts.

Everything else pushes on the bearing, but the bearing just keeps rolling.

Result: less friction.

In fact, the ball bearing makes the movement possible. Without it, the joint would get too hot too fast — melt down, freeze up, stop working.

That’s us.

By the end of most deals, everybody is annoyed with us in some way or another. But it’s a good thing. We brought all the pressure to a head, and we kept all the parts moving — without letting anybody burn up.

Michael K. Clifford once asked one of his partners why this pattern occurs: why the uncomfortable feelings by the time a transaction is done? The partner’s answer was simple: “Michael, everybody hates their drug dealer!”

Self-interest drives us to want the transaction, but everybody has to make some kind of compromise in order to finish it. And nobody loves the give and take of compromise.