Karma is real, and it will bite you in the bum if you don't take it seriously, says John McKee, business success coach and author of Career Wisdom, 21 Ways Women in Management Shoot Themselves in the Foot and The "Yes Factor": How to Negotiate to Get What You Want Out of Life. Anyone working in a community who forgets that what goes around comes around is, at some stage, going to fall flat on their tail.

Just look what happened when Hewlett-Packard and Compaq joined forces. Analysts lined up to describe the multibillion-dollar deal — one of the largest in technology history — as a merger of equals. Not so HP's Carly Fiorina, who made very public her view that in fact one of the so-called equals, herself, was considerably more equal than the other: Compaq's Michael Capellas.

Three years on, after a brutal round of press attacks, Fiorina was gone, dismissed by the board as Hewlett-Packard chairman and CEO.

That's karma. The best deals are the ones that leave both parties feeling positive about the end result, McKee says. If you treat each negotiation as me against you and then boast about winning, at some stage karma will come back and bite you, particularly in a community like IT, which is reasonably small and where you tend to see each other over and over again at the same trade shows or in the same negotiations.