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Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School;

Today's Post

Law, Security, and Technology in the 21st Century

With two Harvard Law School graduates potentially running against each other in the 2012 U.S. presidential contest, you do not have to look far to spot the links between Washington, D.C. and the law school. Katie Bacon of the Harvard Law Bulletin discusses such ties in her article “Double Strength” featured here in the Winter 2012 issue.

Beginning in September 2011 … read more »

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Recent Posts

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The Dark Side: Reporting on the War on Terror
with Roger Cohen, New York Times Foreign Correspondent, and
Carlotta Gall, New York Times Reporter
Date: December 5, 2011
Time: 4:00-6:00 PM
Where: CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S-030 (Concourse Level)
read more »

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Resolve Conflict by Asking the Right Questions

Sometimes asking a simple question can move you from deadlock to deal. Yet negotiators often neglect to ask key questions because it doesn’t occur to them to do so or  because they don’t want to appear weak or uninformed. Even when we do remember to ask the other side questions, we sometimes ask questions that are unlikely to shed much … read more »

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Offer Your Counterpart a Graceful Retreat

Sometimes negotiators back themselves into a corner by taking a tough stance that brings talks to an impasse. In such cases, they are likely to view retreat as a sign of weakness – a surefire way of losing face. To move talks forward, you’ll need to help the other party make a graceful retreat, write Deborah M. Kolb and Judith … read more »

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Managers: improve your team members' negotiating power

Research on stereotypes has reached conclusions about how lack of power and status can affect performance on negotiation and other tasks. Laura Kray of the University of California at Berkeley and her colleagues found in their research  that women negotiators performed worse than men when they were led to believe that their performance reflected negotiating ability. The mention of “ability” … read more »

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Why “thank you” matters

January 20, 2012
Edited by: PON_Staff, filed in: Negotiation Skills
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Why

One should always go into every negotiation fully prepared, but a few very easy steps may help clear negotiation obstacles before the formal process even begins.  Recent research by Francesca Gino, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation-affiliated faculty member, argues that simple expressions of gratitude can yield beneficial returns in cooperativeness and pro-social … read more »

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PON offices to move to Lewis Hall next week

January 17, 2012
Edited by: PON_Staff, filed in: Daily, News
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After nearly 30 years of occupying the storied offices of Pound Hall’s fifth floor, PON is moving! In fact, everyone has to evacuate Pound Hall for about a year, because the Law School will be physically removing one end of the building to create more green space around the new Law School building.

We will transfer the PON offices to nearby … read more »

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Daniel Shapiro receives award for his innovative work on identity-based conflict

Harvard psychologist and PON affiliated faculty member, Daniel L. Shapiro, Ph.D., has been awarded the highly competitive Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI).  SPSSI recently announced the award in recognition of his article, “Relational Identity Theory: A Systematic Approach for Transforming the Emotional Dimension of Conflict,” published in … read more »

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Identify your negotiating style

January 10, 2012
Edited by: PON_Staff, filed in: Negotiation Skills
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Identify your negotiating style

Have you ever wondered if your negotiating style is too tough or too accommodating? Too cooperative or too selfish? You might strive for an ideal balance, but, chances are, your innate and learned tendencies will have a strong impact on how you negotiate. Wise negotiators seek to identify these tendencies and enhance them according to the situation.

Individual differences in “social … read more »

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Does the majority really rule?

January 10, 2012
Edited by: PON_Staff, filed in: Meeting Facilitation
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Does the majority really rule?

When a group of people are negotiating, what’s the best way to arrive at a decision? Ever since U.S. general Henry M. Robert published Robert’s Rules of Order in 1876, groups have relied on the principle of majority rule, measured with a simple yea or nay vote at the end of the negotiation process.

Majority rule appeals to our innate sense … read more »

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Sellers: Stay out of legal hot water

When it comes to business negotiations, you probably understand the importance of being as principled as possible to protect your reputation and ward off legal trouble. You probably expect your counterparts to follow the straight and narrow as well. Yet negotiators often have only a fuzzy grasp of which claims and strategies are legal and which aren’t. As a consequence, … read more »

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A creative approach to breaking impasse

Suppose that you and your negotiating counterpart become deadlocked after exchanging a series of offers and counteroffers. With each of you anchored on very different positions, you can’t seem to find a solution that pleases you both.

Rather than making one offer at a time, try issuing multiple equivalent simultaneous offers, or MESOs. When you present multiple offers at the same … read more »

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Preparing for Negotiation

Understanding how to arrange the meeting space is a key aspect of preparing for negotiation.  In this video, Professor Guhan Subramanian discusses a real world example of how seating arrangements can influence a negotiator’s success.  This discussion was held at the 3 day executive education workshop for senior executives at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

 

Guhan Subramanian is the Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.

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