The Middle East Negotiation Initiative at PON invites you to a panel discussion on

The Gilad Shalit-Palestinian prisoners exchange: the process, deal and implications

November 7, 2011 • 12:15 – 2 p.m.
Pound 100 • Harvard Law School

Please bring your lunch. Drinks and cookies will be served.

PANELISTS

Robert H. Mnookin is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, the Chair of the Executive Committee, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and the Director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project.

James Sebenius is the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the Vice Chair of Practice-Focused Research, PON Executive Committee. Professor Sebenius specializes in analyzing and advising on complex negotiations. At PON, he is a co-chair of the Great Negotiator Award Committee.

Gabriella Blum is the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School, and a Co-Director of the HLS-Brookings Project on Law and Security. Blum served in the Israeli National Security Council, Prime Minister’s Office, as a strategy advisor; as a senior legal advisor in the International Law Department in the Israel Defense Forces and was involved in the Israeli-Arab peace negotiations, Israeli strategic cooperation with foreign forces, and the administration of the Palestinian occupied territories.

Diana Buttu is a Joint Fellow with the Middle East Initiative and Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. She previously served as a legal advisor to the PLO’s negotiating team in its negotiations with Israel and was later an advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Daniel L. Shapiro, an assistant professor of psychology, invited a special guest lecturer, actor Richard Olivier (Sir Laurence Olivier’s son), to give a talk to his Harvard negotiation and conflict management class about William Shakespeare’s play, “Henry V.” Olivier and Shapiro showed how the play offers powerful examples on why being an inspired leader helps in negotiation. The Harvard Gazette reported, “Shapiro says that this sort of inspirational leader – someone who knows him or herself, someone driven by the common good, rather than ego – is best able to engage in successful negotiation and conflict management.”

To read the full article.

Professor Shapiro is a faculty affiliate with the Program on Negotiation. He will be leading a one-day author session on December 8, 2011, based on his book, Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.  For information on attending Professor Shapiro’s course, or our three-day Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives, please visit our website.

A major measure of the economy is the prevailing mood. A bleak job market and less-than-rosy economic outlook influence how we feel in an organization. Tighter budgets and increased layoffs are causes for concern, and many of us respond with “fight or flight” behavior.  We defend our turf or avoid tense conversations in the hopes that things will just get better. Neither approach works very well. A better approach is to recognize that emotions can be your greatest asset in negotiation-especially during challenging economic times. Knowing how to deal effectively with them can enhance your leadership and management performance-even boost your organization’s bottom line in trying times.

According to Dan Shapiro, Director of Harvard International Negotiation Program and Associate Director of Harvard Negotiation Project, the challenges facing businesses are tightly connected to emotions and relationships. This especially holds true when money or jobs are at stake.

While conventional wisdom suggests that emotions don’t belong at the bargaining table, Professor Shapiro disagrees. In fact, his research suggests that effectively dealing with emotions gives you more power and control, both in negotiations and relationships. In his role as Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Prevention, Professor Shapiro works with heads of state, security experts, leading academics, and CEOs-helping them establish global priorities around conflict resolution and navigate emotional challenges. His proven framework and strategies have been used the world over by countless leaders to achieve better outcomes.

These same principles and ideas, all tested and empirically supported, will be taught in Professor Shapiro’s one-day author session, Beyond Reason, taking place December 8th, 2011, at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA. You will learn about the five core concerns that stimulate the emotions that arise in negotiations and gain an essential framework for negotiating emotional challenges and building better relationships.

To learn more or register, please click here.

Adapted from “Becoming a Team Player: Lessons from Professional Athletics,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, October 2009.

In Major League Baseball (MLB), one particular player’s agent is widely blamed for the contentious nature of contract negotiations: Scott Boras. Boras has negotiated unprecedented contracts for many of the most highly paid players, including Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, and Carlos Beltran.

Boras, who earns 5% of his clients’ signing bonuses and salaries, has come to dominate the MLB draft, dictating the size of the signing bonuses he expects teams to offer and persuading clients to turn down offers that fall short. Some teams, including the Chicago White Sox, dislike Boras’s tactics so much that they refuse to negotiate with his clients.

In his most notorious negotiation to date, Boras helped Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) secure a 10-year, $252 million deal from the Texas Rangers in 2000, making him the top-grossing athlete in team sports. Within three years, the Rangers traded A-Rod to the New York Yankees to avoid paying $15 million of his annual $25 million salary. In 2007, as Rodriguez was about to become a free agent again, Boras surprised the Yankees by announcing—right in the middle of the Boston Red Sox’s World Series victory over the Colorado Rockies—that A-Rod would not renew his contract. Amid the firestorm of criticism that followed, Rodriguez fired Boras and negotiated a new, $275 million, 10-year contract with the Yankees through a new agent.

For business negotiators, the benefits of record-breaking deals are obvious. But if the other side comes away feeling resentful, or if you fail to live up to your initial promise, you could end up wishing you’d asked for less.

Many of us operate under the assumption that any given pie is fixed. More for me means less for you, right? Not necessarily. While you still want to claim your fair share, in many negotiation situations, there exist value-creating opportunities that can be exploited to provide “more pie” to both parties.

This counterintuitive approach is just one of the proven techniques that are examined in the three-day Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives.
 

Thirty years of thinking, compressed into three jam-packed days.

That’s the Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives.

Day one: You’ll be introduced to  a framework for thinking about negotiation success. What does it look like, how does it work, and how can you leverage your strengths (and mitigate your weaknesses) to obtain better results?

Day two: Examine and develop effective techniques for addressing a variety of negotiation challenges – among them, managing difficult personalities, working within a relatively small bargaining zone, handling complex and multiparty negotiations, and obtaining good results when you’re up against oppressive deadlines.

Day three: Put it all together. You’ll apply your newfound negotiation skills by taking part in a number of dynamic, interactive exercises. Not only will you start to systematically think about and prepare for a number of complex negotiation scenarios, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the value-creating possibilities. As a result, you’ll emerge well equipped to negotiate more skillfully, confidently, and most important – more effectively.

You can learn more or register for our next session, scheduled for November 14-16, 2011 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by clicking here.

The Art of Negotiation

Moved to Pound Hall 101 on the HLS Campus
October 18, 2011
7:30 pm

Free and open to the public

Please join world-renowned artist Romero Britto as he unveils a series of paintings produced in collaboration with Professor Daniel Shapiro and Harvard College students.   Each painting illustrates a key aspect to address the emotional dimension of negotiation, as described in Beyond Reason, co-authored by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro.  In this highly interactive, whimsical session, participants will have the chance to learn more about negotiation theory and catch a glimpse of Britto in action.

Music by the Harvard Din & Tonics.  Light refreshments will be served.

Sponsored by the Harvard International Negotiation Program and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Robert H. Mnookin, Professor at Harvard Law School and Chair of the Program on Negotiation, reflects on Israel’s recent decision to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the safe return of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas.  From a negotiating standpoint, according to Mnookin, the deal sets a dangerous precedent and may have costs that outweigh the reward.  It is consistent, however, with the tendency of human beings to set a high premium on saving known individuals from harm.

Israel’s Deals with the Devils

What explains its lopsided prisoner exchange with the terrorist group Hamas, which will save one life now but endanger many lives in the future?

By Robert H. Mnookin, chair of Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. First published in the Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2011. Mnookin’s most recent book is Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

It’s hard to think straight when negotiating with an adversary you claim is evil, and Israel proved it last week. The usual problem is a refusal to negotiate at all. Here the Israelis made what seems to be a crazy deal.

In a lopsided prisoner exchange, the Netanyahu government agreed to release about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single life: that of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli corporal kidnapped by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006 and held hostage in Gaza. What explains this decision?

Israel has always claimed it will not negotiate with what it considers terrorist organizations. Chief among those groups is Hamas, which has repeatedly expressed its commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state. The deal announced on Oct. 11 was the result of months of secret negotiations between the Israeli government and Hamas, facilitated by the Egyptian government. Israel may claim that no one in the government ever met face-to-face with representatives of Hamas, and it is possible that the two adversaries worked out the details by exchanging offers and counteroffers through Egyptian intermediaries. But this fig leaf hardly hides the fact that a deal was negotiated.

I am not claiming that a government should never deal with terrorists under the table. Many governments maintain an official policy of never negotiating with terrorists, pirates or evil regimes—while secretly violating hat policy when important interests are at stake.

In some situations this may be a pragmatic approach: Hypocrisy is at times the handmaiden of statecraft. But in this case, Israel is only compounding the damage from previous deals.

For example, in the Jibril Agreement of 1985 (made with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Israel freed 1,150 prisoners in exchange for the release of three Israelis captured during the first Lebanon war. And in 1998 Israel and its ally, the South Lebanese Army, released 65 prisoners to Hezbollah in exchange for the remains of one dead Israeli soldier.

In cost-benefit terms these exchanges make little sense. Israel has typically justified such deals on the ground that Israel has a citizen army in which nearly all Jewish citizens (except the ultraorthodox) must serve. In asking its citizens to risk their lives in service of their country, part of Israel’s implicit bargain is that it will make every effort to recover anyone who falls into enemy hands.

This justification would hardly seem rational to any hard-headed security analyst who thought through the long-run costs and benefits. In the present case, one Israeli soldier has regained his freedom. But to free 1,000 prisoners in exchange? Israeli parents may on some unthinking level feel better about their government’s concern for each individual soldier. But the deal jeopardizes the freedom and safety of many Israelis in the future.

The most direct security threat is perhaps posed by the about-to-be-freed prisoners themselves. Some have “blood on their hands”—they were imprisoned after a trial demonstrating their participation in specific terrorist acts. They may well commit additional terrorist acts. In 2004, Israel exchanged several hundred Palestinian prisoners for an Israeli held captive by Hezbollah (and the remains of three soldiers). Drawing on government figures, Nadav Shragi noted in a report by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs that “those freed in the deal had murdered 35 Israelis” by 2007.

A more substantial cost is that of precedent. Just as paying a high ransom to pirates may encourage more piracy, paying this ransom to Hamas may encourage Israel’s enemies to engage in more kidnapping.

A third cost is political. The deal enhances substantially the political standing of Hamas and further weakens its rival Fatah. Hamas cleverly negotiated for the release of not simply its own members, but members of Fatah as well as Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. In securing the release of nearly 1,000 Palestinians of mixed demographics, Hamas will claim that it is the most effective representative of all the Palestinian people.

So what may explain Israel’s bargain? Gilad Shalit is a known individual: what psychologists would call an “identifiable being.” His picture has been plastered throughout Israel. The Israeli press has written hundreds of articles speculating about his well-being. By contrast, the Israelis who are endangered by this deal are mere statistics—an unidentifiable group of people who may die in the future. Psychologists call these “statistical lives.”

There is a long line of psychological research showing that, in making decisions, human beings will incur far greater costs to save one identifiable being from immediate peril than to enact safety measures that might save many more statistical lives. While no expense will be spared to save an identifiable miner trapped in a coal mine, there is often great political reluctance to spend an equal amount on mine safety. Such a response is entirely human, but it is not rational.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Adapted from “What Happens When Women Don’t Ask,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, June 2008.

Some negotiation research has found that men generally initiate negotiations to advance their own interests much more often than women do. Yet researchers also have identified certain contexts in which women routinely negotiate and achieve outcomes that match or exceed those of men:

• When issues matter to them. In a survey of investment-bank employees, Iris Bohnet and Fiona Greig of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that women professionals were ready and willing to negotiate career issues of particular importance to them, most notably their work-related travel and daily schedules. This could be in part because women feel it is socially acceptable for them to negotiate issues that directly affect their families.

• When they negotiate on behalf of others. Although some studies have found that men excel in competitive negotiations, women negotiators in one study achieved better outcomes than men when bargaining on behalf of someone else. In an experiment involving graduating MBAs, researchers Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Kathleen McGinn found that acting as someone’s agent seemed to motivate female participants to work extra hard, perhaps because they expected that assertiveness would be better tolerated than if they were lobbying on their own behalf.

• When they have good information. In highly ambiguous situations, gender stereotypes are more likely to emerge, putting women at a disadvantage. In their study, Bowles, Babcock, and McGinn found that men negotiated higher salaries than women in fields where starting salaries were ambiguous, including telecommunications, real estate, health services, and media. Yet women performed just as well as men when negotiating for jobs in industries where compensation was fairly clear, including investment banking, consulting, and high technology.

Adapted from “How to Negotiate When You’re (Literally) Far Apart,” by Roderick I. Swaab (professor, INSEAD) and Adam D. Galinsky (professor, Northwestern University), first published in the Negotiation newsletter, February 2007.

Growing economic globalization offers a multitude of new opportunities yet often necessitates alternatives to face-to-face meetings, such as phone calls, e-mails, videoconferences, or instant messages. Newly available technologies can be powerful negotiating tools that save time and money, but if not managed properly, they also come with some predictable pitfalls, such as misunderstandings and mutual distrust. What’s more, your choice of communication medium is likely to affect the quality of the relationship, the amount of information shared, and the efficiency of the negotiated agreement.

Different communication media vary in terms of richness, or their potential to convey the sensation of social presence, which can be so important in negotiation. A phone conversation may allow you to feel psychologically close to a foreign partner despite the fact that the two of you are speaking across the globe. Videoconferencing, which adds visual cues to an exchange, may contribute even more of a social presence. The impersonal nature of an e-mail exchange, on the other hand, may leave parties feeling distant.

A second dimension underlying media is their level of synchronicity, or the extent to which individuals work together on the same activity at the same time. Phone calls, videoconferences, and computerized chats allow negotiators to respond immediately to each other’s actions and words, whereas asynchronous media such as e-mail, voicemail, and fax messages delay the communication process, with potentially disastrous consequences. According to insiders, the extensive use of asynchronous media (voicemail and e-mail) by Federal Emergency Management Agency employees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was partially responsible for the significant delays in emergency assistance – and the desperation and death that followed.

Media richness and synchronicity have a strong impact on negotiation. In a research review, Roderick I. Swaab of INSEAD and Victoria Medvec and Daniel Diermeier of Northwestern University discovered that vocal cues, visual cues, and synchronicity all promote more efficient outcomes by facilitating information sharing and the use of complex strategies, such as making multiple equivalent simultaneous offers. Negotiators leave less money on the table when they are able to pick up clear social cues.

Furthermore, Swaab and colleagues found that vocal cues most effectively improve relations between negotiators and thus reduce the likelihood of impasse. By contrast, the visual cues available in videoconferencing and the synchronicity of instant messaging did not contribute to the development of positive relationships.

Clearly, when preparing to negotiate, you should choose a medium that suits your purposes; above all, strive to enhance the negotiation with appropriate communication cues.

Adapted from “Blind Justice? Think Twice Before Going to Court,” by Chris Guthrie (professor, Vanderbilt University Law School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter, April 2007.

Planning to resolve a personal or business dispute in court? Consider that judges don’t make decisions based on a thorough accounting of all the relevant and available information.  Instead, like all of us, they rely on heuristics – simple mental shortcuts – to make decisions. Heuristics often lead to good decisions, but they can also create cognitive blinders that produce systematic errors.

One such heuristic is anchoring, or the common tendency for people making numerical estimates to rely on the initial value available to them and to give it greater influence over the final estimate than it should have. How does anchoring influence judges? U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich, Cornell Law professor Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, and Vanderbilt University Law School professor Chris Guthrie found that a demand made at a prehearing settlement conference anchored judges’ assessments of the appropriate amount of damages to award. Anchoring and other cognitive blinders can make it difficult for a judge to reach an accurate decision in your case.

When you’re thinking about resolving a dispute in court, remember that the decision that will be imposed on you is binding. If blinders lead a judge to grant a motion that should be denied, deny a motion that should be granted, assign responsibility to the wrong party, or award too much or too little in damages, there can be no going back.

State or federal appellate courts exist in part to correct judicial errors, but appeals occur infrequently and seldom lead to reversal. Even successful appeals add costs and delays to the dispute-resolution process. When you or your organization are embroiled in a dispute, how can you avoid the possibility of an erroneous but binding court decision? Negotiate instead!
Of course, you and your lawyers are likely to be influenced by the same blinders that affect judges – blinders that may compromise your negotiation ability. But there’s a significant difference between making a poor decision in a consensual process such as negotiation or mediation and being at the mercy of a judge’s mistakes.

Most judges are honest people who strive to reach fair decisions. To say that they misjudge is to say that they are human – that their decision making, like all of ours, is imperfect. But because judicial decisions carry so much weight, the research on misjudging offers a sound reason to negotiate, rather than litigate, whenever possible.