Director of the Negotiation Roundtable

James K. Sebenius is Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

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Professor Sebenius specializes in analyzing and advising on complex negotiations, including the most effective ways to generate and sustain cooperation among a corporation's many stakeholders. Using concepts drawn from negotiation analysis, he seeks to discover how to build and sustain winning coalitions and deal successfully with would-be blocking coalitions through the processes of coalition-building and coalition-breaking, in particular, by sequencing choices. Other current research interests include negotiating the spirit as well as the letter of the deal (with Ron Fortgang and David Lax), cross-border negotiations, deal-design (with David Lax), large project negotiations, and a new "3-D approach" to negotiation more generally (with David Lax). Professor Sebenius is also attempting (with Jay O. Light, and drawing on related work by Stuart C. Gilson and William A. Sahlman) to tailor the concepts of deal-making and deal-structuring to particular characteristics of financial and international business transactions.