These researchers are particularly interested in bidders’ fairness perceptions of the negotiation. As the success of Priceline indicates, when it comes to BUGs, the faster the response, the more satisfied the customer. In addition, study participants are more satisfied with a BUG and more likely to use it again and to refer others to the BUG when their offers are accepted – no surprise there.

More interestingly, when an offer is rejected, long-term customer satisfaction can be enhanced by a detailed explanation of the rejection. This finding has broad implications for organizations that must reject offers and bids from suppliers or customers with which they may want to do business in the future. Naturally, a company is likely to be satisfied when you give it your business and dissatisfied when you take your business elsewhere. When you’re delivering bad news, procedural justice, the perceived fairness of a given negotiation, becomes an important consideration.

So the next time you’re forced to turn down an offer, consider giving the other firm a thorough explanation of your decision. In doing so, you may gain more options and more favorable trading partners in the future.

During his years as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, one of James A. Baker, III’s, goals was to encourage the free-market reforms that Communist Party of the Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had launched in the late 1980s. One day during his tenure, a high-level Bush administration official commented in the press that Gorbachev’s efforts were sure to fail. Baker called Bush to complain. “I said, you can’t have other people pontificating about these major foreign policy matters when this is one of our goals, and it’s totally contrary to our policy,” he said. “So they cut the knees off of this particular individual, and we didn’t hear that anymore.”

Baker shared this story on March 29 while receiving the 2012 Great Negotiator Award from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School. In discussion with Harvard faculty at the Great Negotiator event, Baker elaborated on his greatest challenges as Secretary of State and shared negotiation lessons learned over the course of his long, successful career as a lawyer, campaign manager, and diplomat.

Baker’s anecdote about the Bush administration official who went off message raises compelling questions about the best way to manager conflict in negotiating teams when it emerges.

To prevent conflicts among diverse, strong-minded team members from overshadowing group goals, Professor Elizabeth Mannix of Cornell University advises the negotiation teams to spend at least twice as much time preparing for upcoming talks as they expect to spend at the table. Because the other side will be ready and willing to exploit any chinks in your team’s armor, it’s important to hash out your differences in advance.

Start by encouraging the team to brainstorm and debate the issues to be discussed during the talks. Spend timed debating goals, the team’s best alternative to the present agreement, and your reservation point – the worst outcome you, as a team, will accept. Then, spend just as much time exploring the other side’s likely goals, background, alternatives, and reservation point. Having trouble coming to agreement on the facts? Teams sometimes resolve substantive differences by bringing in experts for guidance on areas of confusion, Kristin Behfar (University of California, Irvine), Ray Friedman (Vanderbilt University), and Jeanne Brett (Northwestern University) found in interviews with experienced team negotiators.

What personality conflicts? In the Behfar study, some negotiators described the problem of coping with highly confrontation or emotional group members. Teams that overcame this difficulty did so by practicing their negotiation script in advance with the goal of directing and controlling the behavior of volatile members. To avoid conveying weakness to the other side, rather than calling for a break at the first sign of trouble, some teams devised secret signals they could use to bring wayward members in line – for instance, someone might stretch out her arms to communicate to another member that he’s getting off track.

Scott R. Peppet, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law in Boulder, Colorado, reports that mediation may be quietly creeping into transactional negotiation, or traditional dealmaking, as well. In Peppet’s survey of 122 practicing mediators, 48 reported having been involved in deals ranging from $100,000 to $26 million in value.

The cases facilitated by the mediators included angel investments, a software joint venture, a physician’s partnership, the sale of cable television access rights, and a host of business, community, and personal agreements. Real estate brokers, investment bankers, and executive search firms also serve as dealmakers, of course, but in the end, they typically represent a specific party. By contrast, a true mediator is  nonpartisan and is equally responsible to everyone at the bargaining table.

Unlike arbitrators, mediators have no power to impose an outcome on the parties involved.

Instead they are process specialists adept at moving people from narrow positional bargaining toward a problem-solving approach. If negotiators have been cautious about revealing critical information (such as their must-haves and walkaways), a shuttle mediator – someone who goes back and forth between the parties, carrying proposals, floating ideas, etc. – may discover untapped possibilities for mutual gain. Specialized mediators can also contribute their expertise on deal structuring.

While Peppet is generally positive about the prospects for transactional mediation, he notes that it may raise some legal and ethical issues. It’s not clear, for example, whether communications with a mediator are covered by the same confidentiality protections that apply to court-annexed proceedings. Also, an argument could be made that a mediator involved in a merger or acquisition might have to comply with security regulations and register as a broker.

TUFTS UNIVERISTY (undergraduate)

FALL 2012

Instructor:
Sinaia Nathanson

An examination of perspectives in social psychology for understanding the escalation and reduction of conflict. Course emphasizes empirical research approaches to the study of conflict and negotiation techniques, and the nature and functioning of third-party intervention in interpersonal, intergroup, and international settings.

Section times TBA

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (15.665)

FALL 2012

Instructor:
Denise Lewin Loyd

This course is designed to provide you with a competitive advantage in negotiation. You will learn and practice the technical skills and analytic frameworks that are necessary to negotiate successfully with peers from other top business schools, and you will learn methods for developing the powerful social capital you will need to rise in the executive ranks of any organization.

In this course, you will learn to successfully face the challenge of negotiating materially rewarding deals while also building your social capital. You will work with training materials on leadership and relationship building that have been used with over 200 principals and partners in international professional service firms (40% were non-US nationals), and a social capital assessment tool used by these executives to receive feedback from senior partners and over 2000 clients. In addition, you will have the opportunity to participate in a lunchtime workshop on “Leadership and Emotional Intelligence” led by an executive coach, Charles Wolfe of Charles J Wolfe Associates.

Overall, this course is designed to enhance your ability to negotiate within the context of an ongoing relationship. As a manager, consultant, or professional service provider you will negotiate with your counterparts, team members, clients, and subordinates on an ongoing basis. Further, in today’s less hierarchical organizations, you will be forced to negotiate with others to get your work done. Every time a project falls behind, critical new information is uncovered, or the competitive landscape of your industry changes, you will need to renegotiate tasks, plans, goals, or fees with your key stakeholders.

In sum, we will focus both on the analytic tools necessary to become a highly successful negotiator and on the relationship building skills necessary to negotiate deals that will enhance your social capital, your ability to lead others, and your book of loyal clients. (Session 1: Thursday 2:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.; Session 2: Thursday 6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m.)

FALL 2012

Instructor:
Mr. Chad Carr

This 1-credit seminar is the required classroom component for students doing work through the Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program during the Fall of 2012. Students will read and discuss works related to the various models for conducting conflict assessments, designing dispute systems, and working as a lawyer to be an effective deal-design architect. In addition, readings and discussions will focus on the practical and ethical quandaries and special challenges faced by professionals in conflict resolution, mediation, and dispute systems design. Some sessions will require students to present problems related to the clinical work in which they are currently engaged to the members of the class for discussion and brainstorming. The 1-credit class will be front-loaded with weekly meeting times for the first part of the semester and fewer or no class sessions in the second half of the semester in order to allow students to focus more intently on their clinical work. (Tuesday 5:00-7:00 p.m.)

HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

SPRING 2013

Instructor:
Robert Mnookin

This seminar will study several “intractable” conflicts. For some, such as Northern Ireland and South Africa, there has been considerable progress. For others, such as the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the United States and Cuba, there has not. (Thursday 5:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m.)

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL (2215)

WINTER 2013

Instructor:
James K. Sebenius
(617) 495-9334

Course Objectives:
What can be learned from closely studying great negotiators at work? Since 2001, the Program on Negotiation-an active inter-university consortium comprised faculty from across Harvard, MIT, and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts–has annually bestowed the “Great Negotiator Award.” Over their careers, the awardees have typically negotiated against great odds in different settings to accomplish worthy purposes. By systematically probing the successes (and failures) of this distinguished group of men and women from varied backgrounds, this half-course seeks to uncover broader lessons and generalizations about effective negotiation and dispute resolution in public and private settings.

Course Content:
To generate such insights, the course will initially use the “3D framework”-setup, deal design, and tactics–as the lens to closely examine important negotiations carried out by these “Great Negotiators” (and perhaps a few others who might be excellent candidates for this award). Specifically, it will analyze cases and video material from among the following: Senator George Mitchell’s work in Northern Ireland leading to the Good Friday Accords; Bruce Wasserstein’s dealmaking at Lazard and elsewhere; Special Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky’s negotiations with China over intellectual property rights; the efforts of Lakhdar Brahimi, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General, to forge a post-conflict government in Afghanistan; Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s negotiations leading to the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian war as well as his multiparty efforts to deal with unpaid U.S. dues to the United Nations; the Honorable Stuart Eizenstadt’s negotiations over Holocaust-era assets in various European countries; U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata’s quiet negotiations on behalf of refugees and internally displaced persons in regions from Iraq to the Balkans to Rwanda; the complex negotiations by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to erect massive, controversial installations from the Running Fence in California to the Gates in Central Park, New York, and wrapping Paris’s Pont Neuf and the German Reichstag; as well as former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari’s negotiation efforts leading to Kosovo’s independence and the resolution of a decades-long, bloody conflict between the government of Indonesia and the province of Aceh. This widely disparate set of experiences, and perhaps a few others, constitute the raw material from which generalizations will be forged about effective public and private negotiation.

Course Requirements:
Beyond class participation, many students will take a written exam aimed at crystallizing key course lessons. Alternatively, with instructor approval, individual students or small groups may opt to write papers that 1) analyze one or more “great negotiators” of their choice, or 2) develop other course themes in greater depth. Caveats: while this course will expose participants to many remarkable negotiators and negotiations from which invaluable lessons can be distilled, it is unlike the basic negotiation courses in several respects that should be understood by those who choose to take the course. First, it does not systematically develop negotiation concepts, but rather, assumes the basics, then moves from case to complex case with no attempt at a cumulative intellectual approach. Second, it is not a skills development course; as such, there are no negotiation simulations. Third, while there are many powerful implications for effective business and financial negotiations, most of the cases-as detailed above-take place in public sector, international contexts. Fourth, the nature of the material often requires more background reading than is often the norm for HBS courses. Finally, while it is possible that some of the Great Negotiator Awardees will visit the class, most will not.

Session Times: TBA

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL (2267)

WINTER 2013

Instructor:
Guhan Subramanian

This advanced negotiation course examines complex corporate deals. Many of the class sessions will be structured around recent or ongoing deals, selected for the complex issues of law and business that they raise. Student teams will research and analyze these transactions in order to present their most important aspects and lessons to the class. For many of these presentations (as well as some more traditional case studies and exercises), the lawyers, bankers, and/or business principals who participated in the transaction under discussion will attend class, listen to the team’s assessment, provide their perspectives, and suggest broader negotiation insights.

Topics developed throughout the course include: how negotiators create and claim value through the setup, design, and tactical implementation of agreements; complexities that can arise through agency, asymmetric information, moral hazard, and adverse selection; structural, psychological, and interpersonal barriers that can hinder agreement; and the particular challenges inherent in the roles of advisors as negotiators. The course will also explore the differences between deal-making and dispute resolution; single-issue and multiple-issue negotiations; and between two parties and multiple parties.

The class will be composed of an equal number of HBS and HLS students. These differences in professional background, perspective, and experience should be highly complementary, mutually informative, and in line with the skill set required in most significant negotiations. For HBS students, a basic Negotiations course is a prerequisite. For HLS students, the basic course in Corporations and the Negotiation Workshop are prerequisites, or equivalent. Evaluation will be on the basis of class participation and deal presentation. Sessions will take place at HBS.

Session Times: TBA

FALL 2012

Instructor:
Gordon A. Fellman

Ponders the possibility of a major “paradigm shift” under way from adversarialism and war to mutuality and peace. Examines war culture and peace culture and points in between, with emphases on the role of imagination in social change, growing global interdependence, and political, economic, gender, social class, and social psychological aspects of war and peace. Usually offered every year. (Tuesday and Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12.20 p.m.)