agreement

A contract is an agreement having a lawful object entered into voluntarily by two or more parties, each of whom intends to create one or more legal obligations between them. The elements of a contract are “offer” and “acceptance” by “competent persons” having legal capacity who exchange “consideration” to create “mutuality of obligation.”

The following items are tagged agreement.

Nantucket’s Never-Ending Negotiations: Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) Students Shape How Town and Unions Work Together

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Preparation. Practice. Persistence. Those qualities make for a good firefighter, and as Nantucket Firefighter Nate Barber learned from working with Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) students, they also make for a good negotiator.

As a member of Nantucket’s Local 2509 of the International Association of Firefighters and a former undergraduate negotiation student at Boston University, Mr. Barber knew relations between the Town of Nantucket’s management and his union could be better. Since the firefighters’ contracts only lasted two or three years and the negotiation process itself often took that long, the union and the management sat down for contract negotiations every year. And every year, the negotiations spilled over into the next year or, if it was the final year of the contract, went to arbitration. This impacted everyone: arbitration provoked more fighting, poorer relations, and less of what everyone wanted. They hadn’t had a mutual agreement for six years. As one of the interested parties, though, Mr. Barber knew he was not the person to fix a broken bargaining system.

July 2013

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Monthly Archives.

The ‘Sandberg Effect’: Why Women Are Asking for More
Obama’s Gun Control Defeat: A Failed ‘Outside’ Negotiation
When Investing Abroad, Negotiate a Better Deal

Negotiating in China: The Gold Rush Mentality

Posted by & filed under International Negotiation.

If Chinese culture favors insiders, it stands to reason that outsiders face an uphill battle.

In One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China (Free Press, 2005), business executive and Wall Street Journal bureau chief James McGregor writes of the 1996 attempt by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, to declare that only it had the right to publish financial data in China, thereby locking out Dow Jones and Reuters. It was a bold move based on brute power. Xinhua backed down only after Dow Jones and Reuters appealed to the U.S. government, which threatened to abandon a trade agreement with China.

Trust in Negotiations

Posted by & filed under Sales Negotiations.

Trust may develop naturally over time, but negotiators rarely have the luxury of letting nature take its course. Thus it sometimes seems easiest to play it safe with cautious deals involving few tradeoffs, few concessions, and little information sharing between parties. But avoiding risk can mean missing out on significant opportunities. For this reason, fostering trust on the fly is a critical skill for managers. As Kristen knew, the first step to inspiring trust is to demonstrate trustworthiness. All negotiators can apply the six strategies that follow to influence others’ perceptions of their trustworthiness at the bargaining table.

Negotiate Conditions – And Bring Value to the Deal

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

Like a contingency, a condition to a deal is a related though far less common deal-structuring technique. A condition is an ‘if’ statement like a contingency, but, whereas a contingency depends on unknown future events, a condition is entirely within the control of the parties involved.

Win-Win Negotiations: Managing Your Counterpart’s Satisfaction

Posted by & filed under Sales Negotiations.

As the following points will demonstrate, ensuring that your counterpart is satisfied with a particular deal requires you to manage several aspects of the negotiation process, including his outcome expectations, his perceptions of your outcome, the comparisons he makes with others, and his overall negotiation experience itself.

Negotiation Design Dimensions: A Checklist

Posted by & filed under Sales Negotiations.

Here the Program on Negotiation offers a checklist of negotiation design categories. Whether your overall negotiation design is decide-announce-defend (DAD) or full-consensus (FC), or a hybrid of both, raising these issues is usually preferable to falling into a set of important decisions by default.

2013 Winner of the Raiffa Doctoral Student Paper Award

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills, Students.

The Program on Negotiation has awarded Netta Barak-Corren the 2013 Howard Raiffa Doctoral Student Paper Award for her paper, co-written with Edy Glozman and Ilan Yaniv, “False Negotiations: The Art & Science of Not Reaching an Agreement.” Ms. Barak-Corren is an LLM candidate at Harvard Law School.

 

 

About the Award:
The annual prize of $1000 is awarded

Check Your Emotional Temperature

Posted by & filed under Conflict Management.

Do you ever feel ambushed by strong emotions?

To guard against acting irrationally or in ways that can harm you, authors of Beyond Reason: Using Emotions As You Negotiate Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro advise you to take your emotional temperature during a negotiation. Specifically, try to gauge whether your emotions are manageable, starting to heat up, or threatening to boil over.