Adapted from “When a Contract Isn’t Enough: How to Be Sure Your Agent Gets You the Best Deal,” by James K. Sebenius (Professor, Harvard Business School). First published in “Negotiation Newsletter.”

Top executive pay attorney Joseph Bachelder was representing a client who’d just been chosen as a company’s next CEO. After a first session with the board’s representative to hammer out … read more »

Basic negotiation skills may seem easy to apply in business situations but what about when business and family collide? For example, a 69-year-old CEO of a large financial firm that has been in his family for three generations is considering retirement. He has three children who may be interested in taking over the business in addition to several well-qualified senior … read more »

Retired US Senator George Mitchell played a critical role in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. In an interview with Susan Hackley, Managing Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, in the February 2004 Negotiation newsletter, he describes how he was able to facilitate an agreement between these long warring parties. The negotiations leading up to … read more »

What do we do when we’re uncertain about how to behave in business negotiations? We study the behavior of others in similar situations.

When we look for social proof regarding the “right” way to behave, we tend to make quicker, more efficient decisions, writes psychologist Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University.

Popularity makes just about anything seem more appealing. Here’s one anecdote … read more »

You’re facing business negotiations with the goliath in your industry. What’s your choice? Take what little the other side offers or be squeezed out of the market entirely? In his February 2006 article in Negotiation newsletter, “Negotiating with a 900-Pound Gorilla,” MIT Professor Lawrence Susskind suggests seeking an elegant solution, a counterproposal that will create even more value for both sides … read more »

Faculty Discussion
Great Negotiator Award Presentation

RealPlayer Recommended (download here)

Business leader Bruce Wasserstein was the 2007 recipient of the Great Negotiator Award given by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. As a graduate of Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, he has helped arrange more than a thousand transactions worth hundreds of billions of dollars and is currently the … read more »