Great Negotiators

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

Deals

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

Managing, Organizing & Motivating for Value (1816)

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

WINTER 2013

Instructors:
Ian Larkin
617-495-6884
Brian Hall
617-495-5062
Andrew Wasynczuk
617-495-8043

This course is about how to become a better value creator. Managers and negotiators create value by influencing (e.g. persuasion skills) and motivating (e.g. incentive systems) the behavior and decisions of others. This course provides a powerful framework (and set of practical skills to help managers and negotiators work value propositions with excellence. It is useful for students in all career tracks and with any industry focus.

The course builds frameworks for:
• Understanding the sources of value creation/destruction, and how a dynamic strategy built around “learning, adapting and influencing” is central to developing and executing value propositions.
• Understanding the behavior and motivation and behavior of people (including ourselves) and
• Becoming a more effective value creator by building skills around agile thinking, trust-building and emotional/social intelligence.
• Effectively working value propositions in negotiations concerning pay, incentives, budgets, decision making authority, and resource allocation.
• Aligning incentive systems with organizational strategies.
• Understanding how to build, manage and implement incentive systems so that they motivate value-creating behavior of individuals and teams.

The starting point of the course is that the purpose of organizations is to create value. The goal of individuals, therefore, is to motivate the value-creating decisions and behavior. Manager-Negotiators do this by persuading and influencing others through dynamic strategies centered on “learning, adapting and influencing.” This is the focus of the first half of the course (which strongly overlaps with “Complex Deals.”) The focus in the 2nd half of the course shifts from how Manager-negotiators create value to how Manager-Organizers create value. Manager-organizers build organizational systems and structures, and especially incentive systems, that align rewards (broadly defined) with value-creating behavior. (The second half draws heavily on a former course, CCMO-Coordination, Control and the Management of Organizations).
The first half has two modules. Module one explores the value-creating framework of the course, emphasizing the significant challenges and opportunities associated with fostering cooperative and coordinated behavior. The focus of is on dynamic settings that require quick/agile thinking in settings where you often don’t know what you don’t know. Static strategies are unhelpful and dangerous. Thus, we develop insights based on a dynamic strategy of “learning, adapting and influencing.” Module 2 focuses on how you can become a better value creator in such settings. Insights are drawn from game theory, “improv” comedy, social/emotional intelligence, lie detection and military strategy.

The second half also has two modules. The first module extends the logic of the framework to incentive systems. The framework centers on the three crucial features of any reward system: the allocation of decision rights, the performance measurement system and the reward/punishment system that aligns rewards and performance. The second module focuses on developing, managing and implementing the many types of incentive schemes including: bonus design, sales plan incentives, promotion-based incentives, option and stock-based incentives, subjective vs. objective plans, and human capital strategy more generally, especially with regard to alignment with organizational strategy. The framework synthesizes insights from a variety of fields, including organizational economics, labor economics, strategy, human resource management, psychology and organizational behavior. (Section times: TBA)

Negotiation (2240)

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

FALL 2012
Instructors:
Deepak Malhotra
(617) 496-1020
Andrew Wasynczuk
(617) 495-8043
Michael Luca
(617) 495-8382

WINTER 2013
Instructors:
Michael Wheeler
(617)-495-6747
Francesca Gino
(617) 495-0875

Intensive Course Instructor:
James Sebenius
(617) 495-9334

Career Focus & Educational Objectives

Managerial success requires the ability to negotiate. Whether you are forging an agreement with your suppliers, trying to ink a deal with potential customers, raising money from investors, managing a conflict inside your firm, or resolving a dispute that is headed towards litigation, your ability to negotiate will determine how well you perform.

Because others do not have the same interests, perspectives, and values as you, negotiation skill is critical-professionally and personally. This course will enable you to become a more effective negotiator by enhancing your abilities to:

* Identify (often-overlooked) value-creating potential in different situations;
* Design and execute agreements that unlock maximum value on a sustainable basis;
* End up with an appropriate share of the value that is negotiated;
* Understand the vital role of ethics in negotiation, even where the parties’ ethical standards vary dramatically;
* Work with people whose backgrounds, expectations, perspectives, values, and ethical standards differ from your own; and
* Reflect on-and learn from-your experience.

This course will teach you how to analyze, prepare for, and execute negotiations at a sophisticated level-through actions both at and away from the bargaining table. It will give you the opportunity to enhance your strengths as a negotiator and to shore up your weaknesses.
Course Content

Moving from simple (two-party, one-shot, price deals) to complex (multiple parties and issues, internal divisions, long time-frames, cross-border deals), the course integrates three complementary perspectives: analytic, behavioral, and contextual. While we will analyze a number of traditional case studies, the heart of the course is a series of interactive negotiation exercises. These exercises will give you hands-on negotiating experience. You will learn first by actually negotiating, and then by stepping back to compare your approach and results with others. You will be able to test your analytic ability and tactical skill, and to experiment with new approaches.

The course is a laboratory in which you will be both experimenter and subject. Sometimes the most important learning comes from apparent “failure”-and so the course is designed to let you fail in the safe setting of a classroom, and thus help you avoid costly real mistakes.

All of the sections of EC Negotiation will cover the foregoing in considerable depth, though individual faculty members may vary in their emphases, case material, and sequencing. Prospective students are encouraged to read the faculty biographies that are available online as a first step, consult online descriptions of individual section approaches, and then, if useful, meet with course faculty to pick the section that is most appropriate for their educational interests and career objectives.
Grading & Course Requirements

Grading will be based on class participation and the final exam (or paper if permitted by instructor). The exact weighting may vary from section to section. In all instances, however, diligent completion of the negotiation exercises is essential.

Section times: TBA

Advanced Negotiation

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

WINTER Half course (not offered 2013)
Instructor:
James Sebenius
617-495-9334

This half-course is designed for those students who expect to analyze and participate in challenging business, financial, and international negotiations, sometimes with a public-private aspect. It builds on the “3D negotiation” framework developed in the required first-year course, and develops significantly more advanced negotiation concepts and skills. It should be especially useful for students whose careers will involve the advisory and principal sides of investment banking; business development; venture capital, private equity investment, and entrepreneurial firms; foreign direct investment; alliances and joint ventures; as well as companies engaged in a range of cross-border transactions and relationships.

The central theme is how to deal effectively with difficult negotiators and genuinely hard negotiations. Course modules will emphasize different aspects of meeting this challenge. One module will develop “at-the-table” tactics for handling hardball moves, incompatible positions, adversarial relationships, the lack of vital information, and cross-cultural frictions. A second module explores how sophisticated deal design moves can overcome impasses in order to create value on a sustainable basis. A final course module develops more advanced concepts and skills for making effective “away-from-the-table” setup moves, especially to meet the challenges of cross-border negotiations and those that play out over time. Such challenges typically occur both “across the table” in negotiating “externally” with the other side(s) as well as “internally” within each side.

Beyond participation in class and negotiation exercises, most students will take a written exam; with instructor approval, individual students or small groups may opt to write a paper developing a negotiation topic of special interest. (Time to be announced)

Advanced Negotiation: Setup, Deal Design, and Tactics
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

FALL (not offered 2012)

Instructor:
James Sebenius
617-495-9334

This course is designed for students who expect to analyze and participate in challenging business, financial, and international negotiations, sometimes with public and/or public-private aspects. It builds on the framework developed in the required first-year course, but develops far more advanced negotiation concepts and skills. It should be especially useful for students whose careers will involve the advisory and principal sides of investment banking; business development; venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneurial firms; foreign direct investment; alliances and joint ventures; as well as companies engaged in a range of cross-border transactions and relationships. The course will also help prepare students for challenging negotiations they may encounter at some stage in their careers when acting in public sector contexts or even diplomatic roles.

A central theme is how to deal effectively with difficult negotiators and genuinely hard negotiations. Course modules emphasize different aspects of meeting this challenge. One module will develop “at-the-table” tactics for handling hardball moves, incompatible positions, adversarial relationships, the lack of vital information, and cross-cultural frictions. A second module explores how sophisticated deal design moves can overcome impasses in order to create value on a sustainable basis. A final module develops more advanced concepts and skills for making effective “away-from-the-table” setup moves, especially to meet the challenges of cross-border negotiations and those that play out over time. Such challenges typically occur both “across the table” in negotiating “externally” with the other side(s) as well as “internally” within each side.

While many of the cases and exercises will be from familiar business contexts, the course will also develop insights and skills from the experiences of a subset of Harvard’s “Great Negotiator” Awardees, annually recognized by the Program on Negotiation (sponsored by Harvard, MIT, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts). Possible examples include close analysis of Senator George Mitchell’s work in Northern Ireland; Bruce Wasserstein’s dealmaking at Lazard; 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 as well as his multiparty efforts to deal with unpaid U.S. dues to the United Nations; the Honorable Stuart Eizenstat’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; as well as the complex negotiations by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to erect massive, controversial installations in California, Central Park, New York, Paris, and Germany. (Tuesday 10:05-11:25 a.m.)