Managing, Organizing & Negotiating for Value (1816)

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

WINTER

Instructors:
Ian Larkin (Section 01)
617-495-6884
Brian Hall (Section 02)
617-495-5062
Andrew Wasynczuk (Section 03)
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. (Sec. 01: Monday 8:30-9:50 a.m.; Sec. 02: Tuesday 10:05-11:25 a.m.; Sec. 03: Wednesday 11:40 a.m.-1:00 p.m.)

Complex Negotiation (2240)

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

WINTER
Instructor:
Michael Wheeler
617-495-6747

This advanced course in negotiation extends and sometimes challenges the frameworks presented in the required first year course. It is not limited to a single industry or career track. The objectives are to:
• Deepen students’ understanding of negotiation as a dynamic process in which the interests, BATNAs, and even values of the parties often change significantly.
• Enhance students’ awareness of the overlapping – and sometimes conflicting – roles of a manger in negotiation (for example, as where one may simultaneously be acting as an agent, principal and de facto mediator); and
• Sharpen students’ analytic and interpersonal skills in unstructured situations where the ability to learn, adapt, and persuade is essential for success.

The course is sequenced in four modules:

Dynamic strategy for a complex world explores multiple dimensions of negotiation. For example, a land assembly case illuminates how negotiations to acquire separate parcels must be linked to a larger strategy. In turn, cases involving multi-party lawsuits and labor-management conflicts illustrate how negotiators must adapt to ever-changing conditions. Students will take part in simulations that illustrate key concepts and provide the chance to experiment with new techniques.

Improvising the negotiation process shifts the focus from strategy to process issues. We will explore improv techniques from other domains (including comedy, jazz, and warfare) to see how they can best adapted to the negotiation process. We will give special attention to openings, closings, and other critical moments in negotiation. Students will be able to compare their own performance with that of videotaped professionals.

Negotiating with agents and organizations examines the influence of agents on the bargaining process, that is, negotiators who represent interests of parties not at the bargaining table. We will explore the challenges of coordinating internal and external negotiations in a variety of settings, among them, sales, business development, and collective bargaining. We will also compare transactional negotiation with dispute resolution. Large organizations are engines for generating disputes – be they with customers, vendors, regulators, partners or rivals. Managers skilled at resolving external and internal disputes save costs, preserve relationships, and contribute significant value to their organizations.

Mastery is designed to develop emotional intelligence and foster lifelong learning skills, so that students can continually enhance their effectiveness as negotiators. The module will also synthesize important themes in the course, bridging strategy and tactics, theory and practice. It includes a series of exercises to encourage self reflection and develop ability to improvise effectively in the face of unexpected opportunities and potential perils.

Note: There is some overlap in materials with NOM: Managing, Organizing, & Negotiating for Value (Andrew Wasynczuk and Brian Hall), so students may not enroll in both courses. (January 14 through April, varying on Wednesday, Thursday, and/or Friday, 11:40 a.m.-1:00 p.m.)

Advanced Negotiation

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

WINTER Half course
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

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.)