The following items are tagged health.
Business professionals seeking to improve their negotiation training can learn a great deal from the mistakes made in newsworthy negotiations.
To take one recent example, Steven M. Davidoff of the New York Times’ “DealBook” recently analyzed how the U.S. governments rushed negotiations to save U.S. automaker Chrysler led to a costly long-term problem.
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.
In any negotiation, you’re likely to have information about the other party or about the deal (industry facts, economic health, new products, and so on) that the other party might not know you have.
What to do when you’ve done everything right, but you still don’t have an agreement.
On February 1, the Obama administration proposed a compromise to a federal policy requiring health insurance plans to provide free contraceptives to women.
The proposal would expand the number of groups that need not pay directly for birth control coverage, the New York Times reports. Some religiously affiliated hospitals, universities, and social service agencies would join churches and other religious organizations as exempted groups.
In the mid-1990s, a young JD/MBA student at Harvard was writing a case study about a railroad deal that was ongoing at the time. Somewhat to his surprise, he landed an interview with Bruce Wasserstein, the renowned dealmaker who had pioneered the hostile takeover, and who was a consultant in the railroad negotiations.
It was a fascinating conversation, the student remembers.
“I began to recognize that sophisticated dealmakers play the game at a different level – like a chess game instead of trying to scream and yell louder than others in the room.
“Rather than a frontal assault, sophisticated dealmakers engage in a carefully thought-through sequencing strategy: Get all the pieces lined up, to the point where when you go in the room, it’s basically a done deal.”
Like many of us, this student was hooked by the sweet art of negotiation … and he went on to become a world-renowned dealmaker, instrumental in megadeals such as Oracle’s $10.3 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, Cox Enterprises’ $8.9 billion freeze-out of minority shareholders in Cox Communications, the $6.6 billion leveraged buyout of Toys “R” Us, and Exelon’s $8.0 billion hostile takeover bid for NRG.
For the first time ever, the Program on Negotiation is offering a master-level course for negotiators. The program is highly personalized and taught by 4 negotiation experts from Harvard and MIT. If you are selected to participate, you will be assigned to small learning groups, take part in dynamic exercises with two-way feedback, work closely with faculty members to develop a strategy that addresses personal negotiation challenges, and particpate in intensive simulations.
Katrin Bennhold, staff writer for the International Herald Tribune, and Paula Gutlove, Professor of Negotiation and Conflict Management Practice at the Simmons College School of Management, will present a talk on Women and Negotiation.
In late 1999, with its stock in free fall, NCS HealthCare, a provider of pharmacy services to long-term care facilities, began “exploring strategic alternatives” – code in the mergers and acquisitions world that NCS’s board wanted to put the company up for sale.
In 2001, Omnicare, a larger provider in the same general industry, offered to buy NCS for $270 million, a number lower than the value of the company’s debt. The deal would have left the company’s stockholders with nothing, and talks broke down when NCS demanded a higher price. In June 2002, Omnicare’s fierce rival Genesis HealthCare came to the table with an offer for NCS. Fearful of having its deal stolen away by Omnicare, which had just beaten Genesis in a bidding contest for another company, Genesis proposed a condition on the deal. It would make an offer only if NCS’s chairman and president, who together held a majority of the voting shares, committed to the Genesis deal and rejected any competing offer from Omnicare. NCS accepted this condition, and the merger was announced on July 28, 2002.
In any negotiation, you’re likely to have information about the other party or about the deal (industry facts, economic health, new products, and so on) that the other party might not know you have.
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