Negotiation Newsletter

The following items are tagged Negotiation Newsletter.

Bring Long-Term Concerns to the Bargaining Table

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

It can be difficult to keep future concerns at the forefront of your company’s most important decisions. Fortunatly, research on intergenerational conflict has uncovered best practices for ensuring that you and your employees take the long view.

Dispute Resolution Using Online Mediation

Posted by & filed under Mediation.

Suppose you want to hire a mediator to help you resolve a conflict that you’re having with an individual or a company, but for various reasons, meeting face-to-face would be difficult.

Perhaps you and the other party are located in different geographic areas. Maybe your dispute originated in an online transaction, and you’ve never even met. Or perhaps one of you feels threatened or intimidated by the other and is reluctant to meet in person.

In Deal Making, Broaden Your Focus

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Imagine that you are in charge of renting a new location for a branch of your company in a nearby city. After researching the reputations of a number of local real estate agents, you meet with several and choose the one who seems most knowledgable and responsive.

Google Searches for a More Diverse Team

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Recently, executives at the Silicon Valley-based internet giant Google noticed a disturbing trend: the company was having difficulty hiring and retaining female employees, from engineers to senior executives, Claire Cain Miller writes in the August 22 issue of the New York Times. Women were dropping out during the job interview process and were not being promoted at the same rate as men. In addition, women have lost ground in top leadership positions since Larry Page took over as the company’s CEO in 2011. The issue at Google reflects a larger trend, as the percentage of women working in professional computing jobs fell from 25% in 2011 to 16% in 2010. In many cases, women have been leaving large computer companies for jobs in the public sector or with start-ups.

A Peacekeeper Abandons Negotiations in Syria

Posted by & filed under International Negotiation.

On August 2, Kofi Annan announced he was resigning as the special peace envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League. reports Rick Gladstone in the New York Times. Since February, the former Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary General has attempted to negotiate a resolution of the Syrian conflict. The peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that began 17 months ago has since exploded into a civil war.

Team Building and Your Negotiations

Posted by & filed under Mediation.

During his years as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, one of James A. Baker, III’s, goals was to encourage the free-market reforms that Communist Party of the Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had launched in the late 1980s. One day during his tenure, a high-level Bush administration official commented in the press that Gorbachev’s efforts were sure to fail. Baker called Bush to complain. “I said, you can’t have other people pontificating about these major foreign policy matters when this is one of our goals, and it’s totally contrary to our policy,” he said. “So they cut the knees off of this particular individual, and we didn’t hear that anymore.”

Baker shared this story on March 29 while receiving the 2012 Great Negotiator Award from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School. In discussion with Harvard faculty at the Great Negotiator event, Baker elaborated on his greatest challenges as Secretary of State and shared negotiation lessons learned over the course of his long, successful career as a lawyer, campaign manager, and diplomat.

When Negotiations Take Advantage of Outsiders

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

In March, reported Rob Wildeboer of Chicago’s WBEZ radio station broke the news that inmate in Cook County prisons (including those in the city of Chicago) were being charged inflated phone rates due to a profit-generating contract between the county and Securus Technologies, the company that operates the jail phone service. The contract requires Securus to pay 57.5% of the revenue from phone calls back to the county, an arrangement that netted the county $12 million from outgoing calls from inmates over the life of the three-year contract.