Will Your Negotiations Get Sidetracked?
Coping with Negotiator Emotion, Both Fake and Fleeting
Dear Negotiation Coach: Dealing with an Uninformed Buyer
negotiation skills
The following items are tagged negotiation skills.
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
Our April seminar is currently sold out. To be added to the waiting list, please email pon@law.harvard.edu or call 1-800-391-8629.
This course examines core decision-making challenges, analyzes complex negotiation scenarios, and provides a range of competitive and cooperative negotiation strategies. Whether you’re an experienced executive or and up-and-coming manager – working in the private or public sector – this program will help you shape important deals, negotiate in uncertain environments, improve working relationships, claim (and create) more value, and resolve seemingly intractable disputes. In short, this three-day executive education program will prepare you to achieve better outcomes at the table, every single time.
Fall 2013 Seminar Program Guide
Join us September 16-18, October 14-16, December 9-11, for this three-day negotiation seminar at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed to accelerate your negotiation capabilities, Negotiation and Leadership (formerly known as the Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives) examines core decision-making challenges, analyzes complex negotiation scenarios, and provides a range of competitive and cooperative negotiation strategies.
March 2013
- Learn from the Deficit-reduction Talks – The United States didn’t go over the fiscal cliff, but few Americans liked the deal that was forged to avoid it. We look at what went wrong—and right—to show you how you can do better in your own negotiations.
- To Understand Other Negotiators, Consider the Context – Negotiators are often counseled to engage in perspective taking and empathetic understanding to achieve better results. Yet new research shows that the two very different skills have different payoffs in negotiation.
- Dear Negotiation Coach: Deal with a Crowded Table – Should you limit the number of people in the room during mediation of a high-stakes dispute? Our Negotiation Coach for February, Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School professor Guhan Subramanian, suggests strength can be found in fewer numbers of participants.
Improving Negotiation Skills Training
How would you characterize your negotiating style: Are you collaborative, competitive, or compromising? If you have trouble answering that question, you’re probably not alone. That’s because skilled negotiators typically take on all these styles during a negotiation: they listen closely and collaborate to create value, they compete for the biggest slice of the pie, and they make compromises when necessary.
Keeping the Game Out of Court
Sometimes those on opposite sides of a bitter dispute can achieve great gains – if only they can spot the ways in which they are similar.
In 2001, the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association (MIBA), an organization of five New York-area colleges best known for staging college basketball’s National Invitation Tournament, filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). MIBA allege that certain NCAA rules governing team participation in preseason and postseason tournaments restricted school’s participation in MIBA tournaments, in violation of various antitrust laws. After four years of litigation, the two parties announced not only that they would settle a lawsuit but also that the NCAA would purchase the rights to the MIBA preseason and postseason tournaments.
February 2013
Launch Successful Business Partnerships
From Negotiation to Auction: The Rise of Real-Time Bidding
When Impasse Looms, Bring Them Back from the Brink
PON co-sponsors negotiation skills training for Israeli and Palestinian students
Thanks to leadership from the Middle East Negotiation Initiative (MENI) of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, a series of negotiation skills trainings was recently provided to eleventh grade students from Jewish and Arab schools in Israel. These two-day workshops, co-sponsored by the Program on Negotiation and the Amal Network and funded by
A Value-Creating Condition Thwarted
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.
How to Negotiate When You’re Literally Far Apart
Imagine that you’re the CEO of a sports clothing manufacturer based in Chicago. You recently traveled to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to meet with a distributor who has a rich and diverse network in the European sports market.
During the business trip, you both express enthusiasm about the possibility of a joint venture and agree to give the potential alliance more thought.
Back home, you learn that one of your competitors has discussed similar plans with the same distributor.









