negotiation skills

The following items are tagged negotiation skills.

Use Time Delays to Advantage

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

For decades, General Electric and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sparred over who would pay for the removal of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, that GE had discharged into New York’s Hudson River, a cleanup project that is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The two sides finally came to an agreement in October 2005.

Teaching Negotiation Online: Lessons from Teaching in the Simmons College School of Management MBA and MHA Degree Programs

Posted by & filed under Pedagogy at the Program on Negotiation (Pedagogy @ PON).

Simmons College believes that it is important for people in a leadership position, in almost any profession, to have a basic understanding of, and competency in, the negotiation process. Therefore, negotiation is a required course for the Simmons School of Management Master in Business Administration (MBA) and Master in Health Administration (MHA) degrees. The author designed and teaches the negotiation course for the Simmons online MHA program. In this program, the negotiation course is the lead course in the curriculum, and serves as a foundation course. The students are mid-career, health-systems professionals, many of whom have terminal degrees in their clinical areas of expertise. The author also teaches negotiation in the MBA program, where she designed the course as a “blended” experience, with some lessons taught online between face-to-face class sessions.

Measuring the Cost of Betrayal Aversion

Posted by & filed under Conflict Management.

Richard Zeckhauser and Program on Negotiation faculty member Iris Bohnet have found that negotiators leave substantial amounts of money on the table due to betrayal aversion. They conducted experiments in which they compared people’s willingness to take risks in two decision situations. The first situation is a lottery whose outcome is based on chance. Participants must choose between:

In Dispute Resolution, Try Going to the Top

Posted by & filed under Dispute Resolution.

When two parties are attempting to resolve a contentious dispute, the most effective peacemakers may be those at the highest levels. That’s the lesson from recent productive talks between President Obama and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai on the issue of rules for detaining terrorism suspects.

Business Negotiations: Cooperate to Claim Value

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

What happens in negotiations between two individuals who care little about each other’s outcomes? Suppose an engineer and an industrial designer are arguing over the design of a car bumper. The designer only cares about whether the bumper matches the style of the vehicle; the engineer is concerned only about how the bumper connects to the front. After describing the trouble he’s having with the existing design, the engineer presents a solution that the designer deems “ugly.” The designer threatens to involve her boss if the engineer doesn’t revert back to the prior design.

The Paradox of Positions

Posted by & filed under Dispute Resolution.

It’s not difficult for negotiators haggling over seemingly finite resources to become entrenched in their positions. Sometimes the only way to get unstuck is to think appreciatively and creatively about the other side. Rather than trying to determine why a person has taken a particular position, consider what she wants, appreciate it, and try to deliver it.