Daily Blog

The tragic accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins by actor Alec Baldwin on the New Mexico set of the indie movie Rust in October 2021 shone a spotlight on the potentially hazardous working conditions, long hours, and tight budgets that movie crews have long faced. Complaints about these and other issues were at the center … Read When Hard Bargaining Wastes Valuable Time 

Imagine yourself in the following negotiation scenarios and attempting to make a good deal:

You’re a chef who is having trouble finding cooks in an oversaturated restaurant market. You’re so desperate to get fully staffed that you find yourself making significant concessions on salary, scheduling, and other issues during interviews with potential hires.
You are … Read How to Make a Good Deal When You Lack Power 

Negotiating equity compensation isn’t as straightforward as it might seem, especially in privately held businesses. We shared a question from one of our readers with Kevin Mohan, Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, to gain insight on how to deal with this increasingly common negotiation scenario.

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Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

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In business negotiations, our actions and reactions often go against our best interests. Self-examination can help, writes Getting to Yes author William Ury in his new book. … Read This Post 

Apple has often found success by charging headfirst into unfamiliar industries, from book publishing to music to mobile phones, and disrupting its long-standing business models. In the early 2000s, for example, the company’s cofounder, Steve Jobs, pressured music labels to switch from selling $15 CDs to selling songs online for 99 cents each.

No surprise, then, … Read This Post 

At a Teaching Negotiation Resource Center (TNRC) faculty pedagogy seminar, members of the PON faculty and negotiation community gathered to hear Gordon Kaufman (MIT Morris A. Adelman Professor of Management, Emeritus) speak about how he uses quantifiable data to plot student-learning trajectories. The conversation focused on the ongoing debate within the negotiation pedagogy community regarding the way … Read This Post 

In negotiation, visions of collaborating to create new sources of value can quickly evaporate when the other party engages in a hardball strategy—such as penalizing us financially, attacking our reputation, walking away, or threatening to do all of the above. Suddenly we find ourselves on the defensive, scrambling to do more than just break even.

That’s … Read This Post 

Reverse auctions are becoming a more frequent reality of business contract negotiations as companies work to cut expenses. In most negotiations, however, price is not the only issue. Guhan Subramanian, Joseph Flom Professor of Law & Business at Harvard Law School and Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at Harvard Business School, answered a question … Read This Post 

When we think of our worst negotiation mistakes, they tend to be recent blunders. But what about negotiation mistakes whose repercussions accumulate over years, even decades? A failed negotiation case study from 1976 shows how carelessly negotiated deals can lead to long-term headaches and losses.

A Short Season
In 1974, brothers Ozzie and Daniel Silna, Latvian immigrant … Read When Negotiation Mistakes Compound over Time 

The negotiations that surrounded the 1962 Cuban missile crisis were some of the most tense and frightening in world history, and provide a high-profile example of emotional leadership. Having learned that the Soviet Union had deployed ballistic missiles to Cuba, the United States orchestrated a military naval blockade to prevent the Soviets from delivering more … Read This Post 

When negotiators take a long-term approach to deal-making, the result is typically a win-win. Rather than simply trying to sign a contract on favorable terms, negotiators who discuss how those terms might play out over the life of the contract are more likely to set the partnership up for success. After all, when negotiators merely … Read This Post 

In 2014, prosecutors for the United States alleged that Jesse Litvak, a former bond trader for Jefferies & Co., of using a hardball strategy that included lies and deception to defraud investors of more than $2 million. At the trial in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., prosecutors argued that Litvak defrauded investors by … Read This Post