One of the more interesting segues to job negotiation advice emerged from the December 2014 leaks of hacked Sony Pictures data and an e-mail revealing a young actress’s efforts to be paid on the same level as her male peers.

In a December 2013 e-mail to Sony Pictures cochair Amy Pascal, Columbia Pictures executive Andrew Gumpert … Read Job Negotiation Advice to Help You Succeed

We recently spoke with Guhan Subramanian, the Joseph H. Flom Professor of Law and Business at Harvard Law School and the H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at Harvard Business School, regarding trends in merger and acquisition strategies and how that’s impacting negotiations. 

Negotiation Briefings: In your research, you’ve found that the way in which … Read More

When employees lack effective strategies to resolve conflict in the workplace, issues with coworkers often fester and grow. Employees may feel they lack avenues for resolving conflict at work. And when they feel uncomfortable voicing their opinions, creativity and innovation can stall. … Read More

Good negotiations can easily be spoiled when the outcome is in poor taste.

After actor Kevin Spacey faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct in late 2017, director Ridley Scott and Imperative Entertainment, the company that produced and financed the film All the Money in the World, decided to edit Spacey out of the film and hire … Read More

Q: I’ve pitched many great ideas for change to my organization, but management never takes action on any of them. Even when my organization specifically requests ideas for new products or processes, it’s always a colleague’s idea that gets chosen over mine. Negotiators are good at persuasion. Do you have any tips to increase my … Read More

In negotiation, the party who makes the first offer often gets the lion’s share of the value. That can be due to the anchoring effect, or the tendency for first offers to “anchor” the bargaining that follows in its direction, even if the offer recipient thinks the offer is out of line.
Yet plenty of times, … Read When First Offers Fail In a Negotiation

Should negotiating with the enemy always be off the table? The 2014 Bergdahl exchange offers insights for negotiators who are deciding whether to do business with a known enemy.

On May 31, 2014 the White House made the surprise announcement that the Taliban had released Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the sole American prisoner of war in the … Read Negotiating with the Enemy

Negotiation theory suggests you focus on interests, not positions; separate inventing from committing; invest heavily in “What if?” questions; insist on objective criteria; and try to build nearly self-enforcing agreements.

But what if the negotiation is with yourself, or about your own religious identity?

For example, what does it mean to be Jewish in America? What challenges … Read More

What do you do when you believe you’ve been wronged, the offending party won’t talk to you, and you have no legal recourse? Would you look for new paths for communication and conflict resolution? Or would you go public?

That’s what the world-renowned art museum the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, did in January 2019 to … Read More

There are numerous advantages to hearing from external advisers and experts in a high-stakes negotiation. However, when talks are at an impasse, limiting the negotiation to a small number of participants may be a more beneficial problem solving approach than including outside opinions.
This was at the heart of a recent question answered by Guhan Subramanian, … Read More

On April 14, the Program on Negotiation presented its 2022 Great Negotiator Award to Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres for her success in spearheading the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. In a daylong series of events, including a public interview led by Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles and Harvard Business School professor … Read More