Business Negotiations

On November 20 of last year, Hostess Brands announced that it had failed to reach agreement with its second-biggest union and, as a result, was permanently shutting down its operations.

The news was met with dismay by baby boomers and others who had grown up with the 80-year-old company’s shelf-stable confections. But consumers had been passing … Learn More About This Program

On November 20, 2012, just a year after its $11.1 billion purchase of British data company Autonomy, high-tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that it was taking an $8.8 billion write-down and a huge quarterly loss in connection with the deal. According to HP CEO Meg Whitman, a lengthy investigation by HP had determined that Autonomy … Read Launch successful business partnerships

Computer giant Dell’s potential $23 billion leveraged buyout could mark the beginning of a new era of sky-high-priced acquisitions, writes Matt Wirz in the Wall Street Journal. … Read Business Negotiations and the Return of the LBO

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 … Read Keeping the Game Out of Court

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 … Read A Value-Creating Condition Thwarted

In 1986, the investment bank Goldman Sachs was a $38 billion business owned by more than 100 active and retired partners.

While the partnership structure had insulated the company from the vicissitudes of the stock market and given the company a strong culture of teamwork, it had some significant disadvantages, particularly an unstable capital base and … Read The Story of Goldman Sachs: Negotiating a Vision

On February 14, 2005, telecommunications giant Verizon announced that it would buy MCI for $6.75 billion in cash and Verizon stock. The announcement followed closely on the heels of two other announcements of big telecom mergers: first Sprint and Nextel, then AT&T and SBC Communications. In light of this rapid industry consolidation, only one player … Read How Much Exclusivity is Enough?

In 1901, J.P. Morgan wanted to buy the Carnegie Steel Company from its founder, Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie was 65 years old and considering retirement. As Harold C. Livesay recounts in his book Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Little, Brown, 1975), when Carnegie finally decided he was ready to sell, he jotted down his … Read Are You an Overconfident Negotiator?

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 … Read Use Time Delays to Advantage

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 … Read Business Negotiations: Cooperate to Claim Value