Negotiation Skills

If you’ve ever been annoyed by a negotiation counterpart who can’t seem to remember your interests and priorities, it could be that your communication skills, not his poor memory, are to blame. Negotiators typically aren’t as transparent as they think they are. In some cases, we think we’re revealing more information to the other side … Learn More About This Program

We’ve seen that people whose sacred, or morally significant, values are threatened tend to react with strong emotions that make them uncompromising. In a new study published in Judgment and Decision Making, University of Southern California researchers Morteza Dehghani, Peter J. Carnevale, and Jonathan Gratch find that our counterparts’ emotions affect how cooperative we are … Learn More About This Program

During the past several years, one scandalous story of unethical behavior after another has made headlines: Countrywide’s and AIG’s risky business practices, trader Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s alleged attempt to sell a U.S. Senate seat. As instances of people behaving badly proliferate, some commentators have wondered if we are … Read Negotiators: Guard Against Ethical Lapses

On June 19, Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a libertarian, teamed up with two liberal Democrats, Zoe Lofgren of California and Rush D. Holt of New Jersey, to push through an amendment that places new prohibitions on the National Security Agency and the CIA’s surveillance operations, including barring the agencies from engaging in warrantless … Learn More About This Program

Adapted from “Coping with Culture at the Bargaining Table,” first published in the May 2009 issue of Negotiation.
Why we focus on culture
Why does concentrating on the other side’s culture lead to problems in negotiation? Consider that negotiators often focus too narrowly on the most obvious information about the task at hand. Such focusing failures lead negotiators to … Read Why We Focus on Culture in Negotiations

You’ve probably grown accustomed to seeing people not-so-discreetly checking messages on their smartphones or laptops during meetings. Maybe you’ve even been guilty of this yourself.
Paying more attention to a phone than to the person in front us is clearly rude in most situations. Could it also affect how well we negotiate? Researchers Aparna Krishnan and … Learn More About This Program

At this point, you have entered the realm of haggling: the dance of concessions that follows each party’s first offer. (In our TV negotiation, the $1,100 list price was the store’s first offer.)

For some, this is where the real fun begins; for others, it’s time of great anxiety. To manage your stress, keep your BATNA … Learn More About This Program

In the early 1990s, NASA managers and engineers were warned by an expert in risk
analysis that the heat-resistant tiles that protected space shuttles during reentry into Earth’s
atmosphere could be damaged by debris from the insulating foam on the shuttle’s’ fuel tanks.

During missions over the next 10 years, debris did, indeed, hit tiles, but the damage … Learn More About This Program

The story, related by an anonymous job candidate on a blog called the Philosophy Smoker, went viral. According to the job candidate, referred to only as “W,” the philosophy department of Nazareth College, a small liberal-arts college in Rochester, New York, offered her a tenure-track position following a round of interviews. W said she responded … Read Is your negotiating style holding you back?

The Consensus Building Institute (CBI) based in Boston, Massachusetts and in Washington, DC has honored Program on Negotiation faculty member Lawrence Susskind with its creation of a one-year graduate student fellowship that offers the successful candidate the opportunity to work with CBI in Boston or DC on an area of focus for bot CBI and … Learn More About This Program