Negotiation Skills

Adapted from “Better or Best: Keeping Your Options Open,” by Michael Wheeler (professor, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Jim, a well-regarded residential developer operating outside Philadelphia, has been scouting around for a site for his next project. Two properties seem promising. The Abbott estate consists of 75 acres of woodlands and some … Read Keeping Your Options Alive

Adapted from “When Tough Talk Is Beside the Point,” by Hal Movius (instructor, The Program on Technology Negotiation, Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Most of us intuitively believe that personality traits such as toughness matter a great deal in negotiation. Yet studies by Bruce Barry and Raymond Friedman of … Read When Does Personality Matter?

Adapted from “Battles of the Sexes,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

What happens when men and women compete with one another for scarce resources? In a fascinating series of studies, Professor Laura Kray of the University of California at Berkeley and her colleagues show that gender stereotypes have unexpected effects on the behavior of pairs … Read When the Sexes Face Off

Adapted from “For Better or Worse: How Relationships Affect Negotiations,” by Kathleen L. McGinn (professor, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Six years ago, Esther Lorenza, an experienced entrepreneur and the founder of a new Internet and catalog retailer, concluded that only one supplier could meet her unique product specifications and high standards … Read Choosing Your Next Relationship

Adapted from “The Perils of Powerful Speech,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Death to modifiers! All hail the active verb. Be succinct.

Those are Strunk and White’s commandments for simple and direct writing. They also may be rules for establishing verbal power in negotiation—though not always, it turns out.

Linguistic studies have shown that hesitations (ums and … Read What Exactly Are You Saying?

Adapted from “What Negotiators Can Learn from Improv Comedy,” by Lakshmi Balachandra (lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management) and Michael Wheeler (professor, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

You’re onstage without a script, relying on your mind and wits to come up with lines and actions that advance the game. Should you trust … Read Think Fast!

Adapted from “Fickle Intuition,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

When it comes to trusting others, negotiators often rely on their gut instincts. Recent studies indicate, however, that extraneous factors can sway such judgments. For example, Michael Kosfeld and other University of Zurich researchers introduced a twist in a classic trust game in which subjects must … Read Check Your Impulses

Adapted from “I Know Exactly How You Feel,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

Theorists have long distinguished one-shot deals from repeated negotiations. People who know they’ll never see one another again may be tempted to take advantage of one another, for example. By contrast, parties in ongoing relationships, even ones that have a competitive edge, … Read When Emotions Converge

Adapted from “Create Value with Matching Rights,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

The problem: You and your counterpart have different ideas about how much freedom you should have to negotiate with others and/or how long your agreement should last.

The tool: Matching rights (sometimes known as rights of first refusal) are a contractual guarantee between negotiators … Read Expand the Pie with Matching Rights

Ms. Sreedhari Desai, the PON 2009-2010 Graduate Research Fellow, received the International Association for Conflict Management’s Graduate Scholarship award for two of her papers. The first, “Some Like it Hot: Why Some People Respond Negatively to Procedural Fairness,” (co-authored with Drs. Harris Sondak and Kristina Diekmann) can be downloaded here. The second, “When Executives Rake … Read Sreedhari Desai wins IACM Graduate Scholarship