Harvard Negotiation Master Class
Advanced Strategies for Experienced Negotiators
Monday to Wednesday, November 18–20, 2024
Take Your Negotiation Skills to the Master Level
What if you could negotiate at an even higher level? The Harvard Negotiation Master Class is designed for people like you: strong negotiators who want to become even better ones.
Strictly limited to 60 participants who have completed a prior course in negotiation, this program offers unprecedented access to experts from Harvard Law School, MIT, and Harvard Kennedy School—all of whom are committed to delivering a transformational learning experience.
Through dynamic exercises with two-way feedback and intensive simulations, you will gain proven frameworks for addressing your most complicated negotiation challenges—and emerge a highly skilled and confident dealmaker.
The Harvard Negotiation Master Class has run biannually to sold-out classes, and along the way has taught nearly 1,000 global negotiators to become “Master Negotiators.”
Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Harvard Negotiation Master Class
- Learn how to maximize both objective and subjective value in negotiation and gain greater self-awareness as you understand how impressions affect your negotiation counterparts.
- Learn to set the tone and build momentum at the outset of a negotiation.
- Identify shared, opposing, and tradeable interests.
- Recognize the indicators that your negotiation counterpart is ready to close—with a particular focus on thresholds of satisfaction with the process, the substance, and the relationship.
- Gain a robust framework for improving the quality of feedback conversations.
- Assess the deal versus the attractiveness of no-agreement alternatives.
- Learn to identify blind spots—the places where you are missing opportunities and frustrating others.
- Establish the groundwork for identifying the other side’s victory speech by addressing their underlying interests and concerns.
- Learn how to ask probing, clarifying, and investigative questions in a nondefensive manner.
- Understand how to manage difficult deals and ugly conflicts.
Join the Ranks of Master Negotiators
Mastering the art of negotiation is a lifelong journey. The Harvard Negotiation Master Class offers the rare opportunity to step away from your day-to-day responsibilities to self-reflect and focus on developing a competency that will serve you for the rest of your professional life. After three intensive days, you will emerge a highly confident negotiator who truly understands the game—and loves to play it.
Agenda
DAY 1: Monday, November 18
SESSION 1
THE FIRST 180 SECONDS: CREATING IMPACTFUL OPENINGS
8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET | Led by Brian Mandell
Learn to set the tone and build momentum at the outset of a negotiation.
As a seasoned negotiator, you know how important it is to come prepared for the full arc of a negotiation. Research shows, however, that you should spend just as much time preparing for the first 180 seconds of a negotiation encounter as you do for the rest. That’s because the outcomes of the very first interactions—where negotiators act upon thin slices of information—disproportionately affect overall success. Moreover, when things go awry in these critical first few moments, it can be difficult to recover lost ground.
In this session, you’ll learn how to effectively set the tone and agenda, create rapport, and build momentum at the outset of a negotiation. Additionally, you will enhance your ability to:
- Prepare for negotiation by evaluating sources of power and assessing barriers to negotiated agreement
- Identify shared, opposing, and tradeable interests
- Set a firm, collaborative tone, shape expectations, and propose a well-sequenced agenda that aligns with your priorities
- Generate momentum and a trust-building conversation by sharing information
- Invoke fairness standards to avoid early missteps likely to trigger an impasse or motivate potential spoilers
- Ask probing, clarifying, and investigative questions in a nondefensive manner
- Make opening offers grounded in high aspirations that signal a robust BATNA
- Leverage your professional reputation to encourage concessions
- Maintain emotional control and defend against hard bargaining tactics by reframing unacceptable early moves or offers designed to destabilize negotiators
- Establish the groundwork for writing the other side’s victory speech by focusing on addressing their underlying interests and concerns
SESSION 2
Analyzing Objective and Subjective Value in Negotiation
1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET | Led by Jared Curhan
Conventional wisdom holds that the economic value of a deal is the yardstick by which negotiation performance should be measured. In contrast, how you feel afterward is considered to be a fleeting emotion irrelevant to bottom-line performance. Yet recent research dispels this notion, suggesting instead that the impression you make on your negotiation counterparts—what’s known as subjective value—often holds more weight than the monetary, or objective, value of a deal.
Led by Professor Jared Curhan, this session will review basic concepts you will have learned in prior negotiation training, such as how to create and claim value. Then, you will delve into the more advanced topic of subjective value, which includes feelings about the outcome, oneself, the process, and the relationship. By doing so, you will learn how to foster subjective value while preserving objective value.
Core to this session is a scored negotiation simulation and online system for evaluating negotiation performance in real time. After the simulation, you will receive extensive peer feedback on multiple dimensions of negotiation performance and be measured on the following criteria relative to your peers:
- Value Created
- Value Claimed
- Subjective Value
By identifying your strengths and weaknesses, you will learn how to maximize both objective and subjective value in negotiation and gain greater self-awareness as you understand how impressions affect your negotiation counterparts.
DAY 2: Tuesday, November 19
SESSION 3
Advanced Difficult Conversations—Building (and Re-Building) Trust
8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET | Led by Sheila Heen
Overcome the relational friction and frustration that can make joint-problem-solving impossible.
You can’t avoid difficult conversations. But you can learn to make them less painful—and more productive. In this session, we will take a look at three suites of skills that advanced negotiators can use to diagnose challenges and adjust their approach when things get tough. We will also draw on the Difficult Conversations framework for engaging tough issues in difficult circumstances, and under time pressure.
The centerpiece of this session will be preparing for and conducting a negotiation, in which frustration, mistrust, time pressure, grave consequences, and the need for complex problem-solving come together to create a perfect storm.
Alongside your peers, you will have the opportunity to:
- Face a counterpart who is impatient, distracted, in a position of authority, and with whom you have some relationship history
- Work with a teammate in order to learn from another’s negotiation approach and think about how to best prepare together as a team
- Integrate sometimes conflicting information from multiple sources
- Clarify your own purposes and priorities
- Plan how to open and to frame the problem
- Respond to unexpected surprises or resistance
- Draw on your diagnostic skills to make good choices in the moment as the negotiation unfolds
- Practice advanced skills that will enable you to repair trust, build a stronger working relationship, and solve problems together
SESSION 4
Negotiating and Leading in Highly Charged, Emotional Situations
1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET | Led by Rob Wilkinson
Identify—and capitalize on—game-changing inflection points.
Maybe this scene is familiar to you: You are engaged in some sort of interaction—a quick chat with a colleague in the hallway, a spirited political debate with an aunt at the dinner table, a friendly exchange with the stranger behind you in line at the bank. You and your counterpart are pleasant and cordial.
And then things change.
Your counterpart says something and the words you hear are an affront—to your values, your beliefs, and even your identity—and in that moment, you are frozen. You wrestle with the impulse to defend against personal attack, or the need to correct this person’s misguided views on such an important topic.
What should you do?
Call them out and risk escalating the situation, or walk away and risk validating their righteousness? Hear them out and risk amplifying their nonsense, or educate them and risk compelling them to dig in further?
You need to manage those tensions, control your emotions, and make decisions: on what you’re trying to accomplish, on whether to engage, on how to engage, on how to preserve the relationship, on how to end this conversation.
And it all has to happen in about two seconds.
This session will examine these moments—when we impulsively react or are clueless how to—through the lens of choice, and how we can manage our individual abilities to identify, analyze, and select one in a split second, thus charting the course for the rest of the interaction.
Participants will walk away with a set of concrete ideas, tools, and skills for how to avoid reacting instinctively and, instead, diagnose what is going on in a heat-of-the-moment situation, and respond thoughtfully and strategically.
DAY 3: Wednesday, November 20
SESSION 5
Multiparty Negotiations: Managing the Challenges and Opportunities of Group Decision Making
8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET | Facilitated by Alonzo Emery
Put your negotiation skills to the test.
Most decisions are made with input from a variety of stakeholders. As the number of parties at the decision-making table grows, negotiation challenges and the opportunities they present multiply as well. Additional parties create more opinions about the “right” process to follow and more views about which issues should remain central. Attempting to satisfy all of these various interests and perspectives can reduce the zone of possible agreement. This session explores how advanced negotiators manage the myriad challenges of multiparty negotiations, while also leveraging opportunities to improve relationships and create greater value.
Through a fast-paced multiparty negotiation simulation, you will put the many skills you have honed throughout the workshop to the test. The simulation debrief will help you to draw unique insights from your own experience—lessons that you can rely on during the many group processes you will lead in the future. Specifically, you will learn to:
- Diagnose the peaked challenges inherent in multiparty negotiations
- Identify key stakeholders and decide which to include at the table
- Focus on value creation in the face of multiple, conflicting interests
- Maintain relationships while managing diverse personalities and perspectives
- Design a robust process that will keep your group moving forward and on task
- Consider and choose the right forum for your group discussions
- Establish group norms to help guide you through your deliberations
- Set realistic deadlines that will keep your group centered on its purpose
- Divide responsibilities appropriately so that each group member fills a meaningful and useful role
Participants will be supported by a group of coaches. Past coaches have included Clinical Instructors with the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program; Harvard Law School Negotiation Workshop; Harvard Kennedy School Negotiation Project; MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program; and practitioners and consultants.
SESSION 6
THE LAST 180 SECONDS:CLOSING THE DEAL WITH CONFIDENCE
1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET | Led by Brian Mandell
Openings and closings are the critical bookend of any negotiation: the close.
You’ve made it to the end of a negotiation—are you ready for what comes next? The goal of this session is to prepare you to effectively manage those final minutes in a negotiation when an important, high-consequence deal hangs in the balance and any missteps could quickly undermine parties’ trust and confidence, resulting in the deal unraveling. Navigating this “last mile challenge” compels negotiators to multi-task—to maintain discipline, focus, and resilience, while simultaneously addressing the substantive and relationship dimensions of the negotiation needed for crafting a sustainable value- creating deal.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Assess willingness and readiness to close the deal
- Overcome psychological and bureaucratic decision-making barriers to commitment making and closing the deal
- Confront hard bargaining “take it or leave it” and yes-but tactics
- Write your counterpart’s victory speech to reduce hesitancy and resistance to closing the deal now
- Use the negotiator’s pause to better control the rate and scope of making any final concessions
- Deal with an impasse stemming from the last-minute introduction of new pre-conditions prior to signing the deal
- Distinguish between hard and soft closings and when to use them to maximize your leverage
- Limit gratuitous bargaining and conflict escalation
- Leverage deadlines and time urgency
- Build commitment to deal implementation
- Frame and re-frame offers to scope and refine the deal components
- Use dispute resolution mechanisms to safeguard against a counterpart’s non-compliance with commitments to deal implementation
Meet the Faculty
Brian Mandell
Brian Mandell is the Mohammad Kamal Senior Lecturer in Negotiation and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a faculty associate at the Center for Public Leadership, director of the Harvard Kennedy School Negotiation Project, and serves as Vice Chair of Executive Education for the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School’s Executive Committee.
He is a preeminent teacher and curriculum designer at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he leads an innovative, intensive annual workshop course on advanced multiparty negotiation and conflict resolution.
Professor Mandell refined his case teaching methods in international affairs as a Pew Faculty Fellow and subsequently trained faculty from across the United States in case- method pedagogy with a special emphasis on teaching and writing cases for international security studies.
He is a multiple recipient of the school’s Most Influential Course Award, the Manuel C. Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Through the Negotiation Project, Professor Mandell designs and produces multiparty negotiation exercises that focus on the challenges of cross-boundary collaboration.
Additionally, he is designing and developing curriculum material for graduate students and congressional staffers in the Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative on strengthening bipartisan legislative negotiation in Congress.
Jared Curhan
Jared Curhan is the Gordon Kaufman Professor and a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as Faculty Director of MIT’s Behavioral Research Lab.
Curhan specializes in the psychology of negotiation and conflict resolution. A recipient of support from the National Science Foundation, he has pioneered a social psychological approach to the study of “subjective value” in negotiation—that is, the feelings and judgments concerning the instrumental outcome, the process, the self, and the relationship. His research uses the Subjective Value Inventory (SVI; Curhan et al., 2006) to examine the precursors, processes, and long-term consequences of subjective value in negotiation. He also studies the dynamics of negotiation and brainstorming.
Curhan is Vice Chair for Research and a member of the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School, and he is also Director of the PON Research Lab and Director of MIT’s Negotiation for Executives Program.
Curhan founded the Program for Young Negotiators, Inc., an organization dedicated to the promotion of negotiation training in primary and secondary schools. His book, Young Negotiators (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) has been used to train more than 35,000 children across the United States and abroad to achieve their goals without the use of violence.
Curhan has received the Stanford University Lieberman Fellowship for excellence in teaching and university service, as well as MIT’s Institute-wide teaching award, MIT Teaching with Technology Award, and MIT Sloan’s Jamieson Prize for excellence in teaching.
Curhan holds an AB in psychology from Harvard University and an MS and a PhD in psychology from Stanford University.
Sheila Heen
Sheila Heen is the Thaddeus R. Beal Professor of Practice and serves as a Deputy Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, where she has been developing negotiation theory and practice since 1995.
Heen also teaches executive education programs for and serves on the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
Heen specializes in particularly difficult negotiations – where emotions run high and relationships are strained. She is also a co-author of two New York Times bestsellers, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton, 3rd ed Penguin 2023) and Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Even When It’s Off-Base, Unfair, Poorly Delivered, and Frankly, You’re Not in the Mood) (with Douglas Stone, Viking/Penguin 2014). She has written for the Harvard Business Review, and the New York Times as a guest expert and as a Modern Love columnist.
Heen is also a Founder of Triad Consulting Group, a corporate education and consulting firm that serves clients on six continents. Her corporate clients have included Pixar, Hugo Boss, the NBA, the Federal Reserve Bank, to name a few.
Robert Wilkinson
A negotiation and leadership specialist, Rob Wilkinson is on the faculty at Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches graduate courses on leadership in complex environments and negotiation theory and practice.
Wilkinson has won several Dean’s Teaching Awards at Harvard and also served as a special advisor on negotiation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Previously, he was on the faculty at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy for eight years.
As a management consultant, Wilkinson has nearly 25 years of experience in more than 45 countries within the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. From General Mills and IBM to the Gates Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund, he has helped numerous Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, international organizations, and charities increase their effectiveness.
Wilkinson has worked overseas on a variety of international negotiation projects, including spending three years in Rwanda working with
Hutu and Tutsi communities and two years working with the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Angola.
Alonzo Emery
Alonzo Emery is a lawyer, mediator, and facilitator who has taught negotiation at Harvard for over a decade. They work with leaders across industries to develop effective conflict management strategies and engage in meaningful cross-cultural dialogue. In this capacity, Emery has led projects and workshops for Salesforce, Hewlett Packard, HSBC, the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Asian Development Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and JSW Law School in the Kingdom of Bhutan, among many others.
Prior to joining Harvard Law School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Emery was on faculty at Renmin University of China
Law School in Beijing, where they launched the Renmin University Disability Law Clinic, the first law school clinic in China dedicated exclusively to serving persons with disabilities. They have additionally taught at Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Fees and Dates
Harvard Negotiation Master Class sessions:
Monday to Wednesday, November 18–20, 2024
Location: The Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Upon completion of the course and a program evaluation, participants receive a certificate of completion.
Who Should Attend
The Harvard Negotiation Master Class attracts a diverse group of participants—all of whom are proficient negotiators who wish to take their skills to the next level.
To be eligible for the Harvard Negotiation Master Class, applicants must demonstrate at least 10 to 20 years of negotiation experience, as well as a prior course with PON or a comparable program centered on mutual gains bargaining. In addition, we require a minimum of 6 months between any foundational training and attendance at the Master Class to allow for practical experience and implementation between learning.
Participant Feedback
“This course is designed to truly change the way one thinks about negotiating on many levels.”
“This is the best program of negotiation in the world.”
“This is definitely a very good investment of time, effort, and money.”
Past Participants
…And Many More!