The best leaders are skilled negotiators—and the best negotiators are often talented leaders. Jeswald Salacuse, a longtime member of the Program on Negotiation Executive Committee and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, was a great leader, a great negotiator, and much more—including an impressive scholar and a valued colleague. The Program on Negotiation (PON) mourns the loss of Salacuse, who passed away on July 25.
Salacuse served as dean of the Fletcher School for nine years and previously as dean of the Southern Methodist University Law School. A prolific writer, he published more than 20 books on topics that spanned negotiation, leadership, corporate governance, culture, investment, and more. His lively, advice-oriented books on negotiation include Negotiating Life: Secrets for Everyday Diplomacy and Deal Making; Real Leaders Negotiate! Gaining, Using, and Keeping the Power to Lead Through Negotiation; and his most recent publication, The Institution Builder’s Toolbox: Strategies for Negotiating Change.
Claim your FREE copy: Real Leaders Negotiate
If you aspire to be a great leader, not just a boss, start here: Download our FREE Special Report, Real Leaders Negotiate: Understanding the Difference between Leadership and Management, from Harvard Law School.
A Valued Colleague
Salacuse was deeply respected and admired by his colleagues. “Jes was a mentor to me from the very beginning of my association with PON,” says Program on Negotiation Faculty Chair Guhan Subramanian. “He was a renowned scholar and practitioner in the high-stakes world of international arbitration and, as such, gave me a valuable perspective on my own research involving international dealmaking.”
Daniel Shapiro, founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, warmly recalls the first time he met Salacuse, some thirty years ago: “I was new to the Program on Negotiation, and Jes invited me to his office at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Surrounded by his wall of books and academic papers scattered across his desk, we ended up talking for two hours about negotiation theory, leadership, and cases he was writing to help people understand the interpersonal and cultural dimensions of human interaction.”
“From the early days of the Program on Negotiation, Jes Salacuse’s wise, steadying presence has always strengthened the program and has been a source of great colleagueship and friendship,” says Harvard Business School professor James Sebenius. “Jes could always be counted on for good counsel when it was most needed.”
“During my 25 years as chair of the Program on Negotiation, I so greatly benefitted from Jes’s advice and commitment,” says Harvard Law School professor Robert Mnookin. “As a former dean, he had deep knowledge of how universities work. His broad international experience and commitment to applied scholarship contributed to PON’s activities across the board.”
“Jes Salacuse was not only an accomplished leader and prodigious scholar, he was a wonderful human being,” says Fletcher School Professor of Practice Eileen Babbitt. “He rarely spoke ill of anyone, he reached out to younger and older colleagues alike to provide encouragement and praise, and he lived the values of equity and fairness that he espoused in his work. I will miss his wise counsel and, above all, his friendship.”
Connecting Leadership and Negotiation
At the Program on Negotiation, Salacuse put his negotiation theories to work. “On the PON Executive Committee, Jes regularly provided wise solutions to reconcile competing points of view, all with a wry smile on his face,” according to Subramanian.
“As former dean of the Fletcher School, Jes enhanced the relationship between that school’s expertise in global negotiation and conflict resolution and the many internationally focused PON initiatives,” says Sebenius. “Among Jes’s many intellectual contributions, his quiet insistence for years on the close connections between effective leadership and negotiation stood out and influenced PON’s flagship executive programs.”
“Effective leaders have to negotiate their leadership to make a difference,” Salacuse wrote in his book Real Leaders Negotiate! Over four decades as a dean, leader of professional associations, corporate board chair, and president of international judicial tribunals, he recalled, “I was negotiating all the time.”
Early in his career, after Salacuse was appointed dean of the School of Law of Southern Methodist University, the university president gave him a “pep talk” in which he expressed confidence in Salacuse’s ability to strengthen the faculty, improve the student body, and increase the endowment under his leadership. “I remember thinking, ‘What is this man talking about?’” Salacuse wrote, with his customary humility and humor, in Real Leaders Negotiate! He did not yet see himself as a leader.
As dean, Salacuse met the president’s high expectations—and, in his writing and teaching, went on to synthesize valuable leadership lessons from his own experiences and those of the many leaders he studied.
“Experienced managers know that when it comes to leading people, authority has its limits,” he wrote. “After all, some of the people you are supposed to lead will inevitably be smarter, more talented, and, in some situations, more powerful than you are.” He concluded, “When you understand where employees’ true interests lie, you can then shape your messages and your actions to meet those interests in ways that will achieve your leadership goals.”
Optimism and an Expansive Mind
Through his research, writing, teaching, and leadership, Salacuse contributed to an impressive array of fields.
“I have always appreciated his optimistic and proactive approach to world problems,” says Shapiro. “Where others saw threats to modern leadership and democratic institutions, he saw opportunities to do something constructive to improve the situation. When he sensed the need to strengthen national institutions in the United States, he created an initiative to offer fresh perspectives on leadership for state courts’ chief justices, presiding judges, and other senior court officials.”
Salacuse’s expansive study of negotiation included a deep exploration of the role of culture in dealmaking. “Almost uniquely among researchers in cross-cultural negotiation,” Sebenius recalls, “Jes provided data not only on central tendencies of various national cultures, but also on the heterogeneity within cultures on negotiation-related characteristics, such as an emphasis on contracts versus relationships, emotional display, cooperative versus competitive orientation, and so on. This provided other researchers and teachers with hard data on the perils of stereotyping.”
“Salacuse moonlighted—as he liked to call it—as an international judge, serving as president of an international arbitration tribunal,” says Shapiro. “I still remember leading a negotiation workshop at the World Bank years ago and bumping into him in a hallway, where he shared that he was in the midst of arbitrating a high-stakes international arbitration case.”
“Jes was one of the most intellectually inspiring academics I’ve ever known,” Shapiro concludes. “He never sought the limelight; what he pursued was a better world. Through his impassioned work and humanistic spirit, he truly left an indelible mark that has forever changed our world for the better.”
We welcome you to share your own fond memories of our dear colleague, Jeswald Salacuse.
Claim your FREE copy: Real Leaders Negotiate
If you aspire to be a great leader, not just a boss, start here: Download our FREE Special Report, Real Leaders Negotiate: Understanding the Difference between Leadership and Management, from Harvard Law School.
