Suppose that two entrepreneurs, a marketing expert and an IT specialist, are thinking about merging their consulting firms to create a greater synergy of services. As their talks unfold, each wonders how much information to disclose. Should they bring up discussions with other potential partners?
… Read 
Harvard Kennedy School
The following items are tagged Harvard Kennedy School:
Harvard Negotiation Master Class: Advanced Strategies for Experienced Negotiators – May 8-10, 2023
Strictly limited to 60 participants who have completed a prior course in negotiation, this first-of-its-kind program offers unprecedented access to experts from Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Kennedy School—all of whom are committed to delivering a transformational learning experience.
… Read
Negotiation Master Class May 2023 Program Guide
Over the years thousands of professionals have participated in negotiation programs at the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. And after a few months or years of putting their negotiation skills and techniques to work, participants inevitably ask us, what’s next?
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Contingency Contracts in Business Negotiations
Question: Lately I have been hearing a lot—both in the news and on the job—about companies using contingencies in contracts. Given that I sometimes negotiate deals that entail a lot of risk regarding how future events will play out, I am interested to know how contingencies work and how I might use them.
… Read
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
IN-PERSON
THREE-DAY COURSE | June 20-22, 2023 Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems BONUS DAY | June 23, 2023 Unlocking Value in Complex Business Deals
Three-Day Program Agenda
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
DAY 1: Tuesday, June 20, 2023UNDERSTANDING KEY NEGOTIATION CONCEPTS
MORNING:
Registration, Continental Breakfast and Overview
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. ET
Negotiation Fundamentals—Key Concepts and … Read
Managing Multiparty Negotiations
If you’re in a negotiation with many parties who have varying positions, it may be tempting to join a coalition with parties who share at least some of your goals. But should you join one?
… Read
Negotiating Skills: Learn How to Build Trust at the Negotiation Table
In this article some negotiating skills and negotiation tactics for building trust with your counterpart are presented.
… Read
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
IN-PERSON
THREE-DAY COURSE | May 15-17, 2023 Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems BONUS DAY | May 18, 2023 Negotiating the Impossible
Three-Day Program Agenda
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
DAY 1: Monday, May 15, 2023UNDERSTANDING KEY NEGOTIATION CONCEPTS
MORNING:
Registration, Continental Breakfast and Overview
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. ET
Negotiation Fundamentals—Key Concepts and Core Vocabulary
9:00 a.m. … Read
Closing the Deal in Negotiations: 3 Tips for Sequential Dealmaking
After closing the deal in negotiations, we often feel a sense of pride. Imagine, for example, that you are a purchasing agent who just scored a significant price concession from a supplier. Now it’s time to hang up the phone and move on to another negotiation with a different supplier. You’re feeling proud of how … Read
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
IN-PERSON
THREE-DAY COURSE | April 3–5, 2023 Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems BONUS DAY | April 6, 2023 3D Negotiation: Powerful New Tools to Turbocharge Your Effectiveness
Three-Day Program Agenda
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
DAY 1: Monday, April 3, 2023UNDERSTANDING KEY NEGOTIATION CONCEPTS
MORNING:
Registration, Continental Breakfast and Overview
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. ET
Negotiation … Read
Negotiators: Resist Vividness Bias in Negotiations
Vividness bias is the tendency to overweight the vivid and prestigious attributes of a decision, such as salary or an employer’s status, and underweight less impressive issues, such as location or rapport with colleagues. Let’s talk about a clear vividness bias example from 2015 in Major League Baseball.
For the New York Mets, it was hard … Read
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
IN-PERSON
THREE-DAY COURSE | December 5–7, 2022 Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems BONUS DAY | December 8, 2022 Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
Three-Day Program Agenda
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
DAY 1: Monday, December 5, 2022
UNDERSTANDING KEY NEGOTIATION CONCEPTS
MORNING:
Negotiation Fundamentals—Key Concepts and Core Vocabulary
9:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET
Negotiation … Read
Make the Most of Your Salary Negotiations
What salary negotiation skills can you use if a potential employer asks you about your past salary? If you earned a competitive wage, your concern may be whether the new employer can afford you.
… Read
Job Negotiation Advice from Leading Ladies
Thanks to a series of cultural events and news stories, job negotiation advice has become a hot topic among women professionals and businesspeople more generally. First came Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013) and corresponding movement, which encouraged women to take on leadership roles and … Read
Should Women “Lean In” to Create More Value in Negotiations?
Back in early 2008, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg began thinking about hiring Sheryl Sandberg, a vice president at Google and a former chief of staff for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as the social-media company’s new chief operating officer. The two met several nights a week for almost two months to discuss … Read
Dear Negotiation Coach: Managing Perceptions
Sometimes a negotiation is all about managing perceptions. As this question below shows, focusing a counterpart on his own BATNA can persuade him to reduce the intensity of his hard-bargaining tactics.
Q: A customer is pressuring me to make a deal fast. I don’t want to be forced into a one-sided agreement and prefer to reach … Read
5 Common Negotiation Mistakes and How You Can Avoid Them
Sometimes our negotiation mistakes are glaring: We accidentally reveal our bottom line, criticize the other party when patience was warranted, or get our numbers mixed up. More often, though, our negotiation mistakes are invisible: We get a perfectly good deal, but are unaware that we could have gotten a better one if we hadn’t succumbed … Read
Emotion and the Art of Business Negotiations
The sale of Picasso’s works by his heirs is fraught with negative emotion. How do negative emotions impact negotiation and behavior at the bargaining table? This article offers negotiation skills insights into how to counter or prevent negative emotions in negotiation.
… Read
Dressing for Success: How Wealth and Status Cues Affect Business Negotiation
In business negotiations, we know we’re supposed to focus on substance: which issues matter to both sides, what each party can afford, what each side’s outside alternatives are, how to build a strong relationship, and so forth. Yet we’re often swayed by more superficial, often irrelevant aspects of negotiation, such as the shape of the table, whether … Read
Emotional Triggers: How Emotions Affect Your Negotiating Ability
Example of negotiation in daily life: Imagine you’re about to negotiate with a competing firm about a possible merger. You enter the conference room and find a reasonable and fair representative from the other company, someone you’ve reached mutually beneficial agreements with in the past.
… Read
Should Salary Expectations Be a Laughing Matter?
In salary negotiations, job candidates are often at a disadvantage relative to the hiring organization. Due to the well-documented anchoring effect, the first figure introduced into the discussion tends to strongly influence the salary expectations. Unfortunately for candidates, the first figure mentioned in a negotiation often is not in their favor.
For example, when opening salary … Read
Collective Leadership and the Paris Climate Change Agreement
On April 14, the Program on Negotiation presented its 2022 Great Negotiator Award to Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres for her success in spearheading the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. In a daylong series of events, including a public interview led by Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles and Harvard Business School professor … Read
Howard Raiffa Taught Us About Decision-Making and Negotiation
If you’ve ever made a decision tree, engaged in risk analysis, or created a scoring system when preparing for a negotiation, you benefited from the work of economist Howard Raiffa, whether you realized it or not. And the decisions you’ve made in your negotiations likely have been far smarter as a result. After all, decision-making … Read
Dear Negotiation Coach: How Can You De-bias Job Negotiations?
In many organizations, policies and systems perpetuate gender and racial discrimination and inequality, including higher pay for white men as compared to others for the same work. Harvard Kennedy School professor Iris Bohnet, the author of What Works: Gender Equality by Design (Belknap Press, 2016), overviews steps professionals can take to promote wiser, more equitable … Read
Negotiating Salary: Confronting the Gender Pay Gap
In December 2014, leaks of data hacked from Sony Pictures revealed that when negotiating salary for their roles in the film American Hustle, actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams came away with significantly less than their male costars in the ensemble cast. Lawrence and Adams were paid 7% of the film’s profits; Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, … Read
Emotional Leadership Can Have a Silver Lining in Negotiation
The negotiations that surrounded the 1962 Cuban missile crisis were some of the most tense and frightening in world history, and provide a high-profile example of emotional leadership. Having learned that the Soviet Union had deployed ballistic missiles to Cuba, the United States orchestrated a military naval blockade to prevent the Soviets from delivering more … Read
Ask A Negotiation Expert: Using Law Teaching Materials to Build Bridges
Amid our polarized political climate, dysfunction and conflict seem to rule the day in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. To help legislators and their staff learn to build bridges and negotiate through impasse, the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Legislative Negotiation Project, with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Madison Initiative, has developed … Read
Madeleine Albright’s Ways to Avoid Conflict In Negotiation: First, Put Yourself In Their Shoes
When parties can trade on their preferences across different issues, they reduce the need to haggle over price and percentages. But are there ways to avoid conflict in other types of negotiation?
To find ways to avoid conflict, especially deep-seated conflicts, and reach agreement with adversaries, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright advises close observation … Read
How to Respond to Questions in Negotiation
What’s the toughest question you’ve ever been asked during a negotiation? Do you know how to respond to questions when they’re out of your comfort zone? If you negotiate frequently, it might be hard to narrow it down to just one. Focusing on job interviews, here are a few negotiation questions that candidates often dread:
“How … Read
Why diversity hiring efforts often fail—and how your organization can do better
Immediately before the abbreviated Major League Baseball (MLB) draft, televised live on June 10, 2020, league commissioner Rob Manfred made a statement acknowledging the harm of systemic racism and inequality, and said that he and team owners would be “active participants in social change.” As he spoke, each MLB team’s general manager (GM) or head … Read
Job Offer Negotiation Tips During the Pandemic
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, many jobseekers have concluded that if they are lucky enough to be offered a good job in a tight market, they lack the power needed to negotiate better employment terms. In fact, a silver lining of the crisis is that it has created new opportunities to negotiate. With the coronavirus throwing … Read
Lessons learned from a great negotiation leader
Leadership in negotiation
In academia, there are often subtle conflicts between the executive staff who run programs and centers, and the academics connected to them. Only a talented leader can consistently weave together such groups and integrate very different views. Susan has been such a leader for many years. She provides a vision of doing all we … Read
Dealing with Difficult Employees
When dealing with difficult employees, leaders often feel overwhelmed and frustrated by a task that can seem like a distraction from broader organizational goals. But managing personnel issues, including conflict among employees, is a pivotal leadership task—and one that can be improved with knowledge and practice. The following solutions for dealing with difficult employees will … Read
The Importance of Negotiation for Female Negotiators: Women Should “Negotiate Hard”
When U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama was offered her first job after law school, it didn’t even occur to her to negotiate for a higher salary, she said in a recent interview in Parade magazine.
… Read
Techniques for Leading Multiparty Negotiations: Structuring the Bargaining Process
Imagine leading negotiations involving representatives from most of the world’s nations on a contentious topic such as sustainable development. Where would you start? How would you proceed when conflict emerged? How would you know when it was time to wrap things up?
… Read
In Employment Contract Negotiation, “No Haggling” Isn’t the Answer
Back in spring 2015, Ellen Pao, the former CEO of social networking and news website Reddit, revealed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that her company had taken a bold move in its efforts to create an “equal opportunity environment for everyone” at the company. Specifically, Reddit no longer negotiates salary with job … Read
Counteracting Negotiation Biases Like Race and Gender in the Workplace
To learn more about negotiation biases, let’s look back to July of 2018 when the principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), Elizabeth Rowe, became the first Massachusetts resident to sue her employer under a new state law designed to address the persistent pay gap between men and women. Despite being the most frequent … Read
How Mood Affects Negotiators
What are social psychologists learning about the connections among emotions, negotiation, and decision making? Negotiation contributor Jennifer S. Lerner of Harvard Kennedy School and her colleagues have identified two critical themes. First, they have studied the carryover of emotion from one episode, such as a car accident, to an unrelated situation, such as a workplace … Read
Negotiation and Leadership
NEGOTIATION MASTER CLASS
Negotiation Essentials Online
Articles & Insights
BATNA
- Business Negotiations
- Conflict Resolution
- Crisis Negotiations
- Dealing with Difficult People
- Managing Difficult Conversations: Achieving Objectives with Backmapping Negotiation Strategies
- When Dealing with Difficult People, Try a Complementary Approach
- Examples of Difficult Situations at Work: Consensus and Negotiated Agreements
- Dealing with Difficult People and Negotiation: When Should You Give Up the Fight?
- Dispute Resolution: Building Momentum through Small Wins
- Dealmaking
- Dear Negotiation Coach: Will Your First Offer Be in the Right Ballpark?
- Dear Negotiation Coach: Negotiating a Win Win Relationship with Friends
- Business Negotiation Skills: How to Enhance Your Negotiated Agreement
- Dear Negotiation Coach: Managing Expectations of Our Own
- Negotiating Skills: Learn How to Build Trust at the Negotiation Table
- Dispute Resolution
- Using Principled Negotiation to Resolve Disagreements
- How to Write a Contract That Doesn’t Leave Room for Interpretation
- Repairing Relationships Using Negotiation Skills
- Patience is a Winning Negotiation Skill for Getting What You Want at the Negotiation Table
- Choose the Right Dispute Resolution Process
- International Negotiation
- Leadership Skills
- For Women Negotiating Salary, “Do It Yourself” Sends the Wrong Message
- How to Negotiate in Cross-Cultural Situations
- What Is Facilitative Leadership?
- Leadership Styles in Negotiation: The Case of Ebay and Paypal
- Leadership Skills in Negotiation: How to Negotiate Equity Incentives with Senior Management
- Mediation
- Negotiation Skills
- Negotiation Training
- Salary Negotiations
- Teaching Negotiation
- The Best New Simulations
- Teach Your Students to Take Their Mediation Skills to the Next Level
- Teaching with Multi-Round Simulations: Balancing Internal and External Negotiations
- Camp Lemonnier: Negotiating a Lease Agreement for a Key Military Base in Africa
- Planning Your Syllabus for Next Semester? Check Out the Brief Course Outlines from the TNRC
- Win-Win Negotiations