Supplement | HBS Case Collection | 2008

Joe Bachelder: Reflections

Abstract

After Charles Suarez's failed compensation negotiations with Victor, Suarez's attorney, Joe Batchelder, joined class discussions of the case in a course taught by Professor Brian Hall. Professor James Sebenius also interviewed Joe Bachelder at length on this case and related issues of negotiation and executive compensation. A significantly edited, elaborated, and composite version of Bachelder's informal remarks in these two settings follows: Joe Bachelder: Executive Pay Negotiator (904030), by Jason R. Barro, Brian J. Hall, and Aaron M.G. Zimmerman.

Keywords: Courts and Trials; Attorney and Client Relationships; Negotiation Deal; Executive Compensation; Knowledge Sharing; Talent and Talent Management; Perspective; Organizations;

Format: Print

6 pages

Citation:

Hall, Brian, and James K. Sebenius. "Joe Bachelder: Reflections." Harvard Business School Supplement 908-030, January 2008.

Describes the hardball tactics facing Peter Welz, who seeks to negotiate a make-or-break contract with a vastly larger potential client. Welz's counterpart team is led by Preston Spitzer, a notoriously tough player who fully understands his side's massive advantages in the process. With the economic fate of Welz's newly public smaller firm in the balance, Welz and his team must figure out how to handle some very tough tactics by Spitzer and his minions aimed at extracting lopsided contract concessions. These tactics include demeaning remarks, repeated threats to opt for a competitor, misrepresentations, repudiation of previously agreed provisions, last-minute demands, divide-and-conquer moves, and a waiting game that exploits the smaller firm's evidently urgent need for a closure. The (A) case sets up the negotiations and poses an immediate tactical challenge in the context of the overall process. The (B) case describes the strategies, tactics, and results of these negotiations, along with Welz's broader insights into a more productive approach to the common challenge of dealing with very hard bargainers.

Beginning in 1994, a series of articles and public discolures indicated that Swiss banks may have retained assets belonging to victims of the Holocaust, and also may have engaged in long term attempts to block survivors' ability to recover those assets after World War II. Stuart Eizenstat, a longtime government official, and U.S. Special Envoy for Property Restitution, undertook a complex multi-year negotiation between victims' representatives, advocacy groups, government officials, and the banks in an unprecedented attempt to obtain restitution for the victims. Unifying fractious parties within an uncertain legal, social, and business landscape, Eizenstat's unique approach of quantifying "rough justice" in order to enforce the accountability of corporate entities and governments for past injustices in Switzerland, forms the basis of this study.

This case describes the compensation and performance evaluations at an investment management company. The senior management team of Massachusetts Financial Services (MFS) Investment Management was contemplating an introduction of hedge funds at the firm, but many believed that typical hedge fund manager pay (20% of the upside) would harm the MFS culture, which glorified "star performance but not star egos." The case presents the MFS compensation philosophy and plan (including the plan's emphasis on subjective compensation), the types of people it attracted, the resulting culture, and how the senior management team approached the hedge funds question. It includes side discussion on firm-specific human capital. This is an abridged version of an earlier case.

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