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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013 (Revised from original 2007 version)

  Peter Welz: When a Marquee Prospect Plays Hardball (A)

  James K. Sebenius and Ellen Knebel

  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.

  Keywords: Negotiation Process; Negotiation Tactics; Behavior; Conflict and Resolution; Competitive Advantage;

  Citation:

  Sebenius, James K., and Ellen Knebel. "Peter Welz: When a Marquee Prospect Plays Hardball (A)." Harvard Business School Case 908-010, April 2013. (Revised from original September 2007 version.)

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  Rough Justice: Stuart Eizenstat and Holocaust-era Asset Restitution (A) v. 3.0

  James K. Sebenius and Laurence A. Green

  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.

  Keywords: negotiation; banking; Banking and Insurance; u.s. history; Germany; Europe; Governance; History; Negotiation; Business and Government Relations; Banking Industry; Insurance Industry; Germany; United States; Switzerland;

  Citation:

  Sebenius, James K., and Laurence A. Green. "Rough Justice: Stuart Eizenstat and Holocaust-era Asset Restitution (A) v. 3.0." Harvard Business School Case 913-037, March 2013.

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• Article | Harvard Law Review | February 2013

  Learning from Roger Fisher

  James K. Sebenius

  Roger Fisher's career and writings not only offer lessons about negotiation but also about how an academic, especially in a professional school such as law or business, can make an important, positive difference in the world. By his relentless engagement in vexing disputes—whether in South Africa, at Camp David, on the Peruvian-Ecuadorian border, or elsewhere—Fisher gained a firsthand sense of the issues as negotiators actually experienced them. This enabled him to ask better questions and to formulate more valuable answers. Fisher collaborated across academic disciplines and wrote a series of books, mostly coauthored with junior colleagues, that are best understood as project around an evolving theme—an interest-based, problem-solving conception of negotiation—rather than as a series of one-off products. His commitment to expressing powerful insights simply, concisely, and memorably led to the remarkable influence of Getting to Yes, which has sold over eight million copies and has spawned endless academic and popular offshoots. While the most familiar form of intellectual capital in the social sciences is the deductive proposition, supported by experimental and observational evidence, other forms of knowledge can be both valid and useful. In particular, Fisher and his colleagues constructed frameworks of prescriptions that, on average, respond to widely felt practitioner needs and systematically direct the focus of negotiators to aspects of the situation that generate helpful insights.

  Keywords: Roger Fisher; negotiation; dispute resolution; bargaining; Negotiation;

  Citation:

  Sebenius, James K. "Learning from Roger Fisher." Harvard Law Review 126, no. 4 (February 2013): 893–898.

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