Complex Negotiation

Course Number 2240

Professor of Mgt Practice Michael Wheeler
Winter, 29 Sessions
Exam
Excludes enrollment in Managing, Organizing & Negotiating for Value and Advanced Negotiation: Setup, Deal Design, and Tactics

Career Focus

This advanced course in negotiation extends and sometimes challenges the frameworks presented in the required first year course. It is not limited to a single industry or career track.

Educational Objectives

• Deepening students' understanding of negotiation as a dynamic process in which the interests, BATNAs, and even values of the parties often change significantly.
• Enhancing students' awareness of the overlapping - and sometimes conflicting - roles of a manger in negotiation (for example, as where one may simultaneously be acting as an agent, principal and de facto mediator); and
• Sharpening students' analytic and interpersonal skills in unstructured situations where the ability to learn, adapt, and persuade is essential for success.

Course Content and Organization

The course is sequenced in four modules.

Dynamic strategy for a complex world explores multiple dimensions of negotiation. For example, a land assembly case illuminates how negotiations to acquire separate parcels must be linked to a larger strategy. In turn, cases involving multi-party international disputes and labor-management conflict illustrate how negotiators must adapt to ever-changing conditions. Simulations illustrate key concepts and provide the chance to experiment with new techniques.

Improvising the negotiation process shifts the focus from strategy to process issues. We will explore improv techniques from other domains (including comedy, jazz, and warfare) to see how they apply to the negotiation process. We will give special attention to openings, closings, and other critical moments in negotiation. Students will be able to compare their own performance with those of videotaped professionals.

Managing negotiation examines the influence of agents on the bargaining process, that is, negotiators who represent interests of parties not at the bargaining table. We will explore the challenges of coordinating internal and external negotiations in a variety of settings, among them, sales, business development, and collective bargaining. We will also compare transactional negotiation with dispute resolution. Large organizations are engines for generating disputes - be they with customers, vendors, regulators, partners or rivals. Managers skilled at resolving external and internal disputes save costs, preserve relationships, and contribute significant value to their organizations.

Personal mastery is designed to develop emotional intelligence and foster lifelong learning skills, so that students can continually enhance their effectiveness as negotiators. The module will also synthesize important themes in the course, bridging strategy and tactics, theory and practice. It includes a series of exercises to encourage self reflection and develop ability to improvise effectively in the face of unexpected opportunities and potential perils.

Note: there is some overlap in materials with Advanced Negotiation (James Sebenius) and with Managing, Organizing, & Negotiating for Value (Andrew Wasynczuk, Ian Larkin, and Brian Hall), so students in those courses many not enroll here.