Advanced Negotiation: Setup, Deal Design, and Tactics

Course Number 2261

Professor James K. Sebenius
Fall, 29 Sessions
Exam
Excludes enrollment in Complex Negotiations

Note: due to some overlap, this course may not be taken with "Complex Negotiations."

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who expect to analyze and participate in challenging business, financial, and international negotiations, sometimes with public and/or public-private aspects. It builds on the framework developed in the required first-year course, but develops far more advanced negotiation concepts and skills. It should be especially useful for students whose careers will involve the advisory and principal sides of investment banking; business development; venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneurial firms; foreign direct investment; alliances and joint ventures; as well as companies engaged in a range of cross-border transactions and relationships. The course will also help prepare students for challenging negotiations they may encounter at some stage in their careers when acting in public sector contexts or even diplomatic roles.

Course Content and Organization

Throughout this course, a central theme is how to deal effectively with difficult negotiators and genuinely hard negotiations. Course modules will emphasize different aspects of meeting this challenge. One module will develop "at-the-table" tactics for handling hardball moves, incompatible positions, adversarial relationships, the lack of vital information, and cross-cultural frictions. A second module explores how sophisticated deal design moves can overcome impasses in order to create value on a sustainable basis. A final course module develops more advanced concepts and skills for making effective "away-from-the-table" setup moves, especially to meet the challenges of cross-border negotiations and those that play out over time. Such challenges typically occur both "across the table" in negotiating "externally" with the other side(s) as well as "internally" within each side.

While many of the cases and exercises will be from familiar business contexts, the course will also develop insights and skills from the experiences of a subset of Harvard's "Great Negotiator" Awardees, annually recognized by the Program on Negotiation (sponsored by Harvard, MIT, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts). Possible examples include close analysis of Senator George Mitchell's work in Northern Ireland leading to the Good Friday Accords; Bruce Wasserstein's dealmaking at Lazard; Special Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky's negotiations with China over intellectual property rights; the efforts of Lakhdar Brahimi, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General, to forge a post-conflict government in Afghanistan; Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's negotiations leading to the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian war as well as his multiparty efforts to deal with unpaid U.S. dues to the United Nations; the Honorable Stuart Eizenstat's negotiations over Holocaust-era assets in various European countries; U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata's quiet negotiations on behalf of refugees and internally displaced persons in regions from Iraq to the Balkans to Rwanda; as well as the complex negotiations by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to erect massive, controversial installations from the Running Fence in California to the Gates in Central Park, New York, and wrapping Paris's Pont Neuf and the German Reichstag.

Course Requirements

Beyond participation in class and negotiation exercises, most students will take a written exam; with instructor approval, individual students or small groups may opt to write a paper developing a negotiation topic of special interest.