Half-Course: Advanced Negotiation

Course Number 2275

Professor James K. Sebenius
Early Winter, 15 Session half-course
1.5 credits
Choice of exam or paper
Excludes enrollment in Complex Negotiation

Course Objectives

This half-course is designed for those students who expect to analyze and participate in challenging business, financial, and international negotiations, sometimes with a public-private aspect. It builds on the "3D negotiation" framework developed in the required first-year course, and develops significantly 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 investment, and entrepreneurial firms; foreign direct investment; alliances and joint ventures; as well as companies engaged in a range of cross-border transactions and relationships.

Course Content and Organization

Throughout this course, the 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.

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.