HBS PROFESSOR RAISES NEGOTIATION TO A NEW DIMENSION
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| James Sebenius |
BOSTON - In his new book, Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor James Sebenius argues that the art of negotiation should be more than a tired debate of win-lose and win-win tactics. In fact, success is achieved by bringing the negotiation to a whole new level: the third dimension.
Co-written by David Lax, a founder of Lax Sebenius LLC and a former member of the HBS faculty, 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals (HBS Press) explores why current one-dimensional techniques such as face-to-face bargaining-at-the-table are not enough. According to the authors, this approach is often inadequate for tough negotiations when the other side holds all the cards or when other common deal-making challenges arise such as multiple parties, tricky internal and external negotiations, and shifting agendas.
Filled with real-world cases such as the browser wars of AOL, Microsoft, and Netscape, 3-D Negotiation maps out the following three dimensions of negotiation:
- Tactics
Tactics are the persuasive moves you make and the back-and-forth process you choose for dealing directly with the other side at the table. Good tactics can make a deal; bad ones can break it. - Deal Design
The art and science of deal design is much more than face to face discussions at the table and includes probing below the surface to uncover sources of economic and non-economic value. To unlock the value for the parties, deal designers use a systematic approach to envision and structure creative agreements. - Setup
Setup extends to actions away from the table that shape and reshape the situation to the 3-D Negotiator’s advantage. The setup ensures that the right parties have been approached, in the right sequence, to address the right interests, under the right expectations, at the right table or tables, and having the option to walk away if there is no deal.
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| 3-D Negotiation |
Sebenius will be part of the HBS Executive Education faculty team teaching the School’s 2007 negotiation programs. Changing the Game: Negotiation and Competitive Decision Making will run twice next year (April 15 – 20 and August 12 – 17) as will Strategic Negotiations: Dealmaking for the Long Term (January 21 – 26 and May 20 – 25). Details about these and other Executive Education programs are available online at http://www.exed.hbs.edu/.
About the Authors
James K. Sebenius, the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, serves as vice chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and was formerly on the faculty of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He left Harvard in the mid-1980s to work full-time for investment banker Peter G. Peterson cofounder with Stephen Schwarzman of the New York-based Blackstone Group, now one of the world’s leading merchant banking and private equity firms. For several years following Blackstone’s launch, Sebenius worked closely with Peterson and Schwarzman, initially as vice president, and later as special adviser to the firm after returning to Harvard. Earlier in his career, he worked as assistant to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Elliot Richardson, served on the U.S. State Department Delegation to the Law of the Sea negotiations, was elected as a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. With Lax, he co-authored The Manager as Negotiator, which is used as a textbook at leading graduate programs in business, law, and public policy. He also wrote Negotiating the Law of the Sea, co-edited Wise Decisions, and has authored numerous case studies on negotiation as well as articles that have appeared in academic journals and mainstream publications. Educated at Vanderbilt, Stanford, and Harvard, Sebenius is cofounder and principal of Lax Sebenius LLC.
David Lax specializes in assisting companies in complex negotiations. Forbes magazine described him as a “new negotiation theorist” on the cutting edge of his field. He was cofounder and director of the Negotiation Roundtable at Harvard Business School, where he was on the faculty. Formerly an investment banker and hedge fund manager and now on the boards of several private companies, Lax is a founder and managing principal of Lax Sebenius LLC, through which he provides assistance with negotiation and competitive bidding to companies in telecommunications, healthcare, finance, energy, consumer products, and other industries. He received an AB from Princeton University and an MA and Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University.
About Harvard Business School
Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School (www.hbs.edu) is located in Boston and offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and doctoral degrees, as well as more than 40 Executive Education programs. With a faculty of more than 200 distinguished scholars, the School is dedicated to educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Its core focus is to shape the practice of business, build enduring knowledge, and effectively communicate important ideas. Harvard Business School is the world’s largest producer of business cases, a method of teaching pioneered by the School in the 1920s.