This main purpose of this course is to extract highly practical lessons from studying the world’s greatest negotiators at work on their most challenging deals—in business, finance, diplomacy, the not-for-profit world, and across sectors. Since 2001, the Program on Negotiation—an interuniversity consortium involving Harvard, MIT, and Tufts—has regularly bestowed the “Great Negotiator Award” on men and women from around the world who have consistently overcome formidable barriers to achieve truly worthwhile purposes. In a closely related project at Harvard, faculty have conducted detailed interviews with former American Secretaries of State—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz James A. Baker, III, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Rex Tillerson—about their most difficult negotiations. As chair of the Great Negotiators Award program and co-chair of the American Secretaries of State initiative, I am deeply involved in a multi-year project to systematically distill the strategies and tactics of this distinguished group (along with several other remarkable negotiators). The emerging findings of this ongoing project will heavily inform this course. By way of highly interactive case discussions, frequently interspersed with video clips of the protagonists, and a few negotiation exercises, this course will develop valuable lessons and skills for complex dealmaking and dispute resolution that go well beyond those offered in introductory courses.

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who expect to analyze and participate effectively in challenging business, financial, diplomatic, and not-for-profit negotiations, often with public-private and cross-border aspects. Of the cases, exercises, videos, and significant examples in the course, roughly a third could be classified in a mainly business/financial/entrepreneurial category, a third could be classified in a mainly public/diplomatic/not-for-profit category, and a third would involve a mixture of private, public and/or not-for-profit parties that played meaningful roles.

Course Content and Organization

Throughout this course, a central theme is how to deal with difficult negotiators and genuinely hard negotiations in many different settings. Different aspects of meeting this challenge will be developed. One focus will be on "at-the-table" tactics for handling hardball moves, incompatible positions, adversarial relationships, ideological differences, the lack of vital information, and cross-cultural frictions. A second thread explores how sophisticated deal design moves can overcome impasses in order to create maximum value on a sustainable basis. A third consistent emphasis develops 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. Beyond doing individual deals, the course will explore how great negotiators often envision and carry out effective multi-front, sequential “negotiation campaigns” that culminate in achieving a target deal or deals with sufficient support for implementation and sustainability.

Course Requirements

Beyond constructive participation in class and faithfully preparing for and carrying out negotiation exercises, some students will opt for a self-scheduled written exam. However, with my approval, I will encourage individual students, optionally but often in small groups, to distill practical insights from studying a remarkable negotiator and/or especially valuable writings on a challenging aspect of the negotiation process. Those opting for a non-exam option should plan to present of their key findings to the class and to write a paper on their topic.

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