Requirements: active, insightful class and negotiation exercise participation; paper or take-home final exam.

Revised: This course serves both as a sophisticated follow-on to basic negotiation courses and/or as a self-contained negotiation course taught at an advanced level with a heavy emphasis on handling challenging real-world cases. Unlike past versions of this course, there is no formal pre- or co-requisite, although an introductory negotiation course at one of Harvard’s professional schools or equivalent elsewhere will be beneficial and will offer more basic skill-building exercises. Those without prior negotiation coursework should read 3D Negotiation by Lax and Sebenius in its entirety before class begins to become familiar with key concepts and terminology that others who have taken an earlier negotiation course will already bring to the course.

Purpose: Take your negotiating ability to the next level by matching wits with some of the world’s greatest dealmakers and diplomats as they work through their toughest deals. Examples:

• In business and finance: Steve Schwarzman on several early make-or-break deals for Blackstone; Sarah Frey negotiates advantageous supplier deals for her tiny farm with a vindictive Walmart enroute to building an agricultural empire; Bruce Wasserstein negotiates to take Lazard public, etc.

• In diplomacy: Christiana Figueres guides the Paris climate talks to a near-unanimous agreement in 2015; Colombian President Juan Santos ends a 50-year civil war with the FARC guerillas; US Trade Negotiator Charlene Barshefsky takes on IP negotiations with China; former US Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton describe critical moments in their negotiations with Vladimir Putin, etc.
  
  
• In the arts and sports: Music industry lawyer John Branca negotiates the purchase of the Beatles catalog; Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude negotiate with endless opponents to build “Running Fence,” The Gates in Central Park, and to wrap Paris’s Pont Neuf in golden fabric; Proponents of a “European Super League” try to form a breakaway football/soccer league, etc. etc.
  
  

A typical case challenges you to address its critical deal moments. For most cases in the course, we watch excerpts from stop action video interviews, mostly that I’ve conducted with the protagonist(s) describing how they handled a series of key decisions. After discussion of each such decision, we move to the next critical moment, and so on . . . after which we draw broader lessons. We often find that insights from private sector dealmaking inform public and not-for-profit sector negotiations and vice versa.

The objective of this approach 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—although considerably fewer such simulations relative to many introductory negotiation courses—Advanced Negotiation will develop valuable lessons and skills for dealmaking and dispute resolution that go well beyond those offered in basic 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. Specific course modules that develop the above concepts include 1) introduction and course themes, 2) creating and claiming value, 3) preparing for tough negotiations, 4) dealing effectively with hard bargainers, 5) Two-level games/internal and external negotiations, and 6) Multiparty negotiations across borders and over times.

Course Requirements

Beyond constructive participation in class and faithfully preparing for and carrying out negotiation exercises, most students will opt for a self-scheduled written exam. Instead of taking a final exam, some students may prefer to write a paper on the kind of negotiation about which you care intensely or about a “great negotiator” whom you wish to study in depth. Since, inevitably, the class sessions won’t cover your specific areas of greatest interest in the kind of depth you might wish, the paper option provides the chance to do so for yourself and to build personally relevant intellectual capital. The major criterion for the paper is that it treats your topic in a sophisticated manner from a negotiation-analytic standpoint, and that it teaches you and me something significant about effective dealmaking.

Important: If you are interested in cross-registering for this course, it is imperative that you follow the HBS process, especially its timetable, which can be found here.

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