Michael A. Wheeler

Michael Wheeler, working with the HBS Online team, created Negotiation Mastery: Unlocking Value in the Real World. It is a flexible, highly-interactive online course which prepares participants to close deals that might otherwise be dead-locked, maximize value creation in agreements they reach, and resolve differences before they escalate into costly conflicts. It has been taken by managers, leaders, and students from over 160 countries.

Over 8 weeks of study, participants master fundamental principles of negotiation, learn valuable self-assessment tools, and complete 4 real-time negotiations with members of their global cohort. Negotiation Mastery is offered via HBS Online, the digital learning initiative from Harvard Business School.

Drawing on my book, The Art of Negotiation, the Negotiation 1-2-3 web project provides business practitioners, MBA students, and other learners, an interactive, online resource for improving their negotiation skills. The site’s numeric name reflects three key phases of the negotiation process: Opening, Critical Moments, and Closing.

The site features key concepts on negotiation illustrated through text, videos, quizzes, and various other interactive tools. I developed this in partnership with Michael Hemment and his colleagues at HBS’s Baker Library. We are very grateful for the help of HBS’s Media Service team for video production and editing.

Access to the content is open to the public at no cost.

• N360 generates a personalized PROFILE of users' relational and problem-solving skills, highlighting both strengths they can build on and other areas where they can improve.
• Its SCORECARD feature promps users to rate their performance in all their negotiations, documenting what went well and what you might do differently in the future.
• The MY BEST PRACTICES feature complies users' entries and helps them prepare for upcoming negotiations.
• The TRAINING ROOM includes exercises and videos to sharpen users' skills.

Whenever people and organizations negotiate, they implicitly decide what -- if anything -- they owe their counterparts in regard to candor, distributional fairness, and the possible use of pressure. The deals that they reach may also have impacts on stakeholders who are not at the table. Michael Wheeler and Carrie-Menkel Meadow explored such issues in their book, What's Fair? Ethics for Negotiators.

Wheeler has also developed exercises and cases illuminating ethical issues for graduate students and corporate managers. His parallel interest in how reason, emotion, and luck influence our moral choices is reflected in The Moral Leader course which he and other colleagues teach.

Disputes between organizations and among individuals are an all-too-familiar feature of modern life. Lengthy court proceedings consume resources, damage relationships, and often yield outcomes that do not fully satisfy the real needs of the litigants. As a result, there is growing interest in the appropriate use of mediation, arbitration, and other out-of-court settlement processes.

Michael Wheeler has taught Mediation & Consensus Building the Harvard Law School. He has particular interest in innovative corporate policies and procedures that encourage early, efficient resolution of disputes between and within organizations. This includes the design of new on-line settlement systems, as well as consensus-building initiatives to resolve contentious public-policy cases.

Additional Topics: alliances, cognition, conflict, creativity, crisis management, decision-making, electronic commerce, emotion, environment, interactions, law, organizational learning, partnerships, power and influence, relationships, systems design, teams

Industries: arts, construction, e-commerce industry, energy, federal government, internet, law, nonprofit industry, pharmaceuticals, publishing industry, real estate, service industry, sports, state government, utilities

Geographical Areas: Canada, Italy, North America, United Kingdom, United States