Executive Education

Strategic Negotiations

Dealmaking for the Long Term

To craft a complex deal with major implications for your organization's future, you need more than just persuasive tactics at the negotiating table. You need to bring together the right players, tackle the right issues, and develop the right process. By examining different types of deals in a broad framework, Strategic Negotiations: Dealmaking for the Long Term will help you master negotiation techniques that yield maximum value.

What You Can Expect

In this intensive week-long Executive Education program, you will probe the multiple dimensions of high-stakes negotiations, learning how to put the pieces together and complete the best deals for your organization.

Your Course of Study

You will receive solid grounding in the diverse elements of a deal and explore a systematic approach to achieving goals, fostering understanding, creating an efficient process, and promoting resolution. Learning through hands-on simulations as well as lectures, case studies, and group discussions, you will emerge with new conceptual frameworks and practical skills.

Who Is Right for the Program

Offering a career-defining experience for senior executives facing especially challenging negotiations, this leadership training program is valuable to those charged with realigning corporate strategy, undertaking sizeable deals, settling a major dispute, or juggling multiple constituencies.

What You Can Expect

Improving Your Organization's Performance

Multifaceted, complex deals require a range of negotiation skills. This program, created for the business leader who wants more than fundamental tactics, explores the strategic aspects of negotiating—the concepts that define the value of possible outcomes and address the activities that occur internally, externally, and at the negotiating table. Through lectures and interactive analysis, you will acquire the advanced tools that will help you deliver optimal results for your organization.

Taking Your Skills to the Next Level

When charged with brokering a many-sided, complex deal, you need to draw on a range of advanced negotiation skills. In this intensive program, you will learn to:

• Achieve greater effectiveness at the negotiating table, especially when negotiating across borders and confronting challenges such as hard bargainers
• Craft deals that create maximum value for all parties on a sustainable basis
• Productively manage the tension between creating value jointly and claiming value individually
• Effectively handle complexities, such as synchronizing internal and external negotiations; dealing with multiple parties, issues, and agendas; and negotiating around evolving time frames

"This was an unbelievably eye-opening experience into the negotiation mistakes all of us make every day. Strategic Negotiations offered a clear method for how to rethink your whole approach to negotiating."
Tanja Ward [Investment Officer], International Finance Corporation, U.S.

"As a bankruptcy and restructuring specialist, I gained a practical vision of how to conduct, shape, and finalize negotiations. I applied my new tactics in the early stage of two negotiations—and the results were amazing. The parties are much more interested and engaged in the process, and I am confident that these two cases will end well."
Christophe Thévenot [Administrateur judiciaire], Thévenot & Perdereau, France

Your Course of Study

Strategic Negotiations is much more than a set of techniques for gaining control at the bargaining table. In a rich learning experience that includes faculty lectures, case studies, group discussions, and hands-on practice, you will master concepts and tools that will help you achieve goals, foster growth and understanding, and promote resolution among parties whose interests and perceptions are in conflict.

Negotiating in Three Dimensions

Effective negotiations create long-term, sustainable value for both parties. The surest way to achieve that value is with an approach called "3D negotiation," a powerful strategy that takes into consideration the multiple characteristics of the business world's most successful negotiators:

The First Dimension: Maximizing Effectiveness at the Table

One-dimensional (1D) negotiators seek interpersonal effectiveness, whether in person, by email, or on the phone. They focus on elements of the immediate negotiating process, such as:

• Employing the most appropriate bargaining styles
• Creating the right atmosphere
• Building trust
• Setting communication dynamics
• Framing issues attractively, and packaging or separating them
• Persuading others
• Deciphering body language
• Bridging cultural differences

The Second Dimension: Engineering the Deal

Two-dimensional (2D) negotiators relentlessly look beyond the interpersonal process to the underlying substance of the problem, identifying where potential value exists and how to build agreements that realize this value for both sides. They focus on the principles of dealcrafting—the engineering of value creation among potentially cooperative parties.

The Third Dimension: Designing the Process

Three-dimensional (3D) negotiators know that once the bargaining table has been set, much of the game has been played already. They think hard about the architecture of the deal—how to set up, and if necessary, reset the table. Not only do 3D negotiators skillfully play the game as given, but they also act entrepreneurially on multiple planes to change the game to gain maximum advantage. They focus on issues such as:

• Who should be at the table?
• What is the best means to get them there?
• In what sequence and on what basis should they be approached? Separately or together? Publicly or privately?
• What set of issues should be discussed? Is it most productive to separate or combine issues?
• What process is best?
• How should expectations be set?
• What are the no-deal alternatives?
• Should there be a series of tables, possibly linked, separated, sequenced, or arranged in parallel?

Strategic Negotiations seeks to develop sophisticated and effective negotiators who can operate with skill in all three dimensions, weaving together a series of mutually reinforcing decisions and activities so the negotiation is more likely to yield optimal results.

A Hands-On Learning Experience

During this leadership development program, you will participate in several interactive simulations that place you on both sides of the negotiating table. These carefully constructed exercises range from two-party, one-shot price deals to evolving and complex multiparty, multi-issue negotiations that require synchronization of internal and external discussions. Bringing the program's dealmaking framework to life, the pace of these exercises is rapid-fire, the atmosphere realistic, and the results highly rewarding.

Insight into Your Negotiating Challenges

In addition to the program's core curriculum, faculty members lead daily negotiation clinics—optional sessions in which some of your own negotiation problems can be discussed and analyzed by fellow participants. These sessions not only produce valuable insight, but also provide useful practice in applying the program's lessons.

"The most valuable part of the program was the role-playing exercises, which enabled us to apply concepts and theory immediately. Beyond reinforcing what we had learned, these exercises also fostered networking because teams were always changing, exposing us to different classmates. I particularly appreciated the opportunity to network with people from different companies, countries, and walks of life. Shortly after I returned from the program, one of our contracts came up for renewal. By applying what I had learned—from deal design to negotiating tactics—I was able to walk in fully prepared and negotiate terms that were much more favorable to us."
Vishal Seth [Country Head], Alcoa India Global Business Services, Alcoa Inc., India

Who Is Right for the Program

The Harvard Business School Executive Education program Strategic Negotiations attracts a diverse group of talented executives, enabling participants to build on one another's experience and expertise. The program is designed for senior executives who face especially challenging, nonroutine negotiations that require special skills. It is particularly valuable to executives from companies that are in the process of realigning corporate strategy, undertaking a sizeable deal, settling a major dispute, or juggling multiple constituencies.

Executives who are well suited for the program include:

• Entrepreneurs
• Chief executive officers
• General managers
• Presidents
• Board members and chairs
• Business development executives
• Corporate counsels

Because many high-level negotiations can involve complex financial analyses, participants must be familiar with basic finance and accounting principles such as present value calculations.

Past Participants Represented:

Participating Companies Have Included:

"This program is essential for anyone who wants to understand the fundamentals of negotiation. The real-life cases were well developed, and the program was structured to create a supportive climate for changing bad habits and learning new techniques. I highly recommend Strategic Negotiations for executives of all levels."
Pablo Morales [Partner Account Manager], CA Technologies, Brazil

Meet the Program Faculty

Like all Harvard Business School Executive Education programs, Strategic Negotiations is developed and taught by a core faculty of HBS professors. Our faculty are widely recognized for being skilled educators, groundbreaking researchers, and award-winning authors.

Through publishing, consulting, and teaching, they leverage their business expertise and field-based research to create new knowledge and enduring concepts that shape the practice of management. The result is a teaching team that exposes participants to multiple perspectives, challenging their thinking and encouraging new practices that result in superior business leadership. For more detailed biographies, click on each faculty name.

"As with other executive education programs at HBS, I found the cases and simulations, combined with dynamic discussions in the classroom, enormously relevant. In particular, this program provided a better understanding of how to overcome negotiation challenges and deliver greater results for my internal clients."
Darren E. Zeidel [Vice President & General Counsel, Honeywell Aerospace, Business & General Aviation], Honeywell International Inc., U.S.