Negotiating as a Team

Do you know how to find strength in numbers? The secret, according to this article, is to agree on the substance of the negotiation, then identify, leverage, and smoothly coordinate each team member’s unique abilities.

Six Steps for Making Your Threat Credible

It damages your reputation, your company, and the deal if you make empty threats in negotiation. In this article, HBS professor Deepak Malhotra explains six steps for powerful follow-through.

Negotiating Effectively: Make the first move a strategic choice

The decision as to whether or not to make the first offer or demand in a negotiation needs to be a strategic choice rather than a default. The first offer can have a significant effect on the final outcome.

Editor’s Note: includes a negotiation exercise for use in a classroom or business training class

Master Negotiators – The Seven Strategies

The most successful negotiators, those whose track record enables them to be called Master Negotiators, have seven specific strategies. They are:
* Build the future with creative solutions.
* Come to the table incredibly well-prepared.
* Create and claim maximum value.
* Understand negotiating style.
* Master the negotiation process.
* Build strategic alliances.
* Become a life-long learner.
* Build the future with creative … [ Read more ]

Striking a Deal with a Difficult Negotiator

How can you make someone be reasonable? Lawrence Susskind, professor and professional negotiator, tells how to deal with the most difficult breed: the apparently irrational negotiation partner.

Four Negotiation Tips For Women Executives

Many women who think they aren’t good negotiators simply have never been taught how. Here are four typical mistakes women make when negotiating and how to correct them, so you can get what you want in business and in your personal life.

Use Deadlines for Powerful Negotiations

You can use deadlines to your strategic advantage in negotiations-but so can your opponent. Here’s how to make the most of time pressure. From Negotiation.

Editor’s Note: I found the arguments made in this article quite unconvincing…what do you think?

Keeping Your Cool in Negotiations

In an article from Negotiation, expert Deborah M. Kolb offers tips for deflecting the other side’s power grab.

Negotiation and All That Jazz

Negotiation is improvisational-demanding quick, informed responses and decisions. Professor Kathleen L. McGinn lays out the score in this article from Negotiation.

Editor’s Note: offers an interesting look at six basic forms of interaction: haggling, fighting, working together, opening up, building a relationship, and complex processing.

Negotiating in China

When U.S. and Chinese businesspeople sit at the negotiating table, frustration is often the result. This Harvard Business Review excerpt summarizes the historical and cultural disconnects.

What Women Can Learn About Negotiation

When negotiating compensation, women often sell themselves short. Some practical advice on claiming the power to lead in this interview with HBS professor Kathleen L. McGinn and Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles.

The Ingredients of a Deal Disaster

A deal can unravel quickly if it doesn’t embody the mutual understanding-the social contract-behind the words on paper. The risk factors surrounding negotiation are detailed in this Harvard Business Review excerpt, co-authored by HBS professor James K. Sebenius.

How to Get Them to Show You the Money

Leigh Steinberg, the most powerful agent in sports, tells free agents in the business world how to negotiate great deals – and how to deal with their fear of negotiation.

Rehearsing for Success

Want to win your next negotiation? Role-playing, that much-maligned management technique, could actually do the trick.

Breakthrough Negotiation: Don’t Leave It On the Table

In a new book, Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World’s Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts, Harvard Business School professor Michael Watkins dissects the art of give-and-take. This excerpt details 7 principles followed by master negotiators:
1. Breakthrough negotiators shape the structure of their situations
2. Breakthrough negotiators organize to learn
3. Breakthrough negotiators are masters of process design
4. … [ Read more ]

Getting the Other Side to Say Yes

Roger Fisher, renowned gray eminence of negotiation and co-author of the classic book Getting to Yes, says the prescription for negotiations applies to corporate mergers as well as international diplomacy.

How Deception, Reputation and E-mail Can Affect Your Negotiating Strategy

How widespread is deception in negotiation and how can you detect it? What are the pros and cons of using e-mail during the negotiating process? How does a good, or bad, reputation influence the outcome of a negotiation? This article gives an overview of three chapters in a new book entitled “Wharton on Making Decisions.”

Negotiation 101 / 201

Public-policy negotiator Susan Podziba, a teacher and a mediator-for-hire offers this two-part article on negotiation skills. Part I, gives nine tenets for negotiating success. Part II follows up with some thoughts on refining your skills.