Articles from Best Partner (trending on the web)

Win-Win Negotiations: Negotiating for a Winning Coalition

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If a pet project of yours is facing an up-or-down vote, negotiation can be a powerful tool to help sway the outcome in your favor. One recent case was New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s successful campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in the state, as described by Michael Barbaro in the New York Times.

Getting to Yes with Yourself: A Book Talk with William Ury

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The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School is pleased to present:
 
Getting to Yes with Yourself
(and Other Worthy Opponents)
with William Ury
Thursday, January 22, 2014
4:00 p.m.
 Pound Hall 101
Harvard Law School Campus 
Free and open to the public.
 
About the book:
How can you expect to get to Yes with others if you haven’t gotten to Yes with yourself? In

Business Negotiations and Dealmaking: Weighing Mediation’s Results

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Question: My business enters into lots of contracts, and disputes sometimes arise. We want to minimize the time and effort needed to resolve these disputes (for both ourselves and our business partners) in addition to increasing mutual satisfaction with the ultimate resolutions. We’re thinking of including a provision in our contracts requiring that all disputes undergo mediation before they proceed to a more formalized resolution mechanism. Is this a good idea?

Dealing with Difficult People and Difficult Negotiations: When They Fail the Trust Test

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Negotiating opportunities sometimes come from challenging sources: a family member who has been unreliable in the past but promises to make a change; a business competitor that approaches you about a joint venture; a difficult boss with whom you would like to work out a better relationship. How should you deal with potential negotiating partners whom you don’t entirely trust—or should you deal with them at all? The U.S. government faced this question in the hope of convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear-weapons program.

In Business Negotiations, Do We All Need Rock-Star Agents?

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If you are a star athlete, an up-and-coming author, or a Hollywood actor, then you might not think twice about enlisting an agent to help you negotiate your next payment contract. If you are a professional in most other fields, however, you get by on your wits, thorough research, and negotiation skills and experience.
The

To Avoid the Need for Dispute Resolution, Plan Ahead

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When disputes flare up in business relationships, a failure to thoroughly anticipate and prepare for the future is often to blame. Consider a dispute that has arisen surrounding the estate of Maurice Sendak, the acclaimed children’s book author and illustrator of dozens of books, including the masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are. As Randy Kennedy describes in a New York Times article about the dispute, when Sendak passed away in 2012, his estate passed to three executors: Lynn Caponera, his housekeeper and caretaker of more than 30 years; his lawyer, Donald A.

Dealmaking: Beyond Collusion – How to Include Outsiders in Your Deal in Business Negotiations

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The issue of bidder collusion raises a larger question for negotiators: What ethical responsibility do we have to those who aren’t seated at the table with us?
Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman uses the term “parasitic value creation” to describe the common tendency of negotiators to focus so narrowly on identifying benefits for those at the bargaining table that they overlook potential negative effects of their decisions on outsiders. Collusion is just one type of parasitic value creation; cheating and theft are others.

Negotiation Skills: Should Put Off What You Could Negotiate Today?

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To reach agreement, negotiators sometimes postpone the resolution of certain issues until a later date. We look at how this practice plays out in the real world. Remember the federal debt ceiling talks? In mid-2011, congressional Republicans insisted on significant spending reductions from their Democratic counterparts in exchange for voting to raise the nation’s debt limit by an August 2 deadline. Following a flurry of rejected proposals, the White House and congressional leaders finally reached a bipartisan agreement, which had an interesting two-stage structure.

International Negotiation Skills: Before Apologizing, Consider the Culture

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In 2004, after Japanese regulators shut down Citigroup’s private bank in the country for breaking numerous laws, then-CEO Charles O. Prince made headlines by traveling to Japan, bowing deeply before television cameras, and apologizing for his firm’s mistakes. As unusual as it seemed in American eyes, the public apology was widely seen in Japan as a necessary first step in restarting Citigroup’s operations there.

For Modern Farmer Magazine, a Bad BATNA

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In business negotiations, our mistakes sometimes end up affecting not only the current deal, but our best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, in deals that lie down the road. That's a lesson that Ann Marie Gardner, the founder and editor of the hip new magazine Modern Farmer, has learned the hard way. After settling in New York's Hudson Valley, Gardner got the idea of starting Modern Farmer in 2010, Alec Wilkinson writes in a New Yorker profile.

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