Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, was by all accounts a major factor in getting the NFL collective bargaining agreement signed earlier this week. To do so, Kraft employed four key negotiation tactics to help the players and owners come to a "win-win" solution.

In business negotiations, threats can be fraught with risk. There is the risk that a threat will escalate conflict. There is the risk that a threat will motivate a desire for revenge. And then there is the risk that your threat will work perfectly, but you’ll be unprepared for the aftermath.

That last scenario may describe what happened recently when a number of executives and investment officers at Pimco Investment Management threatened to quit unless Bill Gross, the firm’s co-founder and manager of its flagship Total Return Fund, was fired.

This expectation of a “domino effect” may be especially likely in international negotiations, where cultural differences and territorial concerns perpetuate an “us versus them” approach. Take the international debate over Japan’s long tradition of hunting whales, a practice that many other nations condemn as barbaric and have tried to halt. In 1986, the United States threatened that it would limit Japanese ships’ access to U.S. fish stocks if Japan continued to allow whaling. Japan did agree to halt whaling, but the U.S. government followed through on its threat nonetheless.

The aim of this group is to collaborate on bringing innovation to the Accenture Life Sciences Cloud and digitally enable the R&D function.