ABOUT
JAMES K. SEBENIUS specializes in analyzing and advising corporations and governments worldwide on their most challenging negotiations. He is the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he founded the Negotiation unit and teaches advanced negotiation to students and senior executives. He also directs the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School.
With co-author and business partner, David Lax, he originated 3D Negotiation TM,a uniquely powerful approach for analyzing and advising on complex negotiations. He is a founder and partner in Lax Sebenius LLC, a 3D negotiation strategy firm with an extensive global client list.
Since 2001, he has chaired the annual Great Negotiator Award program, which has intensively engaged with negotiators such as Richard Holbrooke, James Baker, George Mitchell, and Bruce Wasserstein. He also co-directs a project that has conducted lengthy videotaped interviews seven former U.S. Secretaries of State, from Henry Kissinger through Hillary Clinton, about their most challenging negotiations. PBS/WGBH has committed to produce a three-part television series on this project. Jim often speaks to senior executive audiences about negotiating lessons from the Great Negotiators and Secretaries of State.
Sebenius’s private sector career included years with the Blackstone Group; he also served in the U.S. government’s Commerce and State Departments. He is the co-author or editor of five books including 3D Negotiation (Harvard Business School Press), The Manager as Negotiator (Free Press), and, most recently, Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level (HarperCollins). Together with these books, his published output includes more than 250 items including articles, case studies, and negotiation simulations.
He holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from Vanderbilt, an M.S. from Stanford’s Engineering School, and a Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard. He is married to Nancy Buck; their children are Zander, Alyza, and Isaac. Read more about Jim...
A 90 second excerpt on why I find Kissinger to be such an effective negotiator (from a much longer interview at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School).
The fourth Israeli Presidential Conference, Facing Tomorrow 2012. Plenary: Learning from Mistakes on the Way to Tomorrow. Speaker: Dr. James Sebenius (in conjunction with Daniel Kahneman, Michael Sandel, and Shimon Peres)
A short excerpt on three common negotiating mistakes (from a much longer interview about Kissinger the Negotiator at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School).
Interview with Professor James K. Sebenius at the Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives in which he discusses why negotiation is a critical managerial skill and describes a number of critical elements of effective negotiation, each illustrated by compelling examples from his experience.
The founders of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School include Professors Roger Fisher, Howard Raiffa, Lawrence Susskind, Frank Sander, as well as William Ury and Bruce Patton. In this excerpt, they describe the early days of the program in the 1980s and discuss the field of negotiation and conflict resolution, where scholars in law, business, psychology, economics, and anthropology came together to develop powerful approaches to help improve how people negotiate and deal with conflict while preserving relationships.
In the U.S. Embassy to Israel, James K. Sebenius, HBS Professor and Vice Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, conducts a special one day workshop on Negotiation Skills to a group of Arab Israeli and Jewish Israeli high school students.